_{Brief note: I wrote most of this on the plane, but it took me a few days to getting around to polishing it up.}

I’ve thought travel, I’ve talked travel, but aside from a few fleeting flirtations with decidedly domestic destinations, I hadn’t really done much of it.

Until now, that is.

I’m currently writing this at 35,000 ft, traveling at 556 mph on my way back from a business trip. By the time I touchdown in San Francisco, I’ll have covered 13,587 miles in the sky and 34 hours and 31 minutes in airplanes and airports, meaning that this trip handily accounts for more travel than any two of my previous trips. Spanning four countries and as many languages, I had the chance to explore what might as well have been new worlds to me and dust off my paltry high school French knowledge in the process, which was actually même pire que je pensais. My genuine apologies to anyone who was forced to struggle through a conversation with me and my rusty, awkwardly accented French.

Way back in July of last year, someone gave me the idea to track how much money I was saving by not having to pay rent in the area. I crunched the numbers (in reality, like two numbers) and wrote the code, and the savings clock was born. When I flipped the switch, it showed a fairly disheartening negative $6,000 because I was still half in the hole from purchasing my Ford-fabricated flat. But in the intervening seven or eight months, I’ve had the pleasure of watching that number dwindle its way to zero (where I hit my break-even point), and as of this writing, work its way up to five digits in our (just as arbitrary as my formula) base 10 number system.

Yeah yeah, I know, the first day of Spring was one two three four days ago, these posts don’t write themselves (though with enough imagination, time, and Markov chains, they kinda could).

This probably isn’t apparent for those of you in New England at the moment, but today is the first day of Spring. Well…it is in the United States at least, I don’t actually know how other countries/hemispheres do seasons. Climatic differences aside, I found myself doing a bit of spring cleaning earlier today, before I even realized that the Vernal equinox was upon us.

This post is less about the “trucks” and more about the “tax-advantaged accounts”, which hopefully won’t offend too many sensibilities. I just figured it’s been a while since I last forayed in my financials, and the several ensuing months have seen some modifications to the plan. The biggest of these modifications is that I added a new tool to my early retirement arsenal: the Mega Backdoor Roth.

The Mega Backdoor what?

Truthfully, I’ve been doing a pretty awful job at keeping you guys updated with what I’m actually doing, truckwise. The last time I even showed off the interior in all its shanty glory was almost a year ago. In the intervening interval since my last Home Improvement update, I’ve completed a few fairly large truck projects. By “large”, I don’t mean anything that requires any real technical competence, but certainly larger than fixing the hole or doing arts and crafts.