2022 Wrap-up

But not boring....F'er style

Don’t worry dear reader - we have no list of personal thanks to bore you with. We are on probably 20+ personal newsletters and another 20 industry ones. There is nothing we dislike more than getting cluttered with long lists of shoutouts.

Hey newsletter writer - you didn’t win an oscar, it isn’t the time to thank everyone under the sun.

[F’er wife note - “I love hearing all the ways people help eachother”

F’er - yes she read that intro and wanted to let you know she is the empathetic one. She even reads all those family update letters people send with Christmas cards and gets excited to hear little Sally got an A in 3rd grade reading and little Johnny scored 4 goals in middle school soccer. We have too much ‘tism for that.]

The only thanks we will give is to thank all of you.

Genuinely thank you.

We have 3-5 different things going on from trying to spin up a blog, writing for BowTiedIsland, doing one off consults, free-lancing, and various business ventures, etc. The substack is our fun work, but without your support we wouldn’t be able to justify doing it multiple times a week.

So a sincere thanks.

Lastly, we have some plans to release some products in 2023. Paid subscribers will get them for free/massive discounts. So keep your eyes open.

Personal Reflection & Gratitudes

We may not be sending an email blast with our gratitudes.

But YOU should take some time for personal reflection.

It is a good habit to get into doing on the regular in general, not just due to some arbitrary turning over of the calendar. But humans are wired to view the end of a calendar year as a change over. So don’t fight it, lean into that tendency and reflect.

Did 2022 go as well as planned? Is life where you want it? Did you accomplish the goals you set out for the year?

If the answer is no, then why not?

If the answer is yes, did you aim too low? What did you do that helped you succeeed?

Take some time during the next couple weeks and take a good honest look at where you stand. Here are some thoughts and tips we find helpful:

• Write it down

  • There is some extra benefit to writing down your thoughts. Science points to the extra stimulus (not just thinking, but tactile writing and then visually seeing it)

  • We prefer pen and paper as it makes it more ‘real’ than typing

  • You get the benefit of having something you can refer back to later. It is easy to forget or diminish an item if it is a mental list. Seeing it on paper, staring back at you, makes it harder to ignore

• Brain dump first

  • Anytime you are reflecting, just let it flow. Write down everything without judging it.

  • You can go back and curate your list later, but get into a little meditative flow state and just go.

  • Don’t ideate on solutions yet. Too often people will write something down, then spend time trying to solve for it. This first pass is to just brain dump everything, you go back later to find solutions.

• Curate the list

  • We like grouping items into 3 groups. Pick 5-10 big items, 5-10 medium, and everything else in the low priority group

  • You can group by different topics “finances”, “fitness”, “family” for instance.

• In the next section for 2023 planning we will get into solutions and goal setting. You shouldn’t try to solutionize your 2022 reflections, this is just looking over the last year.

If you are having a hard time, here are some questions to help spur your reflection:

• What went well?

• What did you fall short on?

• What patterns in your behavior did you see?

• Who added value to your life?

• Who is a ‘crab’ pulling your life down?

  • Crabs in a bucket - if you put crabs in a bucket, even if they can climb out, the ones on the bottom will pull other crabs down rather than see them escape. People are like that too. If they see you pacing them, most people reactive negative. Your success is a reminder of their failure.

  • Even if it is a long-time friend, if they are only serving to hold you back or criticize, you need to seriously consider cutting that person out.

    • Note - this crab analogy is good. But at some point we read that the crabs aren’t pulling each other down so they don’t escape. They are pulling each other down because they are all trying to climb out and trying to climb over one another, so scientifically the analogy doesn’t hold…but honestly, the analogy is good enough that we can over look the inaccuracy.

• What is a ‘time-suck’ that you can cut out?

  • Social media? TV? Video games? Beers with co-workers/friends/etc?

  • Be honest here. Most people who ‘don’t have time’ for improving their life find a lot of time for following TV/sports/politics

• What can you do to be more efficient?

• Did you outperform the market? Was your time spent worth it?

  • This is always a hard one for us. We tend to do well on a % basis, but look at it on a $ per time spent basis. If you have a $100,000 portfolio and beat the market by 5% that is big alpha, but only $5k. How much time did you spend on your investing efforts? 100 hours over the year isn’t a lot of time (2 hours a week), but it means you ‘earned’ $50 an hour for those efforts. Could you have earned more than $100 a week if you spent that time on a side income?

  • However, if you are viewing your efforts as learning, don’t fully discount it. We would rather figure out our investing strategy early with small money, than wait to jump into it when you have a big bag.

