Jerad Hill

Blog of Life & Business Persuits

Life

The Sliver Lining

It’s easy to get caught up in the moment when things are not going the way you would like them to. Problem areas are always more visible than what is actually working. We get more attached to the problems because they are at odds with what we intended. When we intend for something to go a certain way and the result is less than desirable, it doesn’t feel good. When we make plans and set out on a path, we are emotionally invested in that plan. Anything we spend time thinking about and make the effort to execute on is tied to emotions.

At the beginning of a year, it is easy to say that we are going to make this year different. Perhaps the previous year was ok, but we did not achieve what we had desired. Now that it is a new year, decide this year will be different. Just by doing that, we minimize what actually did go well that year before. It is very easy to focus on what didn’t get done, or what went wrong than it is to focus on what was great.

The last few years I have felt that I could be doing more. There are many areas of my life where I know I am doing more than average, but I also know that I being lazy in some of those areas. Here are a couple of examples.

I have not been consistent with my fitness for years now. I have made several excuses that mostly revolve around getting older and not feeling that great. I have had a few minor health issues that I have let affect me more than they should have. I have more responsibility than before, which requires more work, both at home and at the office. At the end of the day, I go to the couch and spend the last hour or two relaxing by spending time on my phone or watching tv with my wife. I often don’t end up going to bed early enough to get up and go to the gym before my family wakes up.

To start of 2016 with a bang, we received a 30-day notice to vacate the home we are renting. This came out of nowhere as we take excellent care of the property and have never been late on rent. A few days before Christmas we received a rental increase notice that was to begin on the first of the year. I contested the notice because 30-days notice must be given to increase rent. They then quickly responded with a 30-day notice to vacate. The 30-day notice to vacate is also unlawful because we have lived in the home over a year, which entitles us to a 60-day notice.

It is too easy to focus on the problems at hand and to file away the good things that happened. I often have to take a step back and look at the current situation from a different perspective. I try to think about it as if it was a year from now. I have had some hard situations in life and looking back on them from current day is a lot easier than it was going through them at the time.

It is now getting to the end of January and we have not been able to find a house similar to the size and location of the house we currently live in. We are looking at moving into a smaller home, or a rent increase of $400. There are not a lot of available rentals out there right now.

At the gym this morning, I was thinking to myself about my housing situation and I found myself being thankful. If my wife and I had done what most of our friends did right after getting married, which was buy a home. We would be paying close to double of what we are currently paying in rent for a home that we would have bought when housing prices were still quite high. We may have to move in the next few weeks into a home that is more expensive than our current situation, but that is still better than paying for a home that lost 50% or more of its value in the crash. Moving will cost us money, but we have savings that we can borrow from if we need to. It is all about the perspective you take on a situation.

There are silver linings in everything. I know that sounds cliché since the movie with a similar title came out, but it’s true. Instead of looking at the current situation and dreading all that is involved with moving, I am choosing to look at the situation as if it was six months from now. We will be in a home and settled in. We will have met a few neighbors and frequented the nearby park. I will have gotten used to driving a new way to work each day.

As far as fitness goes, I have to take the same approach. I am choosing to look at myself as if it was a year from now which includes being at my target weight, starting each day with a run and eating healthier. I am the type of person who makes a decision to do something and makes a complete 180 to get there if need be. The problem with making an abrupt 180 is that if you do it too fast, you get dizzy. If you get dizzy, you can’t focus on all that is required to sustain that kind of change in your life. Some can pull it off, but I now have the experience now that has taught me that it is hard to do with a family. You cannot disrupt everybody else’s schedule and diet just to change your own.

Though I have learned to see the silver lining in some aspects of life, I am far from being able to see it in everything. I am not the kind of person who worries about things, but I do carry some stress during situations inside of me. I need to be better at recognizing the positive aspects of a situation before even allowing the negative aspects to attach themselves.

What is your process for looking at the positive? What do you do to get yourself out of the funk so you can see clearly and focus on moving forward?

Photo Credit: Eliora Henzler

Squirrel!

