2022 Personal Goals Review

I made some new years resolutions at the beginning of 2022, which can be found below. The ones that I crossed out are the ones that I actually completed. Overall, I didn’t complete many of my initial goals. Working on AI Productivity at Meta was a big source of burnout and my first year as a landlord was rough. When I try to remember what I did with my free time, I usually come up blank for moment — then I remember that I spent a lot of time dealing with the rental.

Habits/Wellness

• Review+plan every week — nope

• Quarterly review — nope

• Sleep early — nope

• Prioritize stillness, no screens and no speakers (how long? How often?)

  • I enabled the screen time widget on my phone and set up daily app timers. They’re good reminders, but I found myself ignoring it sometimes. Android lets you see your screen time metrics for the past 4 weeks — it would be cool to plot this over longer time periods to see how various interventions affect screen time. I started using Finch app this year and have found it to be a good tool for gamifying habit formation and staying on task.

Fitness

• 375 DL, 315 Squat, (stretch) 275 Bench

  • I tried Candito’s 6 week intermediate program and made some decent but diminishing gains over 4 cycles the first half of the year and hit 265 bench, 295 squat, and 325 DL. After reading Juggernaut Strength’s Powerlifting Programming Manual, I did a 12 week volume block for my bench and made some nice gains, hitting 275 by end of September. A knee injury from sprinting, getting sick a bunch of times, and overtraining my shoulder really set me back in Q4, resulting in no further progress. I’m starting this year by focusing on prehab/rehab.

• Switch over to CrossFit?

  • The original plan was to hit 315 squat and 375 deadlift and then try CrossFit for the Olympic lifting, but that didn’t happen. Also, why are CrossFit gyms so damned expensive??

• Handstand 10s — my focus was on the powerlifting, so I didn’t get to this.

Culture

• Iceland

  • This was, for the most part, an awesome trip. I’m glad we planned it so far in advance, because it ended up being very cheap. Getting people to commit to a trip far in advance is surprisingly hard, which is a recurring theme (might be worth writing a separate post about). A lot of people expressed interest, but very few committed, and I’m still looking for more efficient ways to organize group trips. We also had some car-related headaches that took months to completely resolve. Would definitely go back to see the northern lights, hike the Laugavegur trail, see Eystrahorn, and witness volcanic flows.

• Montreal

• Ballet

• Rutgers Symphony Orchestra

• Turkiye

  • Originally planned to do this in Q4, but work was too chaotic to think about this. In retrospect, not going was the right choice especially since I got laid off. I’m not too mad though because I still got to travel 65 days of the year — super grateful for that. This year I got to ski at Big Sky, Snoqualmie, Mt. Bachelor, Breckenridge, and Killington/Sugarbush. I went all over Iceland, down to Wildwood/Cape May, Mexico City, Montreal, the Bay Area, the Berkshires, Art Basel in Miami, and Philly for PAX Unplugged.

Financial

• Cash flow positive on rental, be a good landlord

  • As discussed earlier, I ended up putting a lot of work/repairs into the rental this year, which resulted in a net loss. At least I took care of every maintenance request that my tenants asked of me. Better to lose some money and do things right than to be a slumlord.

• Max mega backdoor

• Invest 170k

• Become well-read on crypto

  • I didn’t have the motivation to do this — was too burnt out from work to dig into something technical. Also, a lot of my friends went from bullish to bearish on crypto this past year, which impacted my interest. On the other hand, my interest in blockchain technologies is now piqued from listening to a couple of podcasts that featured Balaji Srinivasan.

• Invest 50k into crypto

  • This became hard due to 1. the bull market, 2. interest rates rising, and 3. holding the bag on my rental property for 6 months. I came into the year with a 60k balance on my margin loan and was hoping to pay it off gradually, but it made more sense to prioritize paying it down because the interest rate tracks the Fed’s rates, which needless to say, went up a lot this year. Stocks and crypto weren’t going to rise anytime soon, so I wasn’t going to outpace the debt accrual by investing instead of paying down. I let my rental unit sit empty for 6 months and paid ~20k into the mortgage that I could have invested into crypto.

Photography

• Shoot 3 tests

  • Nope :/ I think there is some perfectionism and fear of failure that is holding me back here.

• Make and hang prints

  • I made some progress on this. I started on a photo book and mounted my picture frames at least. Once I finish the book, I will look into making art prints.

• Make NFTs — too burnt out from work

Be a better friend — I pretty much completely forgot about this goal. Building friendships and communities as an adult is something that I want to write more about sometime. I took the office environment for granted and dropped off on some of my more social hobbies, so I’ve found the pandemic/post-pandemic years to be very challenging.

2023 goals to come in a separate post.

2022 Personal Financial Review

So that’s another year of adulting. So here’s a look at my expenses this year vs last year:

2022 Expenses

2021 Expenses

First some observations:

• I was able to lower costs a lot this year in several major categories, while some of my smaller spending categories increased.

• My partner moved in in September and started splitting the cost of the mortgage. This helped to offset costs quite a bit even though housing costs (property taxes and HOA) went up slightly this year.

