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The markets really are ping-ponging all over the place.
For the last 6 months we seem to either be making $10-$20k or losing $10-$20k. Thankfully, the trend seems to be upward. Our net worth is now at a similar level to last November.
I finished topping up our emergency fund in January, so it should be the last month where we invest only $1000. Hopefully it’s $10k per month from now on!
Layoffs
As I was expecting for the last couple of months, my company did a round of layoffs this month. 6% of the workforce. I woke up one Monday and panicked as I saw a meeting invite with my boss and his boss as well as a layoff email. I turned out to be safe, but one of my direct reports was not.
The atmosphere at work is pretty horrible right now, everyone is anxious, even the people who were not affected. Will there be more? I hope not!
Due to this, we’re trying to enjoy all of the time we have right now in the US, as we never know if we’ll be asked to leave. Getting a green card is a long ass process which is at least 3 years away, if I get laid off before then, we’ll have 4 weeks to pack up and leave the country.
Car Camping
For those of you that don’t know, when we bought our first car in the USA, we took the back seats out and turned it into a camper. We installed a wooden platform and cut a memory foam mattress to the right size. For winter, we bought cold weather sleeping bags with the intention of traveling to different mountains for snowboarding over this winter season.
In January, we tried this out, we visited 2 mountains and snowboarded for a total of 4 days. Birkshire East in Western Massachusetts and Waterville in New Hampshire. We did both of these in two consecutive weekends and they were a great success!
We didn’t freeze in -10 degrees weather, the sleeping bags did their jobs. Although we did have an issue with the plastic of the car freezing and then melting in the day and soaking everything, we have some plans to try and mitigate this next trip.
We are absolutely shattered from doing this for two weekends, I think this is more from the snowboarding than sleeping in the car, but it certainly didn’t help. For the next trip, we might take a day or two off to recover.
We also managed to do a 4 hour cold weather hike on a different weekend with an overnight car camp in January (this was the first time we tried out sleeping in the car.)
We saw some beautiful frozen lakes in Western Mass, although it wasn’t fun when our water bladders froze.
February
What’s in store for us in February?
I think, more snowboarding, we plan to do at least one longer trip when we go to Jay Peak in northern Vermont. We may have to throw in a couple of paid accommodation so we can shower and recover if we want to go for more than a couple of nights, but that’s OK.
To start hitting our yearly goal of going to at least 3 national parks in 2023, we would like to go back to Yosemite in the Spring, depending on the cost. We went there for our honeymoon and are dying to get back. Arcadia in Maine is something we’ll probably do in the Spring as well as it’s so close.
How was your January?