• Did you show-up for your family the way it was needed?

  • Another hard one as we try to balance our W2, side work, and a growing family

• Did you gain muscle/lose fat? Are you in better or worse shape than 2021?

• Did you hit your professional goals?

• What are you grateful for?

• Seriously, write down what you are grateful for…it is helpful to keep you grounded and remind you that we live in the best time ever.

This isn’t an exhaustive list (ie- don’t just answer these questions). You need to be holistic and think through your performance across all of life. Reflect on what you did good and what you fell short on.

There is 100s of individualized questions to ask yourself to help reflect on the year.

Get Your 2023 Financial Plan

Now that you have a lot of pages reflecting on the current year. It is time to start preparing for 2023.

Normies are all gearing up for the New Year. It is most visible at your gym on January 2nd when there are dozens of new faces (got to recover from that big hangover on 1/1 dontcha know).

You are better than that and know that any change worth making is worth making now, not waiting for some arbitrary turning over of the calendar. New Year, New You is cope.

That said, if you want to make 2023 the best financial year yet, you need to start planning and putting the plan into motion.

• Start with your 2022 reflections

• Add anything you want to achieve in 2023 that you didn’t do in 2022

• Solutionize

  • Now that you have a curated list, you go back and make goals for how to accomplish things on that list

  • SMART is a commonly used acronym for goal setting. When you write down your solutions they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely

  • “I am going to get in shape” is not a good goal. “I am going to go to the gym 3x a week, every week, for the next year” & “I am going to walk at least 5k steps a day every day” are good goals. You can measure if you do it, it is specific, there is a time table, and everyone is capable of doing it. If you go to the gym and walk the steps, you will likely be well on your path to ‘getting in shape’.

  • Note - we didn’t use “I will increase net worth by $XX” as a goal. Even though it is a measurable goal, it is outcome dependent. It is good to have outcomes in mind and even write those down. But you may not always be able to effect the outcome.

    • For example - You can save $Y00 per paycheck and control that input. But something like net worth is dependent on things outside your control. If the stock market drops 20%, you may not be able to increase your net worth. You don’t control the stock market performance. But you do control your input of $ saved/invested. Make sure your goals are something you have full control over.

• Track your progress

  • A good trick is to get a calendar solely for your goal purposes. Record each day what you did to help achieve your 3-10 big goals

  • The “Seinfeld X” trick is often recommended. Get a big calendar and put it somewhere you see it everyday. Put a big red X on days you hit your goal. After stringing together Xs, you have a visual reminder to keep going. You don’t want to break the streak of Xs.

• Periodically review the list

  • Is everything on the list still aligned with your goals? A lot of times we set a goal and then find out it isn’t the path we want to go down. Review your list and make sure you are ruthlessly focusing effort on your optimized goals.

Plan Your Perfect Day

It is important to start your day with some journaling, followed by meditation, then an ice bath, 30 mins of reading, preparing ceremonial match in a kimono and drink it while grounding and sun-gazing….

Joking…No. Not that kind of fake-gooroo perfect day stuff.

Planning your perfect day is just prioritizing. The night before you write down your top 1-3 priorities for the next day. Then 1-3 secondary priorities.

Remember to use SMART. You want to be definitively able to state whether you hit your tasks at the end of the day.

• “I will write 1,000 words for a blog post”

• “I will go to the gym for at least 30 mins and lift weights”

• “I will put away all distractions for 30 mins to just play with my kids”

Here again, we like pen and paper. There is something we find extremely satisfying in crossing off an item on a list.

[F’er wife note - You can also pull an F’er and anything you do, you write on the list after the fact and then immediately cross it off and say “padding the stats”]

And lastly, we get that some days get crazy and you need to put off your list. But always try to do 1 item. Even if it is right before bed and you pick the low hanging fruit to do. Keep the streak alive of getting things done.

Wrap-up

Whether 2022 was a good year for you or underwhelming, take some time to reflect. In the paid post coming out later this week we will discuss our outlook for 2023 and what our plans are for the upcoming year.

But it is hard to know where you are going if you don’t take into account of where you been.

If you are a W2 worker, especially if you are working from home in an office job, the last 2 weeks of the year are notoriously slow. Everyone is taking time off, many people have PTO they need to take or lose, and frankly no one wants to work. It is the perfect time to block time on your calendar and do this exercise.

But we implore you, to really do it. Vaguely thinking about the year is not the same as a real focused effort on reflection.

Please feel free to share any big wins or even losses you had in 2022 or any tips you have found helpful when reflecting.

Good Luck Anon.