Intro to Experiments in Life Optimization

Fancy title, but what on earth does “Experiments in Life Optimization” Mean? Read on…

One thing that drives my wife crazy is when I make spontaneous decisions on trips or family activities. She likes to plan days or weeks in advance if we are going to do a major activity or go out of town.  I am more likely to play things by ear but she is more likely to come completely prepared.

When it comes to our financial future, however; I am actually quite opposite. Having a plan for the next steps in our journey is a requirement. My goal is to keep our path organized with milestones that phase in as our other milestones are reached so that we have a clear structure and timeline to know if we are on track and always have the next target ready so we know what goals we are aiming at.

Our Vision & Life Optimization

As part of this plan, we have various factors of financial independence built in.

Here is a glimpse at some of the items in our 5yr & 10yr goals:

• • Pay off the house
  • Achieve 4% Rule with 5 years of expenses (minimum) in the MBDR
  • Create passive income streams capable of sustaining our current lifestyle
  • There are a few more but let’s not get ahead of ourselves quite yet…

The first two items have been covered in the blog through various posts. We are targeting paying off the house this year and we have an aggressive savings strategy in place to help us achieve our FI number… To this point though, we have not yet put any attention on our passive income streams. With the house about to roll off, it is time to start kicking off some of those other projects.

What Value do We Want to Provide Here?

As we have been doing research, there are a lot of examples of people who have successfully launched side hustles. There are much fewer individuals publishing failures in side hustles (for obvious reasons). This is a significant gap. While it is good to learn from others successes, it is also beneficial to see failures. This full transparency would give you a well-rounded picture of the “Do’s and Don’ts”. For this reason, we are going to launch new page on our site that will cover the story of our side hustles as we start them up and how they perform.

This should be an interesting exercise in itself. I have no idea if any of the projects will have success and what all they will entail. We will keep everything as open and honest as possible so that you can benefit from any successes and failures that we may have. We will include any resources that we use as well as any systems that we setup to manage the processes.

Currently, all of the projects that we will be posting on the website will be our own; however, there is at least one project that we will be collaborating on with friends.

With all of that said:

Welcome to Experiments in Life Optimization (ELO)

We will stagger the launches of each project within the ELO series due to the fact that we want to give each one the right amount of time to really get launched off the ground. We will provide updates in varying detail on their status depending on where they are in the project lifecycle.

• • Developing the concept
  • Research and development
  • Drafting the strategy
  • Aligning resources
  • Launching the project
  • Tracking the results

Current Life Optimization Projects:

While we currently have dozens of projects in the cue, we are intending to announce 3 in 2021. As these projects stabilize and require less time to manage we will begin to launch others:

1. 1. Drop Shipping
   2. Travel Hacking
   3. Online Courses

Notice that these are not all about passive income or money generation. The intent is “Life Optimization” so we will include anything that allows you to better live a happy and fulfilled life.