Unexcused Absences

This post could also be called “The 2010-2011 Ski Season By The Numbers.” I figure it will be enlightening to break down the last five months quantitatively. In no particular order…

Snowfall

By all local accounts, this was a fantastic year for snow. We have no frame of reference, since it’s our first full season at a big western resort, but even in mid April the slope coverage is quite good. And we picked up almost no rock gouges in our skis, normally a big problem out west.

Grand total snowfall at Beaver Creek, 385 inches (a normal winter is about 310)

Grand total snowfall at Vail, 482 inches (normally 345)

[Update] The final week of the season, Vail hit 500 inches for the year (see the Vail Daily article summarizing the season’s weather).

A ski for (almost) every occasion

Skis

We began this season with 5 pairs of skis in the car on our drive to Colorado; pair of Rossignol race stock 155cm Slalom skis and a pair of 170cm Fischer RX-8 skis for Heather, and a pair of 174cm Rossignol 9X’s, a pair of 178cm Fischer race stock GS skis (for competition) and an older pair of 181cm Fischer GS race skis (cruising) for me.

I’m slightly embarrassed to note that on our drive back to the east coast we will be carrying 11 pairs of skis (well, 10.5 to be precise, but that’s another story *). In addition to the 5 pair detailed above (minus one of my Rossignol 9X’s), we’re bringing a pair of 170cm Fischer Cold Heat all-mountain skis and a pair of 170cm Volkl Kendo powder skis for Heather, plus a pair of 175cm Fischer RC4 Progressor all-mountain skis, a pair of 184cm Volkl Kendo powder skis, and a pair of 191cm race stock Atomic GS skis (courtesy of Scott Snow – thank you!), for me and a pair of 168cm Volkl Tigersharks for dad.

Grand total skis acquired, 6 pair

Tips Collected

I collected $770 in tips, and Heather, who taught twice as many lessons, collected $1,380. For perspective, during Heather’s multi-year ski instructing career at Bryce Resort in Virginia, she received a total of $20 in tips. Sometimes it’s fun to hang out with rich people.

Grand total tips, $2,150

Ski Gear Purchased

In addition to about $200 each spent on ski clothing (pants, base layers, etc.), we bought the following big-ticket items:

• Fischer Cold Heat 170cm skis & bindings – $150
• Fischer RC4 175cm skis & bindings – $345
• Volkl Kendo 170cm skis & bindings – $385
• Volkl Kendo 184cm skis only – $100
• Tecnica Inferno ski boots (for Heather) – $620 (including custom footbed and custom fitting)
• Hotronics electronic ski boot heaters (a set for each of us) – $180

Grand total gear purchased, $2,180 (hey, we almost earned in tips what we spent on gear!). Sadly, I was unable to acquire what I really wanted, a pair of 165cm Blizzard race stock slalom skis.  Next year.

Days and Vertical Skied

Vail Resorts’ Epic Mix system keeps track of pass-holders’ days on mountain and total vertical skied for Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, and Heavenly. My official count was 75 days and 1,257,725 vertical feet at Vail and Beaver Creek. Heather had 84 days and 950,960 vertical feet on these two mountains. In addition to the official Epic Mix totals we had 3 days at Aspen, 3 days of cross-country skiing at Tennessee Pass, and I had 5 days at Bryce.

Grand total skiing, 86 days and ~1.3 million vertical feet for me, 90 days and ~1 million vertical feet for Heather.

Loot from the Beaver Creek and Instructor Race Series

The local racing series were pretty lucrative for me. In the instructor series (Tuesday afternoons), I won the following items; two pairs of Schneider racing gloves, street value ~$100 each, plus an entire sack full of Bud Lite / Nordica ski straps and Bud Lite / Nordica beer coozies, along with the odd Bud Lite lime-green baseball hat (given away at the insistence of my favorite wife).

In the Beaver Creek Championship Series (Monday mornings), I won a pair of goggles (~$130), a Nordica / Bud Lite ski bag (~$70), a set of top and bottom Mountain Hard Wear base layers (~$90), a Budweiser T-shirt (limited value), another set of bottom Mountain Hard Wear longjohns (which I traded with a fellow racer for a dinner-for-two coupon at Main St. Grill, $30), a stainless steel 40-oz drink canteen (~$20), a Subaru T-shirt (also of limited value), and several more lime green Bud-Lite baseball hats (also given away in the pursuit of marital harmony).

