Here is my monthly lifestyle update for February 2020.
What’s in this update for you?
Publishing this update is my way of showing you a holistic approach to live your life. Taking care of your finances should go along with your desired lifestyle. Here you can read all the previous updates.
This update goes along with my monthly net worth reports, where I’m glad to share my investment details and financial progress.
Related: February 2020 net worth report and more
Here is what works for my family and me. I get to travel with my family as we are location independent family, go on workations, and spending time with my daughter while homeschooling her.
I hope to inspire you to truly live the way you wish to and work towards it.
My view is that money for the sake of making money is wrong. You should strive to live the way you wish for.
Last thing, If you are looking to get your finances ready so you can go nomad, I invite you for a free financial fitness call with me.
Just click the link and book a time on my calendar.
Let’s jump in!
Table of Contents
PERSONAL LIFESTYLE AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE UPDATE
TRAVEL & CORONA VIRUS UPDATE
Haha, funny talking about travel these days when everyone are hysteric about the Coronavirus. As I mentioned in the previous lifestyle update, I was in the New York area and the week afterward in Vienna for my FIRE mastermind meeting.
A week after I came back to Israel, the Israeli government issued a warrant saying that people coming back from Austria need to be selfly quarantined for 14 days since the return date. Consequently, I had left with a week to be self quarantined at home. My wife and daughter left for her parents’ place. It wasn’t rational being in a separate room, which we don’t have in our yurt. Also, I won’t be able to take my daughter out to her homeschooling meetings every day anyway.
Now writing these lines, I’m about halfway through the week. It wasn’t bad at all so far. I have the whole time for my self. I get to do more of my work, do yoga and practice my headstand much more, clean the house, and taking care of a lot of things that I never have time for.
So far, no travel plans for the next few months.
ETSY STORE
No changes in my store this month. I now have products for adults and not only for kids.
In a nutshell, let’s say you’d like to save for a vacation somewhere. I created a vacation savings tracker for people to visually see how much they saved for that vacation and keep them motivated towards that goal of making it happen.
I have this product for ten countries so far (Italy, France, The Bahamas, Spain, Germany, Japan, Jamaica, The Dominican Republic, the United Kingdom, and India).
For kids, I created countdown activity for the family vacation (31 countries so far). The kids can color the flag of that target country counting down the days before the trip.
So far, the store didn’t bring in the sales I intended to bring. So, I contemplated if I should close it or not.
For now, I decided to give it another chance until May. So, if you wish to support me, please go to the store to buy a product if you want to or tell about it to a friend and share the stores’ link with them.
Here are two examples:
Click the image to go to the listing
Click the image to go to the listing
READING UPDATE AND READING CHALLENGE
I finished reading Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. I enjoyed this book and now in the process of trying to implement some of the systems in it. However, just like every good book where you want to achieve a lot of it, it’s sometimes hard to see if you are doing it well or not.
The trick to solve this is having someone you need to be accountable for so you can review your habits system. So, here is what I did: On our mastermind meeting in Vienna (more on that later), I told everybody they should read this book, and then we can discuss this at our calls and making small improvements.
Some of the participants took the challenge, and I hope to have an accountability buddy soon.
I am currently reading the book titled The English and Their History by Robert Tombs. So, I started this book because I didn’t was to carry around a big bulky book (that’s the next one on the list here) on my Vienna trip. Therefore, I downloaded this one to my Kindle. I managed to get it for free on my Kindle from a public library (Did you know you can connect your public library and read books for free on your Kindle?). The other books that I wanted to read are on hold right now.
I just finished The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge. What a fantastic read! Please read my last 2 reading updates about it here and here. However, I gave it only four stars because of I kind of lost momentum towards the end. It seems like the more exciting content, for me at least, was more at the beginning of the book.
2020 READING CHALLENGE
LEARNING SPANISH
We manage to keep with our joint Spanish learning and the online course we bought. So far, so good. Although we progress slowly, we are delighted with it. Our time for class is in the evening time after our daughter falls asleep.
Around once a week, we manage to do a speaking class with a community teacher from Italki.com. Our problem is, though, that sometimes our daughter doesn’t fall asleep by the time we start the class, so we either start late or skip, unfortunately.
EXERCISE
My headstand exercise is going well. Have a look (there is also a video if you click right). Now that I’m quarantined at home, I get to do it a few times a day and enjoy it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9BuPPXhrIe/
FIRE MASTERMIND
The reason for being quarantined at home is because I came back from Vienna, where we had our mastermind meeting.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9ArYoYBsKC/
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9BmigshuMN/
It was fun spending time with like-minded people—a frugal meeting, without the need to show off to anyone.
We had an agenda for the meeting, which included playing the Cashflow game 101, speaking about our long term goals. But most of the time, we hung out together and walked around.
There was also a fun meetup of the Vienna FIRE community. So, it was nice meeting new people and meeting old ones. I learned some about the real estate market in Vienna and started thinking of exploring more real estate markets.
On the last day, we went for about an hour to explore Vienna downtown before I headed to the airport.
Shoutout to Mathias from Financial Independence Europe Podcast and Feri from Firehub.eu & Brian who are part of this mastermind. It was great seeing you all.
NOW OVER TO YOU
So, how is this update helping you?
Did you discover anything new?
Are you tracking your finances and see the progress?
Is this update too long? Boring?
Feel free to add a comment, I read them all and promise to reply.