I decided that I was going to just take a break from trying to wrap up any more 101 Things in 1001 Days items in September, and decided to get a few other things going. I was pretty burned-out after trying for the last year to get as much done as possible. (I can’t believe I’m going to do it again, starting on October 1st. God help me.) Thus, this month’s to-do list was pretty light:
- Start the Household Management App (“Haus”)
- Finances Legwork
Start Household Management App
I’ve had this idea for building a household management app for awhile now — something to keep track of the honey-do list, help with meal planning and grocery shopping, and to give me a single view of the kids’ grades/homework, and a bunch of other stuff. I also decided that that was a pretty time-consuming undertaking, particularly given the payoff. I decided to use this as an opportunity to try agentic AI on my own time/dime, and set up a swarm of agents to build the whole thing. I’ve gotten the meal planning/grocery shopping to the point of being functional (it needs a little bit of polish), and I’m working on framing out the specs for the next big feature: household inventory management. (Where’s X? Why do we own four electric drills? Who’d we loan that board game to?) So far, so good. WIN.
Finances Legwork
After making my final student loan payment back in July, we were able to free up $300/month, which was a nice plus. After some discussions in August, and seeing how terrible our health insurance was at covering stuff, we decided our best bet would be to attack everything we could to improve savings everywhere. We briefly looked at refinancing the mortgage under the VA Home Loan program (which would have eliminated our PMI), but unfortunately that was the same week that interest rates were hiked. We also did some legwork on using a super-low-interest-rate 401K loan to pay down some higher-interest debt, discharged another hefty monthly bill, and took a scalpel to our monthly subscriptions. If you look at all the savings we’ll have tackled from July’s student loan evisceration to now, we’ll have managed to save ourselves about $1000/month. No small feat. And with our plan that we have in-place, we’ll be in a good position to get the rest of the debt eliminated in no more than a year’s time — excluding the mortgage and my car payment. Though the plan is to go crazy on the car payment after the other stuff is eliminated. Leaving us with just a mortgage. WIN.
Minor Accomplishments
- Read a shit-ton of books (see below).
- Legwork on Bridgestone RB-1 restoration.
- Working on improving my chess game.
Reading
Big month for reading. Blasted through a ton of stuff. (As always, some of these are in-progress.)
Blockers
- Life, mostly.
Lessons Learned
What’s to learn? I busted my ass, it paid off. The most basic of life lessons.
