thewh00sel!

Poker was kind of lousy this month. This is not poker-related content though, I'll do a write-up on it when I get all of my records for the month in order, but for now I'll do a sexy expense report! Don't get too excited! Ok, I'm just kidding, you can get pretty excited, THIS IS FINANCE YOU'RE READING ABOUT, HOLLA! (Items with an asterisk next to them I talk about below.)

Home- 2,095
Auto & Transport*- 930
Health & Fitness*- 803
Food/dining/toiletries*- 750
Bills & Utilities- 549
Shopping*- 242
Business Services*-105
Fees & Charges- 40
Entertainment*- 241
Personal Care*- 200
Gifts & Donations- 4

Total: 5,959

Auto & Transport
Pretty happy about this number, as it's a 44% decrease from last month's car expenses. And although we picked up a second car again so our car expense will go up again, we will still save and gas and hopefully after the WSOP we can ditch one of them again or downsize it. My wife just drove the new car to work for the first time yesterday too, so the gas savings will be realized next month as well.

Health & Fitness
This number is down by 260 because we finished paying off an old hospital bill from an Emergency Room trip. We still have one that costs us 350 a month for another 6 months or so before it's paid off as well. No interest on that though so that's nice at least.

Food/Dining/Toiletries
Ugh, kind of embarrassed about this number. 750 was much higher than we were aiming for (500) and I actually thought we would be around 400 since we spent 250 on a meat package in March that lasted us through April...but somehow we still spent a bunch. We went out to eat way too much (~$200 worth) and spent the other $550 at the grocery store. To be fair though we just went to the store a few days ago and spent $200 of this 750 so maybe that will have a positive impact on May's food bill. Time will tell.

Shopping
Not much to say about this number. Bought some stuff that we wanted, but nothing really frivolous. Could maybe even put some of this into bills and utilities since $55 was pool supplies. Anyways here's the breakdown on this category:
108 Bike Child Seat
12 child helmet
55 Pool supplies
67 other - pair of shoes, some craft stuff the wife picked up at Michael's

Business Services
This month I started keeping track of what I tip to food service people at the casino, and cocktail waitresses, and the valet instead of tacking it onto my wins/losses. Turned out it was about what I was expecting it to be, but it did make me think twice about ordering a drink sometimes. I even started packing my lunch, and a water jug to avoid ordering food and drink from servers, but a few beers at the end of some nights kept this number inflated, I should be able to get it down in May, and in June I expect the number to be very low since WSOP valet is a waste unless you are running really late (although avoiding the heat for as much time as possible is a nice luxury).

Entertainment
What can I say, had to have a little fun this month. We went to a comedy/magic show on the strip that was $20 for two tickets with a special discount. We had a good/cheap time, but we spent 10 bucks on drinks and another 50 or so on an expensive dinner that we had a discount at when showing the ticket stubs. Buy one get one free at Pampas Churrascaria, a Brazilian Steakhouse in the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood.


It was a nice treat, but it also resulted in one of the shopping expenses. Mrs. Wh00sel walked in her heals (like a trooper) from The Flamingo all the way to Planet Hollywood, which resulted in a necessary purchase of some new tennis shoes to walk back to Bellagio where we parked at. Luckily, she needed some anyways, and there happened to be a Journey's just outside of the restaurant.

I also went golfing once; and although I got a free round (thanks DaMurdera), I lost the flip for lunch. I also lost a couple golf prop bets, (got laid a million to one to par out after the 5th hole, I'm terrible though so probably lit a dollar on fire there) and had to get some new balls to go out, so that added up to the rest of the entertainment bill.

Personal Care
Using up our free massages at Massage Envy adds up. The massages are free but you still have to tip. So one more month of paying this bill, then we will have that expense cut out.

All-in-all the month wasn't too awful on the spending front. We did a lot of spending, but we still came in ~12.5% lower in expenses this month compared to last month, and we got (barely) under the 6k mark for the first time in a long time, which I'm pretty stoked about. Hopefully it can stay that way the rest of the year.