I am easily distracted. There have been times I self-diagnosed ADD. The problem is that we live in a world with no shortage of distractions. There is more than just something for everybody, there are dozens of somethings.

To make it worse, I love technology. You and I both know that the tech world moves fast and there are always new bright/shiny things coming out every day. Adding to that, I want to touch and play with all of the new technology. Obviously, that is not practical because things are expensive.

When I was a kid, I would make lists of stuff I was going to buy when I had money. I grew up working on motors and racing go-karts. I remember making a list of motor parts I wanted to buy so I could build my own motor. A few years ago I bought a go-kart to drive for leisure. I realize now that I was living out my childhood dream of building a fast motor for my go-kart as an adult.

The last few years I have been analyzing, maybe over-analyzing the way I focus and what I focus on. This has led me to realize just how scattered my focus can be at times, hence the ADD self-diagnosis. Maybe it’s not ADD, it’s just that I focus heavily on things that I enjoy and it makes it hard for me to focus on other things when I am locked on to those thoughts. Now I am realizing that sounds a bit selfish, but that is the battle.

Just like most of us, my phone is a distraction. I spend too much time on it looking at things. I don’t scroll Facebook, but I scroll tech headlines and the tweets of people I follow in the technology space. That can be distracting.

The reason for thinking about this or even writing about it came about because I have realized in the last few months there have been a few instances where I had a thought I was working on, got distracted just for a second, and the entire thought was gone. I couldn’t even remember the topic of thought. It’s like it didn’t exist. Sometimes the thought would resurface later, but a few times it did not. Call it getting older or something…

The more I talk with people, I realize that most of this can be written off as a side effect of the human condition. We all get distracted in different ways. It’s hard to hyper-focus on something. To be honest, I am not sure hyper-focus is a good thing.

Even as I wrote this, I lost my train of thought once, was distracted by email twice and my phone three times. The struggle is real.

What are some of the things that distract you? What do you do to curb the distraction so you can get things done?

We’re ok, because we saved

Prior to getting married I wasn’t very good at saving money. I guess I didn’t really have a reason to save money unless there was something that I wanted which required saving for. A little over eight years ago I was engaged to be married, didn’t have hardly any money in my bank account, and nothing in my savings account. It was at that point I realized that I needed change because I might have been okay up until then existing without a backup plan, but I was not about to enter into marriage without a plan.

I ended up selling off a lot of stuff including DVDs that I never watch and my home entertainment system to get some money in our bank account. After that, I started saving whenever I could. Still wasn’t as good as some people who manage to save a large portion of their income however I was doing much better than I ever had in regards to saving.

After about eight months of marriage it was quite obvious that building a savings account was going to be one of the most important things that we did together. We ended up miscarrying our first child and were denied coverage by our health Insurance provider. That instantly put us $20,000 in debt. Thankfully, besides some savings, I was also able to empty and old 401(k) that I had never touched to pay everything off. Now our small savings account was depleted.

We continued to save when we could. We could’ve saved more but we like to travel and eat out occasionally. We were then blessed with our first born child. Being self-employed, private medical insurance is pretty expensive. Our health insurance plan had a pretty high deductible and maximum out-of-pocket responsibility. That year, we ended up emptying our savings account once again, to pay off medical bills.

When our firstborn was six months old, I decided I would be more productive if I moved my office out of our third bedroom and into an actual office. That meant taking on a bit of overhead and at the same time, I hired an employee. We still tried to save when we could and thankfully we had a few good months where we were able to save a lot.

Our second child was born in February so we met our max out our out-of-pocket responsibility with our insurance the calendar year before he was born and during the first two months leading up to his birth. Our oldest had fallen and broken his leg two weeks before his brother was born which resulted in me being off work for a couple of months to help my wife with our newborn son. My oldest son was in a body cast from his waist down which made him very difficult to pick up and move around. Thankfully our savings and the success of one of my businesses was experiencing carried us through this time.

Later that year our oldest ended up in the hospital again with an infection. Thankfully it was during the same calendar year that we had already maxed out our out-of-pocket responsibility, so we just had to pay our co-pays on everything, and I missed a few weeks of work. At this point, we were able to pay off everything immediately without carrying any additional debt.

