I use a budget app for tracking income and spending on a transaction basis and then keep the rest of my finances in spreadsheets.

https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/how-to-survive-midlife-blues

Depending on how old you are, you might just be hitting the normal midlife low point. It hit me hard in my late 30s and I spent a lot of time reading about it once I found out it was typical. I think a lot of it has to do with the rate at which you’re experiencing milestones and life changes. It feels like you are constantly progressing in your life up to your 20s or 30s and then the time scale suddenly shifts. Things take much longer to advance - saving enough for a house or retirement, that next promotion (assuming you even want one), major family changes, etc.

Understanding that helped me recover somewhat, though it still took a couple of years. I’m still in that lull, trying to figure out what I really even want to do next, but I don’t feel sad about it anymore. I don’t know if this applies to your situation, but I found it really helpful to learn about it.

I’ve never asked for time off, only informed my boss that I will be off. I have only had push back twice. Once, when I was in high school my boss said I couldn’t, so I quit on the spot (nothing to lose in a minimum wage job when my parents were still supporting me). A few years later, a shift lead (who was not technically my boss) challenged me, I told him I wasn’t asking for the day off, I was providing advance notice that I would not be there that day.

The irony is that I now manage people who have an attendance policy. I try to make sure people have plenty of opportunity to plan time off so they don’t have to call out. They’re going to take the time either way, I may as well know in advance.

If your main concern is the US currency or just wanting your money to be out of US-based assets, I believe Interactive Brokers provides a lot of flexibility to move your money between assets and currencies. You’re still going to pay taxes and be subject to all US laws.

If your concern is US involvement in your personal financial affairs…good luck. The US has tremendous influence over the global financial system and no legitimate foreign organization is going to work with you unless you have substantial assets. The few countries that do not respect US influence are not particularly trustworthy and trying to do business with them will put you at significant legal risk.

You could also try converting to physical gold, but the US has confiscated gold before, so that’s not a sure bet.

I could probably get a job at either of my local grocery store bakery departments with that.

I used to work for a cable company. I remember a coworker telling me a long time ago that one of the challenges they used to have was making sure the caller’s TV was tuned to the correct channel. So, the conversation would go like this:

“Please change the channel to 27” (or any other random number that isn’t a locally used channel) “What do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change it to 3, now what do you see?” “Nothing…” “Good, change to channel 4” “It works!”

For those that don’t know, there was a long period of time where the auxiliary input into TVs was tuned to either channel 3 or channel 4. There was a good chance that the customer didn’t know which one was correct for their TV and would have assumed that it was already set correctly if you asked.

I tried to sign up for an Apple TV free trial without an Apple device. It let me create the account, but then I had to “activate” the account, and I couldn’t do it on any of my devices (android, windows, the TV that gave me the free trial). I talked to tier 1 and tier 2 support, they couldn’t get it working either.

Then it gets even more ridiculous. The tier 2 agent asks me to upload screenshots of the errors I was getting for the tier 3 (?) engineers to review. Oh, I need an active Apple account to upload anything. I emailed the images and their email system stripped the attachments from the email. Tier 3 closed the ticket and banned my account. I talked to Tier 2 again and all they could do was put in a ticket to request I be unbanned…it was denied.

Finally, I gave up and asked them to delete my account. They said my account can only be deleted if I log in and use the delete account function. I pointed out how that was not possible and they said there was no other option. The whole situation reinforced my plan to never buy an Apple product.

It’s common in the U.S., especially in apartments, to have rooms with no light fixtures. Instead, there will be one outlet that is wired to a switch by the door. That outlet is sometimes upside down to distinguish it from the other outlets. That gives you the option to connect a lamp to the switch to get the same result as having a light fixture. I would generally prefer that every room has a light fixture on the ceiling, but this is marginally better than having to walk across a dark room to turn on a lamp.

I mean, depending on where exactly you ended up, it could go either way. I’ve watched some British TV over the years and I frequently need subtitles and I assume the actors are enunciating better than the average person.

I hope you’re not using that map to navigate your new home.

Oh, that sounds like a sweet deal. I should have been aspired to be a corporation instead of a normal person.

I don’t really understand how Walgreens is still in business. I only go there when I need something that the grocery store pharmacy section doesn’t carry and I’m not willing to wait 1-2 days to have it shipped from Amazon. Every time I go, its a ghost town with more employees than customers.

Way back in the late '90s, my first apartment was a brand new development with a T5 connection (I think) that offered each unit 8 glorious Mbps. However, I needed to get that connection shared between 2 PCs in different rooms. Wifi was not an option (expensive and slow), even a router was a major financial investment for me back then. So, I bought an extra network card and a 100 foot crossover cable and ran it down the hallway.

