A Path to Passive Income

This past week my mom celebrated her birthday. With my new reduced hours, I was able to take the kids down to see her and my sisters during the week. I really enjoyed being able to just take off and spend time with my family celebrating my mother. We had her favorite restaurant (take-out style), played out in the yard for hours, and ended up spending the night. 

Part of my plan spending more time at home is to take care of our wooded areas around our home. Clearing out the brush is a hobby that I have come to enjoy. I like the challenge of doing it all manually instead of using any power tools, meaning I use an ax or hatchet versus a chainsaw, and hedge clippers and hand pruners versus trimmers. I also have a burn barrel as well as a camp fire ring which makes disposing of the debris much more fun and satisfying. I spent 5 hours tackling my yard "debt" yesterday, felled trees and vines that I had piled up over the last year waiting for a good time to burn them. I made it through about 1/3 of the pile. I'm looking forward to spending more time outdoors working with my hands.

Today was a first. My wife and I recently decided that it was time for me to step back from full time employment. This was due to several things coming together all at once. First, COVID-19, need I say more. We have 3 young children, 7, 5, and 3 years old. Handling them day-to-day while trying to balance two full-time jobs was wearing on us all. Second, my wife is killing it at work. She is working on a large project for her employer, it was put on pause in March, but restarted today. So being unsure of our child care/public school situation heading into the fall and her project ramping back up with increased time commitments, we decided that I would work only 10 hours a week for the foreseeable future.  This will give me the time and flexibility to spend time with the children, strengthen important relationships, continue to expand my "side-hustles", knock out some honey-do items, spend more time planning for the future of our family, finances, travel, investments, and fitne...