The next year was kind of up-and-down. My business was busy some months and very slow others. I had hired a couple of employees here and there which did not pan out like I had hoped so overhead was higher than usual. My oldest son also started preschool that year. We had decided to try the preschool at our church, which was not exactly cheap. Our savings allowed us to send him there without worrying about sacrificing by sending him to a cheaper school where we didn’t know anybody.

Then our daughter was born, so we maxed our out-of-pocket again. Let me remind you of the $10,000 maximum. Yes, it still hurts to think about it. In hindsight, we could have delivered our children in Costa Rica for a fraction of that. Our savings account came to the rescue again. This time, I put the payment on a credit card with points for Amazon.com and immediately paid off the credit card.

We had outgrown our home and it was time to find a new home to rent. We had been renting, which also allowed us to save more money because we did not have to spend it on repairs and other costs associated with home ownership. Still, we could have been saving more, but we enjoyed several vacations and still enjoyed going out to eat often. The increase in living expenses took some time to adjust to. During the week we were planning to move, my wife came down with a pretty bad infection that had her in the hospital for over a week. Thankfully our family stepped up and helped us move, and the savings account once again helped us avoid debt.

In 2015, we had saved more money than I have ever had been able to keep for more than a week. We had used credit for a few things, but with zero interest. I had saved money only to empty it out for bills so many times that I was doing whatever I could to avoid having to touch our savings. I had a few investment accounts that were not doing much that I was occasionally contributing to. The months of May/June have become expensive months for us because there are multiple things that come due. We now have two children in school as well. This June, we had school tuition, car insurance, renters insurance, business liability insurance and workman’s compensation insurance all due at the same time. In the past, I would pay several of these monthly because I didn’t want to touch that savings account. This time, we decided it would be best to pay everything in full so we would have less monthly expense to worry about. This proved to be a good decision leading into the holidays.

One of my employees was to have his first child with his wife and I wanted to be able to give him some time off for that. Because of savings, I was able to do that. A couple of days before Christmas, our landlord informed us of a rent rate increase followed by a notice to vacate the property (a story for another day). Our savings will once again play a role in keeping us comfortable.

I understand that was a very long prelude into a post on the importance of savings but as you can see, it is important. Most people do not think about savings and live outside of their means. They put expenses on credit cards and spend money that they should be saving. We will all encounter unexpected expenses and it is our responsibility to pay for them. Nobody owes us anything.

I could have purchased a home with cash had it not been for the cost of health insurance and what we have had to pay in premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses but it is my responsibility to pay it. Taking a cheaper route was not an option when it came to the health of my children.

One fear most self-employed people have is disability. We do not have the same disability options as those who are w2 employees. Since I do not pay into disability, I would not have it for long if something were to happen to me. This is another important reason for savings. Making sure you have at least 3-6 months of money saved so you could afford to live should you need time to recuperate from something is extremely important. There is a much higher chance that I would get hurt and have to take time off from work than be taken out completely (life insurance).

Saving money can be hard

I began saving money by taking money from my account immediately after placing it there. Before I could even come up with a purpose for that money, I had put some in savings. For me, it had to be automatic, so I set it as an automatic transfer from my bank account. I even transferred it out of the bank account I had a debit card and checks for because I knew it needed to be a couple of days away from my main account.

Saving is a sacrifice

Saving money means not spending it on something. This can be hard because there is no shortage of things to want. As a photographer and someone who loves tech, every day is a new challenge for me. Just today, a new handheld rig for my camera came out and I just know how awesome it would be to shoot video with that rig. Do I need this new $2200 rig? No I do not. That has been my problem over the years that has kept me from saving more than I already have.

Saving means showing restraint. It means saying no sometimes. I have found that putting a few days between me and available money is enough time to keep me from spending it on something that I think I need right now. I make impulse buys quite often if the money is there, so I have to remove the money and put it somewhere else.