The next-to-last day of the season was the second annual Vintage Race Day. It was quite a show. They had set up an old-style race course, complete with vintage start banner, bamboo gates, and old race bibs. Someone was there renting out ancient ski gear. You could only enter the races if you had gear from before 1995, when shaped skis made their appearance. Heather and I rented old skis and boots for $50, and Heather won a $50 gift certificate to one of the nice on-slope restaurants, which we then traded with a fellow raffle winner for a Hotronics boot/glove warmer/dryer (worth about $50).

The racing was one of the better deals this winter, because my total entry fees were $25 for the Instructor Race Series ($5 each for the five races), and my entry to the Beaver Creek Championship Series was comped because I worked in the race department. In addition, the B.C.C.S included free appetizers and all the Bud Lite you could drink (hey, it was free…) at the after-parties Monday evenings. And to top it off, our team (Coyote Cafe) in the B.C.C.S. won third place for the season, so we received priceless B.C. Championship Series third-place beer mugs. Readers of our previous posts will remember that third place was a tie, and we (generously) offered our mugs to the other third-place team, and then the organizers felt bad and had another set of third-place mugs made up for us. Nice!

Grand total race loot, $590 (not counting all the Bud Lite / Nordica ski straps, beer coozies, or green baseball hats)

The 3pm cookie frenzy

Afternoon Cookies

Skiing at Beaver Creek has a perq that’s unique in the entire ski industry, I believe. At 3pm every day, a parade of “chefs” in white chef outfits appear at the base with hot, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Many days this can turn into a cookie frenzy, giving added gravity to The Beav’s motto, “not exactly roughing it.” Some days we’re still in uniform when the cookies appear, and it’s verboten for employees to get cookies while in uniform.  Still, we had our fair share over the season.

Grand total free cookies, not as many as you might think!

Fancy Restaurant Meals

This count was at zero right up until our final weekend. We had resisted the siren song of all the delicious restaurants at Beaver Creek, in the name of maintaining true to our household austerity plan. A few days ago, though, I saw in the Vail Daily that Ristorante D’Oro was offering $30 fixed price dinners, including soup, salad, main course, and desert, plus $25 bottles of wine. This is a restaurant where the entrees alone are around $30, and the wine list normally starts at $60 and goes to infinity. We rang up Greg and Susan and had a great evening, the one-and-only time we succumbed to the decadence of fine dining this winter.

Grand total fancy restaurant meals, 1

Miscellaneous

A  hand-written note mailed to Heather from one of her 5-year-old students, thanking her for all the fun and hoping to see her again – Priceless!

* The missing ski story. Right now I only have one Rossignol 174cm 9X ski. As you might remember from before, we have some decent extreme terrain here at The Beav. One day a few months ago I was skiing the Stone Creek Chutes in about a foot of fresh powder, and chose Chute 44 to host a yard sale. I flumphed into a pile of heavy powder snow about a third of the way down the chute, my feet and skis stopped dead in their tracks, and in slow motion my center of mass moved out over my feet and down the hill. Over I went, and in an instant I was sliding down the chute face first, quite a bit faster than I was comfortable with. I glanced off an aspen tree (fortunately not a direct hit) and continued my slide all the way to the bottom, discarding skis and poles along the way.

Powder day in Stone Creek

I could see one ski and one pole sticking out of the snow about 75 yards above me, but there was no sign of the other ski or pole. 45 minutes of searching in the deep powder revealed nothing, so I proceeded to ski out of the area on my one remaining ski (skiing moguls is tougher than you’d think on one ski). I returned the next couple days to continue the search, but to no avail. The ski patrol tells me it will be June before the snowpack in this section melts. I left them my phone number and email and the promise of a couple cases of Fat Tire beer if they find my other ski. Hopefully I can report good news on this front in a few months!

This is the third entry in a series on how we managed to spend the entire winter at Beaver Creek Resort. We are not independently wealthy, nor unfortunately is this extended vacation indefinitely sustainable. We are simply taking an Unexcused Absence from “real” life, and present a more detailed financial picture here.