It was so successful, that I continued to incorporate very long cables in my builds for the next 20ish years. Even today, my desktop computer is not wifi capable, but first I migrated to powerline ethernet and more recently mesh wifi with my PC plugged into one of the child nodes.

Mine is off at the moment.

I’m not sure I understand. You can stream music for free on Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, Pandora, Bandcamp, YouTube, and probably several other services. Not to mention the thousands of radio stations you can stream. It seems like there are exponentially more music streaming options compared to video. If you’re asking about sites where you can stream without ads, I’m guessing those exist too, but I suspect most people are either willing to listen to ads or pay for ad-free with one of those services.

Since it sounds like you have younger kids, I’d take a decent sized portion of it (maybe 2-8k) and use that to make lasting family memories. Seeing everything of interest in a short range (zoos, aquariums, caves, gardens, museums, national parks, whatever), more frequent small vacations (driving distance or short flights to the beach/mountains/whatever), occasional major vacations (other countries, theme parks, cruises, whatever your family finds interesting). Or investing in lifelong hobbies that you can do together, like skiing, art, tennis, restoring cars, etc.

After that, the rest I would add to my FIRE plan. It would not necessarily mean retiring sooner (though it might), but it would be about adding flexibility to my life. If my savings were larger, I could always just to dip into that to pay for college or I be better prepared to deal with an unexpected layoff or emergency.

Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Mass Effect Legendary are my favorites that I come back to repeatedly. Of course, they were all probably perfectly playable on your old PC.

Hitman World of Assassination was good and not playable on your old PC. I have not replayed it yet, but it is definitely repayable with the option to approach every level in different ways.

I’ve gotten bored with the Assassins Creed games, but the newer ones are very pretty and they’re open world with lots of story and tons of things to do.

You mentioned Far Cry 3, there’s also 4, 5, 6 New Dawn, and Primal. I haven’t played 5, 6, or New Dawn, but 4 plays the same as 3 (just a different story) and I actually like Primal quite a bit.

The Just Cause series is really over the top mayhem, but I enjoyed them. Lots of open world destruction for a…just cause (or maybe just because).

The Saints Row games are ridiculous, childish fun. Very similar to GTA, but makes GTA look classy by comparison. I think Saints Row 4 and Gat Out of Hell are the best ones. The first 2 are quite dated at this point. There is a recent remaster of 3, I liked the original, but haven’t played the remaster yet. There’s a newer one that’s just called “Saints Row”, I’ve only played a little of it so far and its pretty bland.

I don’t know a lot about the Amish, but possibly. From what I know, it seems like they embody some of the core principles in terms of contributing to the community and managing a balanced, relatively equal society. I don’t know anything about their religion, so I don’t know if there is a level of control from church leaders that might be more of a centralized control structure. But they might be an example. You can also search for examples of hippie communes or artist collectives.

There have been many groups that form communes within a larger system. Sometimes its built around a religion (or cult), sometimes around various ideals, like artist communes. In my opinion, what makes these work is that they’re small (your reputation matters), people join it voluntarily, and people can be kicked out if they don’t uphold the ideals. So, you don’t need a state to enforce the rules aside from a mechanism to remove people who don’t participate fairly. And because they are within a larger entity, they don’t have to deal with things like national security or foreign affairs. I don’t think that model scales to a national level.

I’m the opposite, lived most of my life on the West coast and then moved to the East coast. Some time zone related things that I’ve noticed:

• I love to start work early and end work early, so there was a period of time where I could work 6am to 3pm and still be online later than many of my east coast coworkers. This schedule was ideal for me. Now I have to work until 5 or 6pm every day and I don’t like that very much.

• I could get up and trade stocks early in the morning, which is convenient for me because I don’t do a lot of stock trading and don’t need to stay on top of it throughout the day. Now I get up and think, “I need to make that transaction later today”, then 4pm rolls around and I realize I’ve forgotten to do it yet again.

• Not a time zone thing, but I’ve been to Hawaii once and would love to go back. When I was in California, it was a 5-6 hour flight, now its more like 12 hours. I’m not willing to make that trip. I do have the option to go to the Caribbean or Europe instead, which is nice though (if I ever get around to it).

• I don’t watch sports, but I always thought of the Super Bowl being an afternoon game. Then I moved East and realized people were staying up past midnight to watch the game (and party) and then trying to go to work or school Monday morning. No impact for me, but for my lifestyle, afternoon games would be preferable.

• I used to do a lot of online gaming with people from all over the US and Europe. Lots of my friends would stay up very late or even all night gaming. I could keep up with them when it meant staying up until 10-12pm (my time). Staying up until 2 or 3am would not work for me. I don’t play online games anymore, but that would be a challenge for me now.