I'll have a poker update up in a few days at the most, got a couple interesting hands to talk about, and a couple coolers/bad beats to share too.
-wh00sel

Welcome to the jungle

0 votes

Comments (8)

...but you can't win much either...

Took a shot and played a little 10/20 on Monday in a soft game when my 5/10 seat wasn't available. Played for about an hour, hoping to turn on the run-good. Bought in for 3k and ran it up to a little over 8k before my seat opened up at 5/10 (Flopped a set vs top two and turned a straight vs a set). I almost just stayed at 10/20, but I didn't really want to be 8k deep with a bunch of people who cover me just yet. So I went back to 5/10 which turned out to be a great game. Unfortunately I dusted off 1-2k of my profit for the day when I ran a bluff against bottom pair unsuccessfully, and ran an overpair into a set for a little bit too.
/bragpost

Only got 5 days left this month to try and string some wins together, and need to get on it if I want to get to 150hrs this month.

ps: how bout that FTP/PS news?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ME WANT ONLINE POKERS

0 votes

Comments (10)

Well, I sort of came to a compromise with Mrs. wh00sel on the one-car situation. She wanted a second car, but agreed to have two affordable cars instead of two expensive ones. So I saw the opportunity to replace her SUV with an economical 5-speed that fits more than enough cargo for our family.

Phase One
Enter: 2009 Honda Fit

Price: 13,000 (14.5 after taxes/registration)
The problem was that she didn't know how to drive a manual. This car, though is probably the easiest manual I've ever driven. First gear may as well be "D" on an auto, because you have to try pretty hard or be on a pretty steep hill to risk a stall-out, even for a noob. After about an hour of total practice, spread across a few days I'd say she is proficient enough to commute with it, although she still wants more practice before committing to using it as her daily driver. I presume that in a week's time she will be driving it daily without issue.

For you car enthusiasts out there, it's actually pretty fun at the limit too. Although the 2009 isn't as raw as the 2008 and earlier models, on-ramps can still be a pleasurable experience in this econobox.

Phase Two
Ditch the SUV

Self-explanatory, but if I can get it done in the next month before another payment is due on it this will just be a delayed-trade-in for the Fit with no out-of-pocket expenses, and actually a small short-term profit since the SUV is worth more than we owe. Another benefit is that if the car sells before I have to register the new one (30 days) then I get the remaining prorated value of the registration of the SUV to go toward the new registration.

Phase Three
????

Phase Four
Profit!

If we get a second car as planned before the summer then it will probably be some 3-4k beater that gets the job done in emergencies and we can throw down cash for, although I would still rather just have one vehicle, we'll see what happens. As far as actual profit gained by switching to the Fit for our primary vehicle, we will save whatever the difference is in profit from the Santa Fe's sale, plus about 30% (conservative estimate) in gas. Given that we spend about $400 in gas per month, that amounts to $1440 in yearly savings from the switch, not to mention a more reliable car with lower cost of ownership. I also recently got a credit card that gives 5% back on gas so that should make me 150-200 per year in free money.

Next up:...pay down student loans before interest starts in about a year. Next write-up will be about how much we owe on those (I really don't know bc Mrs. Wh00sel handles those, I would guess around 40k *puke* when all is said and done) and if it's worth it to start firing money at it now, or build the roll, so I'll break that shit down soon. I know you're excited, but don't break your F5 key off waiting!

-wh00sel

0 votes

Comments (17)

Sup guys, time for a mid-April poker update. This month has been pretty lame as far as results go. I'm stuck about 1500 on the month. I haven't been playing particularly good or bad. I did make one really dumb river fold in a spot where it was a clear call and cost myself a 3k pot. So tack 3k onto my totals and I'd be up a little bit overall.

Here's what April looks like on my spreadsheet:


My average session length for this month looks very high at 8.4 hours per session, compared to my YTD average of 6.95 hours per session. That's because last week was my wife's spring break so I didn't have as strict of a schedule to adhere to from the 1st-7th. This month has been pretty laid back so far because of it as well, as I took Easter off and then played Mon and Tues, followed by Wed/Thur off. I'll be back at it tonight and tomorrow night though.

