Category: Misc

Each year I do the majority of my Charity donations in early December, timed to be around my birthday.

I do a blog post about it to hopefully inspire others. See previous years: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015

All amounts are in $US unless otherwise stated.

General Charities

$800 to Givewell Top Charities fund . I’ve been donating to Givewell as my main “help the poor” charity since they have fairly low overheads and try and get the most impact from their donations. They also get good reviews for living up to these goals.

My employer matched this donation so total given to Givewell was $1600.

Software and Internet Infrastructure Projects

I was planning this year to donate $100 each to Software in the Public Interest and the Software Freedom Conservancy, unfortunately Paypal is currently blocking charity donations from Asia/Pacific so I was unable to donate to them. Adblockers on my browser might also be a factor.

• €20 to Syncthing which I use to Sync files between my computers and phone since I stopped using Dropbox.
• $50 to the Internet Archive
• $50 to the Python Software Foundation

Others content creators

• $NZ 100 to The Spinoff which is a New Zealand news website
• $103 to Signum University mainly in since I follow of Corey Olsen’s Exploring the Lord of the Rings series and the Other Minds and Hands show.

Payments via Patreon

I signed up to Nebula in mid-2023 for $30/year and reduced my Patreon subscriptions a little. Below is current as of mid-December 2023

• $2/month to The Prancing Pony Podcast who make a podcasts show about J R R Tolkien
• $1/month to Zach Weinersmith who creates SMBC Comic and other stuff
• $1/video to The Nerdwriter who does Youtube videos
• $1/month to CGP Grey who does Youtube Videos
• $1/month to City Beautiful who is creating videos about cities and city planning.
• $1/month to Alt Shift X who creates Youtube videos
• $1/month to RMTransit who does a Youtube channel on Transit.
• $1/month to Quinn’s Ideas which is a Youtube Channel about Science Fiction (especially Dune)
• $1/ month to Asianometry who creates Youtube videos, mainly on Economics and the semiconductor industry.
• $1/month to CityNerd who Videos on Cities and Transportation

I thought I’d do an update on my current status and what I’m up to.

Work

Unfortunately I got made redundant from my job at Sharesies in March. This was part of company-wide layoffs that saw about 30% of all staff and 50% of my team get made redundant. I was very sorry to leave, it was a great company with great culture and I was working with a great team.

I’m still using their product for my share investments (mostly Smartshares Exchange Traded Funds) and I have a small number of shares/options in the company.

After a job search I started at a new company in April. It is a fairly large company with a complex internal system so I’ve spent the last 5 months getting my head around their internal systems and tools we have to use

My team is part of a global “follow the Sun” operations department so we get a handoff from the US when we start and handover to Ireland at the end of the day. Unfortunately timezones mean I start at around Noon and finish at 8pm and also have to work one in four weekends.

The new company has a pretty good culture, although since it is large there is a lot of corporate overhead. My first month was spent doing something like 40 training courses and that didn’t even cover much of my day-to-day.

Covid / Getting out

My job at Sharesies was 100% work from home so I only spent one week in the office the whole 18 months I was working there. My new job however is a fairly strict 50% in office so I go in 2 or 3 days each week. They do have free food in the office.

Outside of work I still mask on public transport and for most shopping trips. Currently the covid numbers are fairly low so I do about one cafe visit/week. I’ve also been going to Auckland Thursday Night Curry although my new shifts make this difficult.

New Zealand has eliminated all anti-covid measures (such as mask requirements) and we are currently between waves. However there are still a steady number of hospitalisations and deaths so I’m not in a hurry to increase my exposure, especially in places like the supermarket where there isn’t a lot of upside.

I haven’t yet caught covid, but I have caught a cold and persistent cough in mid- 2023.

Weight Loss and Exercise

Between July 2022 and March 2023 I was on a fairly strict diet to lose weight. I was consuming around 1000 Calories/day by just having a couple of small meals each day of potatoes, plus some cheat meals etc.

Peak was losing around 1kg/week but eventually the diet petered out with my new job etc. Overall I went from to 107kg to 79kg. But have put on around 6kg in the 6 months since. I might to a blog post at some point on my diet experience.

I also was using a rowing machine and doing lots of walking. This has been reduced since my new job and the cold winter of 2023.

I am planning to try and restart my diet and do more exercise.

Hobbies

Chess

I have not played any in-person Chess since late 2021. Unfortunately Chess is a high-risk activity for Covid. Lots of Kids and you are in a crowded room for hours at a time.