You have to be vigilant

Even if all you have to save each month is $20, that $20 should get put in savings and forgotten about. Having my money in a savings account at another bank made it easy for me to forget about it. When I looked at my checking balance I saw what I had to live on. If it was enough for some fun, we would have fun. We are still battling with being consistent. Some years the first half of the year has looked much better than the second half. Being self-employed, I don’t receive a paycheck every two weeks. Some weeks I get paid, others I don’t.

You have to want it bad enough

My motivation was my wife. I didn’t want her to suffer the hardships I had put myself through by spending all of my available funds with a week or two left in the month. My wife and I both were not very responsible with our money before marriage. Our rude awakening was our first encounter with medical expenses. Sometimes you need a good kick in the pants to get on track.

You have to automate it

As I mentioned before, if you are bad at saving money, you have to automate it. I think that automating the process is good for anybody, even if they are good at saving. Though I don’t have a regular paycheck, I have some recurring income that comes in each month. That is my baseline savings. Once that hits the account, a chunk of it is transferred away. Later that month, once I have enough money in the account to cover the next months expenses, the rest is put in savings.

We used to handle vacations by just paying for them out of savings, or if I had extra money in checking however, that has changed too. We now have automated savings set up for a variety of things. I started this just shy of a year ago for a few items and setup a few more late last year. We have separate savings accounts for the following items and each savings account gets something each week. You can set automatic transfers for any dollar amount, even $1.00.

  • Basic Savings Account (Our main savings account)
  • Insurance Costs (Health, car, home, business, etc.)
  • Children’s School Tuition
  • Charity (Used to help people in need)
  • Adoption (We are planning to adopt and have a savings account for adoption expenses)
  • Children’s savings accounts (Somewhere to put their birthday money and save for their future. Once for each kid.)
  • Travel Fund
  • Racing Fund (For Quarter Midget racing expenses)

My prayer is that we will be protected from having to clear out savings accounts for unplanned expenses. We don’t have a lot of money saved, but we could weather a small storm or two. Since using a bunch of our savings to pay for items in full, we have been able to save even more. Instead of paying for school tuition out of our main savings account, we set up a separate savings account for that. I took the projected amount we would need for tuition that would be due in June of 2016 and divided that by 52. That amount is taken out each week and put into savings. As of writing this, that account is already more than half way to paying tuition in full. No surprises.

We often allow things to surprise us even if we knew they were coming. Last year I knew that our kids school tuition was coming up, so it was a bit of a surprise when I realized how much it would be with two kids now in school. Our goal this year is to automate even more savings until we are to the point where even future big expenses such as cars are saved for.

In Closing

What are some of your savings goals? Have you been able to save? If so, what method worked for you? Saving money is an ongoing exercise in restraint. It’s like dieting, you have to put off what you want now for a later payoff. Our goals are to be able to pay for our next vehicles in cash, save at least 50% to put down on a house (this goal may change to save to buy a home with cash), continue to pay our children’s school tuition, and be able to take a vacation each year.

My Kids Are My Startup

Just about every casual conversation I have with someone, the topic of work-life balance comes up. I have always felt this was kind of a weird way to refer to your life as a whole because to me work has always been a big part of my life. There have been chapters of my life where work consumed all of my time and there have also been a few times in my life where I didn’t have much work so I had a lot of time to spend with friends, read and sleep. Now that I have a wife and three children, my priorities have changed. I believe that instead of discussing the topic of work-life balance, we all should be talking about a priority balance.

Priorities have changed for me since I was fresh out of high school. Through my twenties, I would work long hours and sleep little. I wanted as much time as possible to try and build something. I have worked for myself since I was twenty years old. My entrepreneurial roots go all the way back to my childhood. In high school, I prioritized work over education. In my early twenties, I worked a lot. I had little time left over for friends and a relationship. I tried to have both, but long hours at work always won. At age 25, I knew that this was not a sustainable way to live. During my twenty-fourth year, I had left a relationship and lost touch with several friends. If I was ever going to get married and have kids, I could not live like this. I also watched married friends of mine get divorced over things like money and working too many hours. I did not want that to happen to me.