The first article in the series, Fighting the “Tyranny of the Ordinary”, discusses freeing ourselves from the ever-expanding world of stuff. The second, Show Me the Money, talks about spending habits that free up our annual vacation budget and keep our expenses low. In this third article, we talk about the major lifestyle and financial decisions that make this extended vacation possible. Earning two erratic incomes challenges our planning and budgeting. However, those plans and budgets continue to work when we voluntarily dial down our income.

We’re Independent

We are both self-employed, which frees us from the standard (American) workplace option of 2 – 3 vacation weeks per year. Self-employment radically affects our spending and savings habits (a good thing), makes it nearly impossible to get health insurance (a frustrating thing), and allows us to take more and longer vacations (an excellent thing)!

Erratic Income

Our income stream is erratic. As a Realtor, I receive a paycheck only after completing a successful transaction. Kent right now does computer programming, which means he wins a contract, completes the job, and then starts to hunt for work again. We live with our irregular income by strict saving and budgeting which allows us to regularly pay our bills. We don’t know when we’ll earn our next dollar, so we ensure we have one or two in the bank to tide us over until we do!  Saving a ‘cushion’ of money smooths out the rough income stream.

Periodic Work

Magnetospheric MultiScale Mission

Kent’s main contract right now is writing software for an upcoming NASA mission. He adjusts his schedule to the natural ebb and flow of the project, working long hours in some phases, and stepping aside in others. This winter, Kent isn’t needed on a daily basis, but can work from Avon when needed (read about Kent’s day at the office here). This erratic work schedule creates gaps in our income, but allows us to spend the winter at Beaver Creek. Kent periodically returns to DC to work for intense stretches, which supplements the income from our jobs in the winter leisure sports industry.

The Last Good Housing Market in America

The NoVA Housing Market

In the housing market, we simply got lucky. Washington DC’s housing market remains the strongest in America. Prices are up and rents are rising. We purchased a modest home nearly a decade ago, just before the big price run-up. Thanks to historically low interest rates (we refinanced last October), we essentially break even by renting our house. We can leave town, and not be eaten alive by our mortgage.

In Summary

Once we understood how to survive gaps in our income, it no longer mattered why those gaps arose. The gaps can be accidental or self-generated. This winter, we made a conscious decision to take a pay cut!  The combination of our preparing for erratic income, the ability to work periodically, and the luck to be in a good housing market have made it possible to “live the dream” here at the Beav this winter!

Back to How We Did It – Part 2

This is the second in our ongoing analysis of how we actually made this year happen. View the first installment where Heather offers several strategies (automate, digitize, backup, and eliminate) to free up time so you can pursue your hobbies and/or travel. In this installment I’ll show how you can free up $750 a month with very little effort or pain.

Freeing Up Extra Money

In my not-so-humble opinion, it’s the repetitive, small and medium expenses that conspire to deprive most of us of an adequate travel budget. The biggest culprit, in my book, is the cable TV bill. Most people in our demographic spend ~$125 a month with the cable company. That’s $1500 a year, or two round-trip airline tickets to Hawaii (at least in the off-season)! Now I like SportsCenter as much as the next guy, but if it’s a choice between watching Chris Berman do his schtick or a yearly trip to the islands, well, I’ll choose the tropics (plus, you can always catch highlights on YouTube). We have never subscribed to cable, which means that since we’ve been married we’ve saved (by not spending in the first place) close to $15,000. That’s a nice spot of change no matter how you slice it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a complete shut-in, I treat myself to the Masters and US Open every year by breaking out the rabbit ears on my old tube television. But for the most part, I find it quite easy to simply ignore the happenings on cable and broadcast TV.

Another big ticket item, when all added up, is the morning Starbucks and daily lunch during the work week. If you figure you’re spending $15 per work day on breakfast and lunch ($11 lunch and $4 coffee), that’s $3,750 per year. On the other hand, a sandwich made at home, or some leftovers, costs less than $2 per day. Let’s say you make your own coffee every morning, and agree to only eat out 2 days a week for lunch. You’re now spending $1,500 per year on lunches out, ~$65 per year on coffee (assume $0.25 per day), and another $265 on lunches at your desk ($1.75 x 3 days per week x 50 weeks). You’ve saved close to $2,000 per year.