I didn't count Easter as an extra day off since it's a holiday, but technically it'll be 3 days off this week, and will shorten my overall days of play for the month. Even so I think I will manage to get in 150 hours, and hopefully 160. I'm at 58.75 hours now with 18 days left including today, so if I play 12 out of the 18 days I'll need to average 7.6 hours per session to get to 150. If I stay at my 8.4 hour rate I will just barely hit 160. So hopefully everything falls nicely into place and I can wrap this month up with a little upswing to get back on pace with my Challenge.

I'm 37.4% of the way there, but I only have about 32% of the time left to get there. I'll be grinding hard these next two weeks and do a last month breakdown of how likely I think I am to get there in my last month. Wish me luck!

Keep on grinding Blogfans

0 votes

Comments (5)

Life
Well, it's been almost 2 weeks since I sold my car and we have been using just one car for the family, and I'm happy to say that the transition has been really smooth so far. My wife had last week off of work for Spring Break so that was the true test for us, since her biggest issue with having one car was that she would feel stuck at home while I was at the casino. We managed though, and I think I almost have her convinced to downsize the SUV into something more fuel-efficient with just as much cargo space. Now I just have to teach her how to drive a manual for maximum efficiency.

I also found that we did some things during the week to just avoid using a car. Two days in a row we biked somewhere that we were going to go instead of driving; once to go to the park for lunch, and once to go to a close-by restaurant for Easter Brunch. That was the first honest exercise I've gotten all year so I felt pretty good about that.

Savings
The change seems like it will really help with lowering monthly costs as predicted. Insurance went down from $200 to $90, which is more than I was expecting. Obviously, the cost of the car is gone too ($305 per month). And I got an added boost to income this month as the car had a warranty on it that I got a refund for ($1,900). Granted, that was paid for with the purchase of the car, but it's nice to get it back. And finally about $200 in yearly registration fees.

Total Savings: $590 per month for the next 12 months

That's $7,080 in extra money for the year, hard to say no to that.

Potential Future Problems
I'm a little worried about when the WSOP starts because my wife has to work until June 8th so I might have to buy a cheap used car for June or something if we can even find a sitter for the little one. I'm going to assume that I can buy and resell a used car on craigslist for no loss on the value of the car, so the cost of picking up a second car for one month I'll estimate at $330 ($150 for registration, $100 for one month of insurance and say $80 for extra gas use since my wife will have extra access to a vehicle). I'll be actively working on a solution to that problem, but some ideas besides getting a second car are:

-Carpool. Seems odd for a poker player, but maybe I can find someone to pick me up for the first week and either split gas money or return the favor a later week. Total cost avoidance: $330, 100%, but comes with dependence on someone else.

-Hotel. Could stay at the Rio for 5 days @ 50 /day with one of the many people coming in for the WSOP and bring my own food to avoid getting owned by casino food. Total cost avoidance: $80, 24.4%. Plus avoid DMV waiting and take some cost burden off of a player staying at Rio anyways. Decent option, but probably underestimating the cost of a room there, and my wife's annoyance with me for being gone for a week while living in the same city.

-Rent a car. Seems like an OK idea, but in reality I feel like it would be a net loss. I ran a quote for it though to check it out. Looks like getting the cheapest model from June 1st through June 8th would run me $245 after tax. So total cost to me if I include the $80 of extra gas spent for having the 2nd car available would be $325. Total cost avoidance: $5, 1.5%. But I also ran a quote for June 4-8th bc June 1st is a Friday and if I can get one ride on Friday and rent a car for the following weekdays it would run me $204; $284 after gas. Saving me $46 or 14% from buying a car, and all the hassles.

I think renting might be the best idea as far as maximizing independence and minimizing hassle, glad I ran the quote on that.

Anyways, I guess I'll wrap this long post up. Probably could have split this post up into two entries, but my fingers just kept on trucking, as it were, so enjoy the bonus info and let me know if you have any other ideas, comments, or questions.