I decided to make changes. I wanted to create freedom in my life to do things like see the world and hopefully find someone to love. I sold off the remains of the business I spent my early twenties building and started building websites. I had a laptop and could work from anywhere. During the next few years, I did just that. If I woke up and wanted to work from the beach, I did. It was nice, but I soon realized I had swung to the opposite end of the spectrum. I was making a living, but I was not being as effective and productive as I could have been.

I am coming up on my eighth year of marriage and my oldest child will turn six this year. My experiences so far have taught me that you can not get time back. Once you spend time, it is gone. Having realized this early on it helped shape what I would do with my time. Setting priorities is important. I have wanted nothing more since I was a teen to start a company and make it something awesome. I have started a few companies over the years, some successful, others not. None of them grew to the potential I knew they had and I am fine with that.

A life is much more important than a company or a career. You and I both have an average lifespan to make a career happen or to build a business. However, once you introduce a new life into this world, priorities should change. That life needs to be nurtured and shaped, very much like a business does, and time is limited.

My Kids Are My Startup

I have never considered any of my businesses a startup business. The story, however, is similar, I built something from nothing and am trying to grow it. Call me old fashioned. I consider myself a small business owner. Kids, however, are startups. They come into this world ready to be programmed and shaped into something amazing. If they are guided by a good CEO (parent), they will flourish and add value to this world. They may even get acquired by someone (a spouse), and build their own little startups (Grandkids!).

The problem is that there are some crap CEOs out there who are more interested in themselves than their fledgling startups. Let’s ditch the metaphors. There are some crap parents out there who are more interested in themselves than their children. Can you have an amazing career and raise a family? Yes! Can you run a successful startup company and still be around during the hours your children are awake? YES! It’s not hard, it’s prioritization.

At one point, I was running three companies at once. I had a successful photography business, website design business, and a technology review/news website. Each of these companies brought in enough revenue to support a small family. After my wife and I had our first child, I made sure I was working a regular work day of 8 hours or less. Sure there have been a few days here and there where I have worked closer to 12 hours in a day, but they are few and far between. I used to shoot several weddings each month on the weekends but have since scaled back the amount of weddings I book each year to make sure it does not cut into my family time.

The one thing I want to succeed above all else is my family. I love business and could not imagine doing anything else, but my family trumps business. You can close a business and start a new one, but you can’t close a family. You should never close a family. When a business closes, there is limited damage that can easily be fixed. Someone loses a job, they go get a new one. When you break up a family, the damage lasts forever. We are talking about a family breakup due to a husband or wife that overworks and does not prioritize correctly. I recognize that there are valid reasons for divorce. I am not here to discuss those.

I think that if more men/fathers of this world would prioritize their lives in favor of their families, there would be less of all things negative. If I have to hire more people to help with work so I can maintain a regular work day, I am fine with that. Yes, it will mean paying the wages of others which waters down the money I could be earning, but it is worth it. If I was working for a company, I would forego a promotion if it meant taking time away from my family.

To be honest, I could go on about this forever, so to keep this post from becoming a total rant, I will end it here.

If you are a dad or children any age, please consider how you can give them more of your time. I know you have seen the countless movies that portray a father who tries to spend more time with his already grown kids. That is not the time to make up for it. Do what you can while they are young and before the damage is done. If you are not raising them, someone else will.

I’m taking my life back from Facebook

I made a decision that I should have made a few years ago. I deleted my Facebook profile. I have wanted to do this many times before but could never pull the trigger. I logged out of Facebook a couple of times for an extended period, but I always ended up back there. You can read about that here.

Let me start by saying that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Facebook. The fact that there is a service that lets us share our lives and stay connected easier is a pretty amazing thing. The problem is not with Facebook, it’s with much of the content within Facebook.

I can’t recall how long ago it was, but I realized that Facebook had started to become a place where people go to complain about stuff. Just about every post in my newsfeed was a complaint. I would go on Facebook to see what my friends were up to and I would end up depressed by the end of it. Either Facebook was only deciding to show me negative posts or those are the only posts that stuck out to me. Facebook has allowed people to complain about their lives rather than taking responsibility. It’s easy to post to Facebook in an attempt to get sympathy from our friends. It’s actually kind of sad and it doesn’t help anybody.