Other optional expenses are Gym Membership (just buy some running shoes and go jogging to save $50/month or $600 per year), a fancier cellphone plan than you need (most people can lop $20 per month, or $240 per year, off their bill), and the daily trip to the vending machine for your afternoon snack ($1.50 per work day or $375 per year). Dinners on the town are literally 4 to 5 times the cost of a comparable home-cooked meal. Grilled USDA Prime (not Choice) steak ($20 for two), a nice bottle of wine ($18), and side dishes and desert (another $7) can be done at home for $45, vs. north of $200 for two at Charlie Palmer’s (including tax, tip, etc.). Many folks go out 3 and 4 times a week. We try to ration ourselves to once per week, or once every other if we go to a fancy place. Back when we had real jobs (and real income), we were spending easily $10k per year on dining. Now we spend no more than $2,500 per year, and still enjoy a really nice local ethnic restaurant every week. Let’s be conservative and assume we’ve freed up $4.5k per year on dining.

To sum the annual savings:

• Cable TV: $1,500
• Lunches and morning coffee: $2,000
• Gym membership, cellphone, and vending machine: ~$1,200 per year

So far, the total savings is $4,700, or almost $400 per month, and we haven’t even included dining yet.

• Dining out: $4,500

The grand total savings works out to a little over $760 per month!

A final note on this topic, the best entertainment value, by far, is Netflix. For less than $10 per month, you get the DVD of your choice in the mail about every three days, plus the ability to watch unlimited streaming content. So throw away cable TV, and some discretionary purchases as outlined above, and then spring for Netflix, and you’ll still be saving $750 per month, or $9,000 per year!

Stretching The Travel Dollar

Although it’s obvious, it bears mentioning that low- or mid-season rates on hotels and airfare can easily be half the rates in place during high season. Plus, the crowds are thinner, stores and restaurants can give you more personal service, and locals you encounter won’t be so stressed by the hordes that descend during peak travel periods. Wherever you’re going, give some consideration to the off-seasons.

There are other considerations as well; for example, many people think that winter is a great time to go to Hawaii, but the weather is by far the worst of the year from about Thanksgiving through February. When I was there, one February we had two weeks (!) of solid rain. Another year, not long ago, it rained almost every day for 35 days during winter. Imagine showing up for your dream Hawaii vacation and encountering dreary weather. Conversely, the least likely months most people consider for traveling to Hawaii, August and September, have the finest weather, lowest crowds, and great deals on lodging and activities.

How We Spend Our Travel Budget

Ok, here are the meat-and-potatoes on the cost of our vacation lifestyle. We have three favorite types of trips; sailboat charters in the tropics, skiing in the Rockies, and canal boating in Europe.

Sailboat Charters

By traveling in the mid-season (low-season for sailboat charter typically means terrible weather), and looking for promotions, we almost always get the cost of our sailing trips down to between $80 and $100 per person per day (call it $1800 per couple for a 10-day trip) for 5 to 8 people on a sailboat. Airfare from the east coast to the Caribbean runs around $500, and food and miscellaneous expenses usually run around $300 per person. Add in $100 for misc items and our typical sailing adventure costs the two of us $3,500 for a 10-day trip.

Skiing

On a ski trip it’s especially important to travel outside of Christmas/New Years, President’s Weekend, and Spring Break seasons, because the intent is to ski, not stand in liftlines and wait to be seated at restaurants. Off-peak airfare from the east to Denver or Salt Lake City runs around $300. Lodging can be had for $75 per person per night, and lift tickets average another $85 per person per day. We prefer to take shorter trips for skiing because frankly, our east-coast legs simply aren’t up to the task of skiing a big mountain more than 4 or 5 days in a row. Throw in a rental car for $300, and another $500 for meals, and the total cost of a 5 day ski trip comes to around $2,200. We can easily keep the cost under $2k if we get a condo and cook for ourselves. If we do away with the rental car and take public transportation (a great option around both Vail/Beaver Creek and Salt Lake City), the cost is more like $1,600 for the five days.