0 votes

Comments (12)

In my last blog I made a comment about retiring in under 6 years if I can save 80% of my income every year. This isn't an estimation, it's simple math and anyone who can save that much will have enough saved up in that time period to live off of the money they've saved for the rest of their lives. Here's a chart of savings rate versus amount of time working assuming a starting point of 0 savings:


So I decided to do a more detailed breakdown of my specific situation and the amount of money in expenses I will need to cover at the time of retirement to determine what my "number" is. That is, the amount of actual money I will need to have saved up so that my wife and I can quit working and defeat the game of life. To keep things simple I'm not going to break things down into individual categories. Instead I'm going to keep things pretty general.

Current Expenses: ~7,000 per month. Let's assume that it stays at 7,000 for the rest of this year and then becomes lower for the years following to make the math easier.

Estimated Expenses after 2012 (cutting out everything we don't really need i.e cost of living after retiring): ~4,500 per month (probably more like 4,000, and significantly lower once we pay off the house, but 4,500 seems safe).

So the goal now is to determine how big of a ball of money can generate an annual income of 4,500 per month. That actually isn't that hard. First you multiply 4,500 by 12 to get 54,000 in annual expenses. Then you take 54,000 and divide by .04 and you get the number: $1,350,000


Seems like a lot.

Then there is the time factor. How much time will it take me to reach that number? This is the cool part because you have the power of compounding on your side.

Let's take my current savings rate for 2012 of 50%. So if I hold on at 50% for the year with 7k/month in expenses, I will have saved up 84,000 (7*12). Now assuming that I don't put any of that into my poker bankroll and invest it into something risk-averse we can assume that the money will generate about 5% on average from investments. So by the end of the year that money will be worth 88,200, not bad. So for years 2-5 let's assume that I can still save 7k per month. By the end of the 5th year my nestegg will be worth 487,360.676. Here's what the year-over-year breakdown would look like:

year 1: 88,200
year 2: 180,810
year 3: 278,050.50
year 4: 380,153.025
year 5: 487,360.676


Now let's add some stuff. Right now my wife isn't getting paid much as a substitute teacher, and will be a full time teacher for next year. She will probably get about 35,000 in after-tax pay. So if I add in her 35,000 per year as savings and also add the 2,500 per month in savings after we are down to 4,500 per month in expenses next year, it brings our total up to 149,000 for years 2-5. Wow! what a difference cutting out 2,500 a month can do; it adds an extra 30k per year in savings, effectively doubling my wife's 35k per year income! Here's what it looks like over 5 years:

year 1: 88,200
year 2: 249,060
year 3: 417,963
year 4: 595,311.15
year 5: 781,526.71

That brings us to 57.8% of our "number" in just 5 years assuming that I can make no more than what I'm making now at 5/10 after expenses/taxes each year. Not bad. Now, let's assume that after the first year I decide that I have enough of a buffer to play 10/20 about half the time that I play poker. And let's assume that I win 1.5x as much as I win at 5/10 even though it's double the stakes and you can buy in for more. How does that affect the numbers?

Well, let's see how much more I would make from playing. If you take the 114k that is saved from my income in years 2-5 and multiply by 1.25 (remember we're only making 1.5x as much as we were half of the time) you get 142.5k. Add in my wife's 35k and we're at 177,500 in savings PER YEAR. Here's the final 10 year breakdown to retirement:

year 1: 88,200
year 2: 278,985
year 3: 479,309.25
year 4: 689,649.71
year 5: 910,507.20
year 6: 1,142,407.56
year 7: 1,385,902.93 Oh yeaaaaaaah beer me we're retiring!
year 8: 1,641,573.08
year 9: 1,910,026.73
year 10: 2,191,903.07



It's pretty sick when you break down the numbers and look at them laid out like this, but I think that retiring in 7 years or less, given that we have some money saved already, is a very likely scenario for me and my family and I'm pretty damn excited about it. What's your number?

note: this is assuming that we continue to make 2k in mortgage payments for the rest of our lives. If I factor in that with minimum payments the mortgage will be paid in 27 years, and assume we live another 50 years after that, the amount of money we actually need to retire will be much MUCH lower. This seems like the best way to do it for now though, since I'm not accounting for future expenses like children's tuition and higher health care costs when we're older so I figure it all balances out this way.