There has been a change in society during the past 5-6 years. People used to be able to share their opinion without being ran over for it. We used to be able to accept the fact that people had an opinion other than our own. That has changed. We can still share our opinion, but if it goes against anything the media is focusing on, it is best left unspoken. I realized that the bulk of the people I was connected to on Facebook cared more about trivial things than actual travesties. I tried to filter my Facebook newsfeed, but Facebook makes it a pain in the butt to customize the content that you prefer to see.

About two years ago I stopped accepting every friend request that came in. I realized that my newsfeed was so cluttered that I couldn’t see updates from people I was actually connected to. I tried creating custom newsfeeds, but that was a pain to manage. I was not going to go through 4924 friends at the time and manually clean house. To be honest, I even considered hiring someone to do it for me.

My frustration came to a boil last week when I realized I had been scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed for 30 minutes and my heart was racing because of the content I had just ingested. I felt like I had just spent the last 30 minutes reading all of the tabloid articles in the grocery store checkout. Just about every post was negative, disgusting, rude or a conflict against something I believe strongly about. During the time I had logged out of Facebook for two months, I was blogging more and able to read more books. I didn’t mindlessly go to Facebook, I intentionally picked up an actual book.

I had entertained the idea of converting my Facebook profile to a Facebook page for a while. A Facebook page is different than a profile. A Facebook page allows you to post updates just as you would a Facebook profile, but you have no newsfeed and people don’t friend your profile. It’s similar to Twitter in the way that people can decide to follow your updates by “liking” your page. Facebook used to allow you to do this conversion while keeping the history you have amassed in your timeline. That is not the case anymore and it was a bitter pill to swallow.

I have always recommended to all of my clients who want to start a Facebook page not to post unique content to Facebook that they hope to never lose. Facebook will most likely not always be the cool place to hang out. All of the content that people poured into Myspace is now worthless or gone in many cases. Depending on how you used Myspace, this may be a good thing. I have been posting to Facebook just shy of 10 years. I joined in 2006 when Facebook began allowing anybody to create an account. That is a low of content to allow to perish. Within the last 10 years, I started dating the woman I would marry. I got married and had children. Much has happened, and the majority of it was shared through Facebook.

Facebook allows you to backup your data. You can download it into this basic looking archive that you can click and scroll through (see mine here). It’s not very searchable but it’s better than nothing. I was able to backup all of my photos in case there were one or two that I had not saved somewhere else. I never take photos inside of the Facebook app so the majority of my photos were saved in Google Photos or iCloud Photos. I realized that I almost never scrolled back into history through my Facebook timeline anyway.

I needed a change. I was wasting a lot of time reading the nonsense that was being posted to Facebook in hopes of coming across something nice someone else had to say. I am afraid that I will miss things. I have been able to pray for people who are going through hard times because I read about it on Facebook. I would have never known about the situation outside of Facebook. My wife and I like to help people when we can and many times we have discovered a need through someone’s Facebook post. I will miss this, but it will make me actually reach out to people to stay connected rather than scroll Facebook in an attempt to get the highlights.

I converted my personal Facebook profile into a Facebook page. I did not want someone else to end up registering http://facebook.com/jeradhill to use it for their own purposes. I will continue to post to Facebook through this page. I converted a personal account that I had for managing Facebook pages before Facebook Business Manager was created so I could remain connected to the Ditch Auto photography group I created. I will not be adding any friends there. I am sure that this will not be a popular choice among many as the Facebook connection just became a one-way road, but I had to make the decision.

To keep connected with people who’s updates I would miss by not having a personal account, I will actually connect with them in person or follow their updates on other social networks such as Twitter or Instagram. I have had this intention many times, and I know it will be hard to do, but I am going to make an effort. Limiting the information intake will help me focus more on my family and my closer friends, who often get overlooked because they don’t post to Facebook that often.

Facebook is still an excellent tool for keeping in contact with people. As a business owner, it’s a fantastic marketing tool as well. This is why I am not leaving Facebook altogether, I am simply limiting the amount of content I consume so I can fill that extra time with what’s closest to me.

Instead, let’s follow each other on Instagram or Twitter.