• I fronted a bunch of money late 2021 for several ski trips in 2022, so my travels cost about $3k more this year and $3k less last year — about 9k per year. I was out of the state on vacation for 65 days of the year compared to 66 last year, including 28 days abroad. Not bad.

• In 2022, I resolved to spend less on “General Merchandise” compared to 2021, but I ended up spending about the same. I probably need to do a more detailed breakdown to see how I’m spending money here. Spending almost $600/month on random stuff seems high to me.

• Eating 2-3 meals a day on 2-4 days a week at Meta saved me quite a bit of money compared to in 2021 when I was mostly working from home. What a great perk to work at a company that feeds you. My partner spitting the grocery bills and the cooking also increases efficiency quite a bit.

• My family finally kicked me off of their auto insurance, so I had to start paying for my own this year. Thanks mom and pops. Y’all can call me a manlet for mooching for so long.

• Dues, subscriptions, and online services increased a bit this year. I got a new annual fee credit card, Squarespace and Amazon Prime prices went up, not sure what else contributed to the increase. I will look more closely at this at some point to see what subscriptions I can do without.

• I didn’t spend >$8k on furniture this year. I’ll call my apartment fully furnished at this point. Only took 5 years 🤡

Next year projections:

• I expect that my housing costs for next year to be around $12k since my partner will be contributing the entire year. So I will be saving about $8k compared to this year.

• I probably won’t be eating Meta food in 2023 now that I’m no longer working there, so I can expect my food costs to go back up to 2021 levels, so increasing $2.5-3k.

• I’m guessing I’ll be spending about $42-43k next year, before tax deductions for mortgage interest. Let’s see if I can hit that.

My reflections on my first year owning an investment property probably deserves its own post, but some quick thoughts:

• I’m down 26.5k net on the investment property, which hurts me not a small amount. The big mistake I made was trying to do minor renovations myself after closing. I thought it wouldn’t be much effort and it would save money. Man was I wrong. Because I had a full-time job, I ended up splitting the work into 2-4 hour chunks over the course of 5 months, AND I hired painters anyway, AND it just wasn’t fun to have to spend my evenings and weekends fixing shit instead of doing my hobbies. Holding the bag for 7 months set me back financially way more than just hiring labor up front. I could have had tenants in the unit by February instead of August. I’ve learned the hard way that my time and sanity are worth much more than a couple of bucks, and scaling my impact requires outsourcing work that I’m not efficient at. Costly but important lesson. At least I gave myself a wide margin of error.

• Got lucky with the rental market. I was able to get decent tenants in my unit pretty quickly at asking price, which allows me to cash flow a little bit every month after maintenance.

• Speaking of maintenance, I’ve had to do a ton of maintenance, which has been quite the headache. Maybe I’ll write another post on the maintenance saga that I’ve had. The previous owner did a shit job maintaining the unit, and the building itself is in bad shape cosmetically. I should have done way more due diligence up front when buying the place. Next time, I will ask for HOA boards meeting minutes for the past year along with their financials to get a better picture of how the building is holding up. All the maintenance is cutting into my margins, but I’d rather be a good landlord possibly at a slight loss than be a slumlord.

• Taxes and HOA went up this year, which will cut into my margins next year. The tenants are on a 2 year lease, so I can’t raise rent next year. We’ll see if this works in my favor or against me.

I hope these spending summaries for the past 2 years can convince someone that it’s possible to have a pretty decent lifestyle in a VHCOL area like New York City. For most people the biggest factor is cost of housing, and the next biggest factor is probably food. While most of my peers are spending between $2-4k a month on rent (that continues to increase each year) to live by themselves, my housing costs were <$2k/month and are going to be <$1000/month going forward. How did I achieve this? I bought my apartment in an area that’s close to the city but wasn’t rapidly gentrifying at the time. It was even better during COVID because I refinanced when mortgage rates were rock bottom. And I’m now splitting the housing cost with my partner. I don’t expect these costs to increase dramatically over time (property taxes and HOA will probably creep up slowly), whereas renters will continue to experience appreciable cost increases year over year.

The tradeoff is that it’s not as convenient or as serendipitous as living right in Manhattan. It’s 15-35 minutes outside of the city by public transit, so it feels qualitatively comparable to living not too far into an outer borough like Brooklyn or Queens. I can still do almost everything that I want to do in the city without feeling like transit is a drag. The tradeoff is that my neighborhood isn’t quite as hip as parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn yet, and none of my friends want to move here as a result (it’s safe, quiet, family-oriented, easy to get around, and pretty nice though). But saving an extra $1-3k/month in housing costs means I have an extra $12-36k to spend on my hobbies or to save compared to my peers and I get a lot of security knowing that my base cost of living is very sustainable. I don’t ever feel burdened by my living expenses, I don’t feel chained to the rat race, and I feel like I can continue enjoying what I enjoy to a long time to come. To me, that’s worth more than the convenience of being in a central location until I eventually get priced out anyway.