0 votes

Comments (30)

Well this month had a rough start but ended up being respectable. Here's a snapshot of how I'm doing overall, stacked up next to how March went.


My hourly was $17 lower than my average has been so far this year, which I attribute to running poorly on the weekends during March Madness when the games were great and then the games being sub par on the weekdays in between. If I can get in 160 hours per month for April and May at my current hourly I would finish up around 67k. To get to 100k I need 691.45 more hours at the current hourly. If I expect to achieve that number by the end of May I will need to average about 190 per hour for the next 2 months...Nothing a little run-good can't cure.

Regardless, I am satisfied with the amount of hours I got in this month. I managed to take 2 days off per week in-keeping with my schedule and felt like I had a really good work-life balance for the month and am looking forward to maintaining my schedule for April.
-----
Budget Stuff.

Now that the month's over I can add to my previous post that my savings rate (Expenses/Income after taxes) for the year is now 49.57% (-30% Jan, 70% Feb, 50% Mar). My goal for the end of the year is to have a 65% savings rate as an average and, as the expenses get lower, hope to improve on that next year. With a 65% savings rate and non-changing expenses you will be "retired" in 17 years assuming nothing saved up. With an 80% savings rate you can retire in 5.5 years. I'm hoping to clear 80% over the next 3-5 years so I can just be done doing stuff. Or bink a WSOP event and be done this year .

TA TA FOR NOW

0 votes

Comments (5)

SPOILER: Sorry no bird/spider tattoos in this post.

Ok, on to the excitement of expenses!

So all of my expenses for the month are paid and here is the breakdown (Items with asterisks next to them I talk about below):

Home 2,025.07
Auto & Transport* 1,656.43
Health & Fitness 1,142.87
Food & Dining* 807.30
Bills & Utilities 486.67
Shopping* 330.82
Personal Care 103.00
Taxes 74.95
Education 47.00
Business Services 35.00
Entertainment 4.99

Total: 6,714.10

Auto & Transport: I'm kind of excited about this category for next month because we are going to try living with just one vehicle which will remove a $300 payment and $100 insurance premium per month. I am also going to try to convince my wife to downsize her SUV to something cheaper and more fuel efficient without sacrificing any interior space and comfort by the end of April. She's currently getting around 22mpg and commuting about 20 miles to work and paying ~500 a month for the car payment. I think we can get a 10-12k vehicle that gets 23/30mpg and that will reduce the payment and make it easier to pay off if I have a good month or two. I'm thinking Suzuki SX4 or similar, let me know if you have any thoughts on what to get.

Food and Dining: This number is inflated because at the beginning of the month we purchased $250 worth of meat from one of those meat trucks that will last us at least through April and potentially longer. If it ends up being cheaper overall then it should automatically adjust by being a cheaper food and dining expense in April. Time will tell. We also spent probably like 80-100 on fast food and restaurants this month which didn't help either.

Shopping: Was about $100 more than it could have been, but like I said in a previous post, we bought a little electric Jeep for Allison and she really likes it. I don't think we will lose much money on it as they get snatched up pretty quickly whenever they pop up on craigslist. So if it still works in a year or two I assume we can get $80-100 for it and get our money back.

All things considered this was a successful month in lowering my expenses. Although the actual number increased by a few hundred dollars, I expect that next month will break into the 5,xxx range which would be a pretty big success considering the short amount of time I've been working on lowering expenses.

Coming in the months to follow:
-Try and get out of a $34 per month gym membership some how
-The "Health and Fitness" number will go down significantly in a few months because a few hospital bills will be paid off
-The "Personal Care" category will go down in a couple months as well when our 1 year membership to Massage Envy (Spa) will be up and we can cancel that.