My new job also involves me working evenings so it will be difficult to play evening Club chess.

Tolkien

I am trying to get more involved with Tolkien Fandom. I’ve join The Tolkien Society and subscribed to their magazines. I’m trying to work though them as well as back issues.

I attended the Ausmoot conference Online in 2023 and I am considering attending in person to Ausmoot 2024. I took an Online course on the Silmarillion also listening to various podcasts.

Linux.conf.au

Unfortunately my regular Linux.conf.au conference was last held Online in 2022 and it looks like it will not be run in future. This means the Sysadmin Miniconf I’ve helped run since 2006 will probably not be held again.

Linux Australia has created the Everything Open as it’s new flagship conference. I didn’t attend in 2023, although I may in future.

Other

I’m still interested in Public Transport, especially Greater Auckland. I’m working on a new article or two on the subject although switching jobs has delayed things.

I’m still working to improve my programming skills

My proposed Business idea hasn’t progressed beyond the planning stages. I have things mapped out but the main gap is getting my programming skills up to being able to create a Django website to host it.

I’m still listening to Audiobooks and also doing around 30 minutes a day of reading books.

I’m still using Twitter but I’ve also joined the BlueSky Social (login required to see my account).

I’ve recently been doing a review of my investments and retirement goals. I was made redundant in early 2023 and made an estimate on how long my savings would last. While it wasn’t enough to retire on it was a good percentage of the way there.

I got a new job after a few weeks but I decided to make some more detailed calculations to see how much I would really need and if I was on track.

Note: That all numbers in the blog post are 2023 New Zealand dollars and I’m assuming are inflation adjusted.

My Situation

I am a New Zealand citizen living in Auckland, New Zealand. I work in IT and have a stay-at-home partner and no children. We rent and don’t own property. We have Investments in Managed Funds and Term Investments plus Kiwisaver Retirement accounts. I am not including any inheritance.

Our total expenditure is around $50,000 per year. About half this is rent. This doesn’t include major purchases ( eg a replacement car ) or travel.

Why retire early?

The big reason to retire early is due to declining health and life expectancy. At 55 I can expect till live till around 85. Which probably means I’ll die in my 80s. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to be fairly active till 70 but probably not past that. Almost certainly at either myself or my partner will be unable to do active activities (eg walking around a city all day or tramping) by 70.

This means if I retire at 65 I might get 5 years of active retirement. Whereas retiring at 55 could give me 15 years, 3 times as much. If I get sick at 67 then the differene is even greater 12 years vs 2.

Retirement scenario

My working scenario is that I will retire at 55. We will then spend $70,000/year for 5 years on extra travel etc. Then $60,000/year in our 60s followed by $50,000/year from 70 onwards.

New Zealand Superannuation will kick in when we each turn 65. This provides around $15,000 after tax for each person.

Running the numbers

So to test this out I’ve been using a free app/site called ficalc.app . It lets you plug in your retirement length, portfolio and spending and it will run it against every starting year (in the US) since 1871. It will then show you the success rate including the “nearly failed”.

A hard year to check against is 1973. A falling stock market and high inflation wipe out a lot of your savings at the start so you need a good initial amount to keep ahead of your later withdrawals.

I found I would need around $1,350,000 starting amount for every year to be successful and no near failures for a 30 year retirement. The numbers were virtually the same for 40 years.

However if I adopted the Gayton-Klinger Guardrails strategy and spend up to $5000/year less when my portfolio was down I could get away with just $1,200,000 saved.

The result

It appears that we will need around $1.2 to $1.35m (in 2023 $NZ) to retire at at 55 with my assumed spending patterns. At my current saving rate there is a good chance I could reach this.

Delaying retirement beyond 55 to save more money loses healthy years of retirement with not a lot of upside in risk reduction. However a delay of a year or two greatly improves the expected outcome so it is an option if things look tight.

There will always be some risk. ie a Stockmarket Crash, financial loss, costs increase (eg rent) or health event could cause problems and I would no longer be working to adjust to it.

We also won’t have a lot of spare money to voluntarily spend on things. eg a $40,000 on an extended holiday wouldn’t be in the budget and would be hard to save for.

I ran the numbers assuming I buy rather than rent. However since Auckland housing prices are so high compared to rents it doesn’t seem to be significantly worse than paying rent out of savings.

Resources

• My base chart at ficalc.app
• James Shack has some Youtube videos on why your should retire as early as possible.
• NZ Superannuation rates