Canal Boating

Believe it or not, a one week visit to the canals of France doesn’t break the bank, especially compared to a mid-range Caribbean cruise, or a week at a resort like Hyatt or Westin with their overpriced restaurants and outrageous activity fees. Airfare from DC to France runs about $900 each (again, mid-season). Rail transport to and from the boat can be had for ~$50 per person. The boat, fuel and insurance will be about $1,500 per couple. Call the grocery (mostly wine and cheese!) and restaurant bill for the week $400. That is it! There is no other expense, since the boat is your lodging and local transport all rolled into one. Total cost for the two of us is $3,900 for the week.

The Grand Total

If you’ve been keeping track as we go along, you’ll see that $3.5k + $1.6k + $3.9k totals $9,000, which is suspiciously close to the savings we identified in the first part of this post. So you tell me, is over three weeks of fantastic vacations per year worth the sacrifices outlined in section 1? With apologies to any Minnesotans out there, “you betcha!”

There are many other strategies we use to really chip away at travel expenses; we house-sit for people in fun locations, we extend our time on the ground in far away destinations to get more bang for our airfare buck, we stay with friends, and we sometimes get lucky. The main point of this post is to hopefully show how to trade mundane, everyday expenses for travel that will make your friends and co-workers just shy of exceedingly jealous!

Ahead to Part 3 – Lifestyle and Financial Decisions, or back to Part 1 – Fighting the Tyrany of the Ordinary

How did we get the Vacation Lifestyle we currently enjoy? This is the first of a three-part series on specific steps we took to shape our lives and habits. We hope that this is beneficial in your life, Unexcused Absence or not. Please chime in with your own suggestions and comments!

Fighting The Tyranny of the Ordinary
Modern life has a way of making you work to stand still. You clean your house, but it gets dirty again. You pay your bills and check your credit report. You renew your driver’s license. All these tasks – shredding pre-filled credit card offers, remembering internet passwords, tracking frequent flier miles and their expiration, paying your taxes, etc. – constitute the Tyranny of the Ordinary.

Long before we even imagined an Unexcused Absence, we focused on two things which would reduce the Tyranny of the Ordinary. First, we eliminated repetitive tasks. Second, we reduced the amount of stuff we owned.

Step 1 – Eliminate Repetitive Tasks with Automation
Writing checks, filling out envelopes, finding stamps and mailing bills wastes time. Paying bills automatically simplifies this chore. Nearly all merchants accept payment automatically via credit card (earn points or miles!) or via a bank draft. There is no need to pay each bill as it arrives in the mail, and the payment is on time every month!

Step 2 – Digitize
Digitizing stuff (paperwork, music, movies, and books) makes the information more accessible. Need a copy of your lease? It’s on your laptop! Thanks to a digitizing campaign, we now have most paperwork, music (including old cassette tapes), movies and books available on the computer. We access all of our music with an iPod, and we don’t own a single cassette tape.

The iPad travels to Paris

I simply love having books around. But since my purchase of the iPad, my shelves have gotten a lot lighter (Kent is not a book hoarder like me). I find many of my favorite classics for free on-line (gutenberg.org). I couldn’t part with all my battered favorites, but I can now travel with ALL my Jane Austin, Twain, and Melville in a small 7” by 9” device.

Our books, music, movies and paperwork occupy about one quarter of the space they did three years ago.

Step 3 – Backup
The term “cloud computing” refers to keeping data on the internet rather than on a local computer. The esoteric phrase “in the cloud” means that data is independent of a particular computer, tucked away somewhere on the internet. Once committed to digital forms of paperwork, music, movies and books, it is critical to backup data using a service such as Mozy. ‘Nuff said.

Step 4 – Eliminate
Acquired easily and rarely relinquished, things tend to create their own life by requiring space and maintenance. Things should be useful or enjoyed on a regular basis or they simply waste your resources. It’s not about paring down possessions, but making sure each item has immediate value.

Celebrating our Victory
Our small victories over the Tyranny of the Ordinary gave us the flexibility to pursue a unique opportunity. When the possibility to work at Beaver Creek arose, we were able act. The bonus of our new thinking? Over $400 at a garage sale, and several thousand dollars from Ebay sales. Not bad for stuff we weren’t using or enjoying!

Tired of fighting the Tyranny of the Ordinary? Got tips? Please comment!

Continue to How We Did It – Part 2