Hopefully by the time the WSOP rolls around we will be holding steady at 5k /month or under. Let me know if you like this stuff, and sorry if it's over the top boring, I'll post poker results in a few days.

-wh00sel

0 votes

Comments (33)

It's been 10 days since I last posted any updates, but I have continued to run meh and am down about 3k since you last heard from me, which has murdered my hourly down to about $75 or so. March Madness kicked off this past weekend and the games were pretty great, but I still couldn't manage to put up any good sessions; maybe I'll try playing somewhere other than Bellagio next weekend. Hopefully next weekend and the Final Four will still keep it pretty busy here and I can redeem myself. Hours-wise I'm fairly happy with myself. For March I've put in 104.5 hours so far, which puts me on pace to hit a really solid 180 hours if I can keep it up. And given that I've been breakeven for this month I am pretty determined to put in some time at the tables.

On a cool side-note. Myself and some other winning 5/10 regs whose games I respect all wanted to know what the average hourly would be in today's games for someone who converted from online to grind live over a significant sample size. So we all took our 5/10 hourly rates and number of hours to determine what it would be. Results were about in line with what I expected, but in case you guys are interested...Over 3823 hours the 7 of us have a combined average hourly of $86.76. Using an estimate of 35 hands per hour, that translates to 133,805 hands which imo actually means something from a sample-size standpoint.

Some interesting facts derived by that data:
- $2.48/hand
- 24.79 bb/100 12.39 BB/100
- Rake is $12 per hour or about 12% of the gross hourly (i.e 86.76+12=98.76 so 12/98.76=~12%)
- Tips vary by player so I will not try to calculate how it affects win-rate except to say that it is still $86.76 post-tipping and rake.
- Standard deviation was about 35 I think but someone else has access to all of the individual hourly rates so I couldn't do this calculation myself and don't really know to appropriately use it but there it is.

If anyone has any ideas for other information that could be useful from this data let me know. I probably won't be blogging again until the end of the month, but you never know so stay tuned!

-wh00sel


ps- Budgeting is going "ok." We made a splurge purchase for Alli for $100 on craigslist but she seems to enjoy it.

0 votes

Comments (14)

Approaching the half-way point now...Here's the breakdown:
44.7% of time passed
31.4% of goal complete

Stats


As you can see the past week or so has been breakeven since I was at around 30k profit at the end of Feb. That's due to a 7k loss over 2 days and grinding it back over the next week. Also yesterday I ran AA into 66 on AK664 for a 4k pot and got one-outed with nut flush vs lower flush for a $2500 pot; would've had a monster day otherwise, instead I won 1k.

I've been stepping the hours up lately. Got a little over 40 hours in this week and hope to improve on that this week. I'll just break down a couple of the interesting stats below.

Hours left for 100k: 687.75
Means at the current hourly I need to play 687.75 more hours to hit the 100k mark which means an average of 8.2 hours per day over the next 84 days when I've been averaging 4.6. Which would be 56 hours per week, which is a bit of a stretch given that I've been at or below 40 so far this year.

On pace for: 70,282.63
This stat takes my current (hours played) divided by (the amount of days that have passed times my hourly), times (the total amount of days in the challenge) to predict what I will make if I continue this pace of hours at this hourly.

SIDE CHALLENGE!

I've decided to do another challenge that involves something that is kind of ignored in the poker community because of how much money flies around constantly: Budgeting and lowering my expenses!

Last year we averaged like 8k per month in expenses, which is ridiculously high. After cutting out some unnecessary stuff, we got it down to 7200 per month in January. February was even better, lowering our expenses to about 6500. By the end of the year I'd like to get that number below 6k as an average for the whole year but that might be difficult with fixed expenses like a mortgage and 2 car payments/insurance/health insurance, but I'm going to get quotes on those to try and get the rates down. I'd also like to pay off one of the cars by the end of the year with some aggressive debt paydown, but for now, I think the money is better leveraged in my bankroll paying the vig on the loans until I'm more comfortable with a couple years worth of expenses built up.


Until the next time!
-wh00sel

0 votes

Comments (10)