February Fast Five

February Fast Five

For the month of February, I’m making this monthly update relatively short and sweet.

Keeping communication as clear, succinct, and deliberate as possible has been something I’ve been working on. Especially with digital communication. For example, now I try to get by with writing emails that are at most five lines or sentences.

Incorporating elements and principles of minimalism and essentialism into communication is something I want to do. It’s another way to be more efficient with spending my energy and giving my attention.

So without further ado, below are some of the cool and interesting things that have been going on in my life in a brief “fast five” format.

 

Family and Fatherhood

For the entire month of February, my wife had to work late on the weekdays and even had to work on the weekends too. That means double the dad duty for me.

This is fine by me, of course, because I like spending time with my daughter. She’s a fun girl.

It also means that I’m carving less and less time for other things, such as blogging. (This is another reason why I’m keeping this post short and sweet. Brief posts are simply quicker to write!)

In February, I took her to a lot of cool places that she really enjoyed. One of those places is La Jolla, which is not too far from where we live. It has a beautiful beach and cove full of sea lions and seals. She really liked the sea lions and found their barking to be quite entertaining.

We also did other things such as checking out local farmer’s markets. One of the farmer’s market has a nearby train station that has an old fashioned steam powered locomotive.

Now that she’s older and understands more of the world, hanging out with her is a lot of fun!

 

Finance

February was a tough month for the stock market. The Dow and S&P 500 plummeted into correction territory and many stocks have plunged to bear market territory. It may get even worse. Who knows.

If you watch the news, it seems like many people are in panic mode. But I’m not. My portfolio is fairly diverse and I’m comfortable with the asset allocation that I currently have. I’m also relatively young and have a stable salary with a high income. My wife does too.

There’s really no reason for me to be overly concerned. I’ll just stick with my plan according to my investor policy statement. In fact, one of the purposes of having an IPS is for times like these. A well formulated investor policy statement helps to remove emotion out of investment decision making. It can help prevent bad decisions such as panic selling when stocks are low and panic buying stocks at all time highs due to FOMO.

Sell High

While I consider myself a buy and hold investor of low cost index funds, I do have a small portion of my portfolio in individual equities. It makes up roughly 5% of my portfolio. I could afford to lose it, so I kind of consider it something like “play money” to learn from.

Anyway, I do own a few individual stocks. One of them is Tesla. Earlier this month I sold a quarter of my Tesla stock at 900, which is a price that was almost four times than what I bought it for. My gut feeling was that the stock price was artificially high and that at some point it would go down. (I obviously had no evidence to support this, and I do not advocate timing the market. Luckily, however, it worked out).

Nevertheless, I sold these shares to lock in a profit. It’s not a big portion of my portfolio (less than 5%), but it’s enough for me to buy a new Tesla, which I might do :).

Buy Low?

Obviously, one of the primary triggers for the stock market downturn is the economic disruption caused by the Corona virus and the uncertainty of how bad it might be. Travel related stocks are getting hit particularly hard.

One of the stocks that interested me is Carnival (ticker symbol CCL). It’s currently trading at an all time low. CCL’s current price (at the time of writing) is less than half of its all time high, which was around $72 back in February 2018.

My guess is that as the situation with the Corona virus improves, the stock should gradually go up in price too. Because shares are so cheap right now, I went ahead and bought 100 shares.

In addition to the potential appreciation of the stock, there are other benefits to being a shareholder. CCL has a dividend yield of 6%, which is pretty good. It’s a lot better than leaving money in a money market savings account earning less than 2% APY.

And finally, if you own a minimum of 100 shares, you would receive an onboard stateroom credit of $50, $100, $250 depending on the length of your cruise. Royal Caribbean cruise lines offers a similar benefit. You can click here for full details if your’e interested in learning more.

This is pretty awesome, especially since I will be going on a Mediterranean cruise in May with my family. I’ll be sure to take advantage of this benefit!

 

Frugal Living

Earlier this month, one of our sprinklers broke.

Sure, I could have paid a handy man to fix it, but I wanted to do it myself.

After watching a few YouTube videos and getting some advice and supplies from my dad, it turns out that fixing it was pretty easy. All I needed was some PVC pipe, a pipe cutter, PVC coupling, and some Christy’s PVC primer and glue.

It’s debatable whether or not it would have been more cost effective for me to hire someone to fix it. Especially since time is so valuable. But this didn’t take me too long to do. Plus there’s a certain pride in doing something for yourself.

There are plenty of time-wasting (and maybe head-scratching) activities that people DIY for themselves just for the sake of frugality and saving a penny or two. This was not one of them. I had fun fixing the pipe myself and I learned something new in the process.

Fitness

My wife and I have been more dedicated to improving our physical fitness. Every month we’ve made specific fitness goals for ourselves. February is no exception. I’ve been going to the gym at least every other day while she does plenty of workouts at home.

We have this pull up bar over our doorway that she uses for her workouts. She’s pretty dedicated to doing fifty unassisted pull ups at least every other day. And she’s planning on increasing her number incrementally each day to 100 pull ups.

Same thing with push ups. She’s doing 50 push ups a day every other day and plans to increase it to 100 too. Keep in mind that these are real push ups, not the modified type where you’re propped up on your knees. Anyways I’m impressed because most women can’t do a pull up or a push up.

Our daughter often sees us working out at home. This is awesome because she often mimics us and tries to do push ups and sit ups too. It’s really cute!

We try our best to be good models of a healthy lifestyle. Maybe she’ll become an exceptional athlete like her mom.

 

Food

We’ve made a lot of great food in February.

All of the meals we make at home are whole food, plant-based, and incredibly delicious.

One of our favorites has been this coconut curry with lentils and cauliflower.

The meal was inspired by a recipe from popular YouTube vlogger Pick Up Limes.  You can click here if you’re interested in the recipe.

It’s very simple to make and it’s very delicious. Our daughter loved it! Giving her nutritious food to eat is another way for us to promote a healthy lifestyle.

 

Final Thoughts

February wasn’t a good month for the stock market, but it was a pretty good month for me and my family overall.

With the stock market going down, it presented some buying opportunities. It is a great time to buy stocks while they are low and to exchange some index funds for other similarly correlated ones for the purpose of tax loss harvesting. In my taxable account, for example, I primarily do this with Vanguard funds using VTSAX, VFIAX, and VLCAX as TLH partners.

Being young with a high income and a stable salary, market volatility doesn’t scare me too much. Now if I were older or lean FIRE with no back up plan, that’s another story…

February was a great month for family activities here in Southern California. Believe it or not, it’s already starting to feel like summer out here. We had a lot of fun going to the beach, exploring the city, cooking, and working out.

I feel so fortunate and incredibly grateful.