My last post here on Frugal Flannel was July 3rd, 2024, over one year ago! The internet is interesting in that people (or at least their personas) tend to completely fall off of it with no explanation. Did I just lose interest in writing here? Did I gamble my FIRE portfolio away in Vegas? Was I even still alive? Sorry to say, nobody came looking for me, or at least this version of me.
One contributor to my absence is that I’ve just grown so tired of the modern internet. I complained last June about Google deranking and removing this blog for no apparent reason despite my posts having a good Click-Through Rate from their search engine and an increasing number of visitors over time. I’ve attempted a few things including patience to see if I can get back in Google’s good graces, but two years after whatever algorithm change they made that nuked traffic to my blog, the path forward isn’t any less opaque.
Since then it’s clear the internet is only growing worse over time, with countless pages of GPT-generated slop flooding onto the web every minute. I swear that whenever I search for finance-related topics, no matter what search engine I use I almost never find independent blogs anymore. The results are instead mostly the same dozen boring but established financial-adjacent tabloids like Forbes, The Motley Fool, CNBC Money, and their ilk (despite having low relevance to the keywords I input) with a few AI slop blogspam articles thrown in for good measure. These AI articles are just pages and pages of textual nonsense formatted and designed in a way that they’ll match a long-tail query exactly by random chance, with the odds of clickthrough rising by the sheer number of pages of AI vomit that can be nearly instantly generated and published. Where did the humans go?
I also realized semi-recently that due to the lack of discovery mechanisms, I don’t interact with FIRE content at all anymore. Most of the FIRE blogs I used to follow have stopped posting, and a few even sold out to content farmers. I’m not on Reddit or any other forums, the value proposition of those having gone to nearly zero for me several years ago. I do read books about general finance and economics for my own enjoyment and education, but that’s a few shades removed from the personal finance category. The result is that FIRE for me has entirely lost the community feel that it once had, solidifying as a solo journey.
I’m sure there’s tons of good FIRE content out there that I haven’t discovered! But it’s just so difficult to find anything decent without investing an inordinate amount of time filtering out junk, AI slop, scams, and low quality information. The internet is rotting. Pragmatically, I usually choose not to even bother wasting my time. Often the last thing I want to do after staring at a screen all day at work is to come home and do the same (I make an exception for E-Ink screens, which I simply adore reading on, and seem to have none of the eye strain of traditional displays).
Anyway, that’s enough whining. So where have I been since I abandoned this blog?
Financially, it’s mostly been business as usual. Work, save, invest, repeat. I won’t go back and create budget review posts for the check-ins I missed, but I was absolutely continuing to track my expenses, savings, and net worth every single month.
My expenses have continued to remain higher than ideal due to ongoing home renovation expenses, and the fact that I was forced into getting a new car far sooner than I would have otherwise. My car was totaled by an elderly driver just shy of it turning 10 years old. I was originally hoping to drive it for a total of 12-15 years, and I was really enjoying not having a car payment, but my hand was forced by factors beyond my control. So I now have a $559 per month car payment after putting the $11,500 I was paid out by insurance for my totaled car as a down payment on a new one. Side note, I paid $26,500 for that car brand new in 2015, so to drive it for almost a decade and put shy of 200k miles on it, while only losing $15k in depreciation is pretty amazing, and given the prices of new cars nowadays, probably an unlikely event to reoccur.
My financial stats on this blog were frozen at my previous most recent update in June 2024, where I reported a net worth of $479,211. I’m happy to report that a little over a year later I’m at a net worth of $670,279! Obviously both US and international total stock market indices are at all-time-highs, which has catalyzed my continued net worth growth as I continue to sock away my savings.
As of my budget and expenses review for the first half of 2025, my average spending YTD remains over $5,000 per month, chalking up as my third highest six-month average spend ever, both in nominal and inflation-adjusted terms:
Buying a fixer-upper house (even DIYing as much as I can) has proven to be quite expensive when contrasted with my apartment life where I consistently spent $3,000 per month or less on average. We have just a couple of major renovation projects remaining, then this should taper off. I’m hoping to do the kitchen this fall/winter, which should be the most expensive of the remaining renovations.
Honestly, home renovations have been how I’ve been spending a lot of my free time on the weekends. I enjoy the physical labor, saving money by doing the renovations myself, and the peacefulness of time spent offline.
I plan to keep the blog alive with ad-hoc posts when they come to mind, and sharing my financial milestones. Next up, I plan to update my FIRE projection and see if I’m on track to retire by 40, which was my original goal when I started this blog. It’s been two years since my last projection (and six years since the first one!) so it will be nice to find out quantitatively just how close I am to early retirement.
Good to hear from you. I’ve also been deep in renovations for the last year. While they are expensive, I don’t think of them as expenses. I think of them as increases in home equity. You’re literally building a more expensive, nicer home to sell one day.
For calculating my fire number I exclude renovations but include a 3% annual estimate for maintenance.
We are unsure if this will be a “forever home”, at least no plans or inklings of other places to move 2.5 years into this first house, so unsure if those equity gains will ever be realized on my part. Obviously the other benefits of buying a fixer-upper like lower purchase price and ability to pick finishes without doing a custom build can’t be understated.
3% is a good conservative number and should allot you plenty of wiggle room. We’ve already done several major maintenance items like the roof and water heater, and still averaging around 3% of home value in annual costs even when including the improvement items as well.