I have a nerdy confession to make. Justin and I used to play a ton of world of Warcraft. It was one of our first hobbies that we would do together. On our first anniversary, he drove me out to the middle of nowhere in Azeroth (the main world in WoW) and we had a picnic. Yup, super nerds.
There comes a point in the game towards the end of each expansion where you have a max level character (or characters) and you start doing parts of the game over and over to build up gold, reputation, or gear. This is typically referred to as “farming.” During this time, your still playing the game, but usually in a routinized manner. It can be boring and monotonous, but the point is to prepare for the future. (I bet you see where I’m going with this…)
When it comes to money and financial independence, we’re in farm mode right now. We’ve actually been in this mode for quite some time. It’s only recently that I’ve become bored with writing about it. There is only so much that I can say about why and how we spend our money as it doesn’t change much from month to month.
In the typical month we pay our mortgage and HOA dues, the utilities, life insurance premiums, etc. In addition, we save a set amount into our brokerage account and LP’s 529 plan. We send extra principal to the mortgage every month. All of this adds up to 80 pecent or more of our monthly spending.
The only categories that seem to fluctuate are food/dining and kids. Try as we might, food and dining consistently ranges between $700 and $1000 per month. It really depends on if I’m resupplying the liquor cabinet, having people over for dinner, or both. As for kid spending, that varies quite a bit too. I think we’re done buying big stuff, like furniture and carseat/stroller, for him for a while, but clothes, toys, and baby food are ongoing expenses that I happily pay for.
So, what does farm mode mean for the blog?
While I’ll keep doing our monthly spending reports (and will probably revamp them soon), I’ll probably start branching out more to other parts of our life more frequently. This means more posts about minimalism, zero-waste, trying to raise a “woke” person, environmentalism, criminal justice issues, etc… I may do more deep dives into our past money decisions as it’s always fun to look back on the data. Essentially, I’m over the day-to-day stuff. We’re as optimized as we want to be, which doesn’t mean that we’re perfectly optimized, we’re just done thinking about the small stuff.
Smith Happens 
One thought on “farm mode”