Getting to my FIRE goals: my net worth ended up right where it started at the beginning of the year, despite investing around ~175k of my income in 2022. I made the mistakes of holding my META and COMP equity instead of liquidating right away on vest and after lockup. Those stocks are down about 70% and 90% respectively from peak. I’m not really sure what to do besides tax loss harvest to offset the gains that I’ve gotten from investing in index funds. Somehow it feels way less bad when my index fund ETFs go down than when individual stocks go down. I guess it’s way less certain that individual stocks will recover compared to the larger market. And anyway, if the larger market isn’t going to recover, then that’s a much bigger problem. Do I continue holding and hoping that the value will recover once we come out of the recession? Do I realize losses and reinvest in other assets hoping to make back all that I’ve lost? I don’t know.

Recap of the goals that I made at the beginning of 2022 to follow in another post.

Hanging Pictures

I’m 5 years into living at the same place, and my apartment still doesn’t really have much art on its walls 🥲 I’ve also been really interested in making big prints of my landscapes for awhile now, so I finally bought some large 36x48” frames to hang.

Trying several layouts before settling on the final one

I found a bunch of guidance online for how to hang large pieces of art above furniture, which I ultimately chose to ignore. Here’s my justification for why:

• The art should be centered over the furniture:

  • This probably makes sense in a lot of cases, but when I marked out the setup with tape, it looked off. It actually felt like it threw the symmetry of the space off (and it felt too close to the wall to the right). I realized pretty quickly that the couch wasn’t the statement piece and visual focus of my living room — it was the coffee tables, which themselves were not centered wrt the couch. Centering the frames wrt to the coffee tables made things feel symmetrical again.

  • Maybe the takeaway here is to know what the “visual center” of your space is going to be and use it as the anchor for the rest of your furniture placement. It’s okay if something large like a couch is placed off center if there are other elements that can bring the space balance wrt the “visual center”.

• The art should be 2/3 to 3/4 the width of the couch:

  • This seems like pretty solid advice overall especially if you’re centering the art over the couch, except I had no choice but to ignore it if I was going to place two 4’ frames side by side. I think it looks fine because the wall is huge and the 2 frames together fill about 3/4 of the horizontal space. If I were to just put one frame up, it would leave a lot of the wall empty, which I think would be awkward. Better to not have anything on the wall at all in that case.

• Hang art 4-12” above your furniture (6-10” for couches specifically):

  • I went with placing the frames 1’ below ceiling and 2’ above the couch so the tops would be in line with the tops of the doorframes and my other large art poster.

  • Conventional wisdom says that the art shouldn’t be too far above the furniture to maintain visual cohesion, but my couches are pretty low. Most couches are 30-35” high, but the one in question is only 25” (side note: I like low furniture and light colors because it has less visual weight and can make a small space feel larger and more open). Putting big frames only 12” above the couch would make the bottom of the frame 3’ above the floor and the center 4.5’ above the floor, which would be awkwardly low. 2’ above the couch places the center of the frame at roughly eye level, 5.5’ above the floor (this also happens to be a rule of thumb for hanging art on a wall without furniture underneath). Also, this clears more of the picture over my floor lamp when viewed from the entrance.

  • I waffled a lot on this, but I ultimately prioritized overall alignment with other elements in the room and more normal viewing height over avoiding an awkward space between the couch and the art.

A lot of time was spent trying to figure out how to best hang these frames. My process if I ever have to do it again:

1. Determine layout/location of frames:

   • I was installing multiple large frames and wanted them to be perfectly level, so just winging it wasn’t an option.

   • I tried a couple of different ways to test layouts: painter’s tape to outline, cutting out pieces of paper to match the size of the frame and taping them to the wall, marking the corners of where the frames would be with tape. I thought the paper cutouts would be easier to move around on the wall compared to measuring/moving tape around, but it turned out to be really annoying to work with because I cut them out from a roll of seamless paper. Constantly fighting the curling from a 3x4’ paper added a lot of frustration. The gaff tape (easy cleanup like painter’s tape but strong like duct tape) that I had put on there kept getting stuck to the paper as it curled. I ended up just outlining with tape to test layout. Only marking the corners wasn’t enough to visualize such big frames and involved a lot of measuring. I think making the cutouts out of a flat piece of paper or the cardboard that the frame comes in will be the most efficient going forward.

   • My laser level really helped to ensure everything was level and aligned. I also drew lines/guides on the wall with a pencil when needed.

2. Determine which fasteners to use:

   • I knew that I wouldn’t be able to mount the frames to studs because the math just doesn’t work out (my studs are 16” apart), but I made the mistake of assuming that I would be able to avoid all studs and ducts when determining mount points. So I bought Monkey Hooks, which are super strong and easy to use when you can punch clean through the drywall, and only later realized that I needed different fasteners because one mount point was directly over a stud, and there was a 3’ horizontal span of ductwork behind one of the frames. I had to make another trip out to Home Depot to grab some 3M Claws, which are super strong but also don’t completely punch through the drywall. The frames weigh ~15lb each.

   • Next time around I would gather the following info ahead of time: weight of frames, mounting points, location of studs, location of ducts

3. Mark out of the mount points w/ pencil and make sure they’re level before installing fasteners:

   • Having a bubble level is helpful here.

Here are some pictures of the final result. Maybe it won’t take two whole days next time 🥲