Our Wonderful Disney World Holiday Venture (Part 2 of 2)

This is the second chapter of our latest Disney trip report which comes to you with just a few pictures but much more words. You can read the first installment here.

You’re probably eager to hear about all our best Disney advices.

Be patient as we first start by talking about our fantastic once-in-a-lifetime New Year’s Eve experience at Magic Kingdom.

After that, we’ll also get into discovering apparently infinite possibilities always pleasantly surprising us at Disney.

The New Year at Disney World

Spending New Year’s Eve at Magic Kingdom was an amazing experience. It sure gave us the chance to check off one major item from our bucket list.

In fact, I was personally so excited that a had a hard time sleeping and woke up for good at about 4:30 am that morning. I ended up being a little tired after the previous day airplane traveling and shopping at Disney Springs. All that adrenaline still kept me going but I remained a bit out of phase. My two girls laughed quite a lot about it because they are supposed to be the Disney nuts of the family. With retrospect, I would still qualify myself as the Disney planning nutcracker.

Because it is such a busy day, we had to plan New Year’s Eve at our preferred Disney park accordingly.

Our Wonderful Disney World Holiday Venture (Part 1 of 2)

As I said on several occasions before, going to Disney World is always exciting and a lot of fun. For us, it was even more special this time around as it was our first visit during the Holidays. My open schedule also allowed for some extensive planning and the freak planner in me really enjoyed the whole process.

Sorry it took a while to write these posts, but it gave me an excuse to continue savoring this magical once-in-a-lifetime trip even more.

We’ll do our best to give you a glimpse and pointers regarding our incredible experiences like our second visit ever to Cinderella’s Royal Table, the remarkable restaurant inside the famous Disney World castle or the fact we were finally blessed to land a dinner reservation at Be Our Guest.

Temperatures were cold, even sometimes freezing which is very rare and atypical for Florida, but it didn’t ruin our pleasure being Canadian and kind of prepared. You can read more about it in the second part of this brief Disney series that will include some of our best strategies and tips to accommodate any vacation at Disney, along with other always interesting Disney related topics.

As usual, we’ll use this opportunity to talk about Disney’s amazing values. In fact, let’s start with one of their most profitable ones.

Experience Living with Only 75% of Your Salary

Could you live with only three-quarters of your salary? Extreme savers may find this quite easy as they probably already save more than 25% of their actual income. But let’s face it; they are still exceptionally rare individuals.

Heck, many can’t even get by with their full revenue.

I’ve been experiencing it first hand myself for the last 2 years. As some of you might know, my working conditions allowed me to take a differed 6-month leave of absence in 2017 and to spread out income deductions over a longer period so I’ve been paid 75% of my salary since 2015.

So today, we’ll talk about financial and psychological implications of having your salary amputated and how my family and I fared with it. We definitely think the broad benefits are worth the hassle.

I’ve been doing it for real but everyone has the option to at least artificially implement it. For instance, by using pre-authorized transfers to automatically put aside a significant portion of their paycheck. It can be a great way to discover if you have the financial means but also the stomach to live with less money. If you prefer, gradually doing it could give you a chance to learn to slowly cope with it. 

Is Living with Less That Hard?

How to Manage Your DIY Portfolio While on Vacation

Earlier this month, we talked about our 21-Day Summer Trip Around the UK and many seem to wonder how we are able to take care and manage our DIY Portfolio while enjoying rather extensive vacation.

So, the big question this time is what do we do with our holdings when we get away from home for 3 long weeks?

Those who know us already anticipated our short answer which simply is: nothing different!

For starters, we never take a lot of time to manage our portfolio and sure don’t have to monitor it on a day-to-day basis. We normally take only a couple minutes each week to look at our holdings and set up upcoming operations.

If we are available, we usually like to manually process our stock buying and selling. From time to time, we still must rely on automatic orders like when we know we will be busy working. Programmed orders can always be bypassed if more time becomes available afterwards.   

We just treat trips or vacation as completely booked periods. Three fully-occupied workweeks would be handled the same as three weeks of vacation.

So, before our summer trip, being on a buying mode, we simply set up buying orders on selected stocks from our Watch List that would trigger at specific thresholds. Using our own tool, we typically like to buy stocks that would reach a Dip Factor of 3, 3.5 or 4. For your information, no orders were triggered during our latest trip.

With internet now accessible from almost anywhere, if necessary, we could access our online brokerage accounts and input transactions while on vacation. Then again, privacy may be an issue. One more reason we prefer not to.

A quick anecdote. We were in the US a couple years back when markets plunged because of one of the debt-ceiling crisis. US media was talking about it all the time. Being there, we felt the pressure even more and were tempted to consider selling some of our stocks. We were fulling invested at the time and we had no buying or selling orders set up. Being on vacation with limited internet access, we had no way to manually input transactions on our autopilot portfolio. In the end, we were very fortunate we had no opportunity to give into the panic because markets went back up a few days later after the crisis was resolved.

We are very proud to limit time we spend managing our DIY Portfolio. Our conservative passive style of investing sure helps us accomplish so. It also allows us to always enjoy our vacation a little more!

Photo by Lady C

Our 21-Day Summer Trek Around UK

Over the years, going on trips every now and then has become essential to our family life. I must admit that traveling projects are somewhat against my nature, being more an appreciate-what’s-around-the-house kind of guy. Thanks to my girls (or women should I now reluctantly say) and their irresistible influence on me, we still manage to plan noteworthy trips on a regular basis.

After the fact, I’m usually very happy that I went along with their mad traveling desires. In the end, it’s always interesting to discover and experience different cultures and points of view. It also makes us appreciate even more what we already have here around home sweet home.

This summer’s trip around the United Kingdom was no different.

So, without further due, let us share some thoughts and impressions of our exhilarating summer trip around beautiful cities and countryside of the UK.

LONDON

Our initial stop was the great city of London. And what a stop it was! 

Preparing for Extensive Time Off

As 2017 is only a couple days old, I already believe it will be a great year, or at least, it will be a great one for me. Forgive my selfishness but I especially look forward to this brand new year as I will be able to enjoy my second 6-month leave of absence from work. 

So my big project this year: to have time and to enjoy the freedom it can give me!

All this began to truly take shape back in 2015 as I Signed Up on a 2-Year Program that will end with a 6-Month Leave. Despite the fact we are a couple months away from the actual time off, it’s just around the corner, I’m starting to feel it and can’t wait to taste it for real.

This is the second occasion I took advantage of that type of leave. In my 2012 leave, among many ventures, Our Exciting 24-Day Trip to Italy is surely what marked me the most!

Meanwhile, with still a lot of on-going and new projects boiling in my mind, I am ironically lacking what I will have plenty of by the middle of the year: precious time!

Luckily, I can rely on the 12-Minute Approach to help pace myself, effectively materializing many of those ideas while maintaining a relatively healthy balance in my life.

Plan Not to Over-Plan

Easy Vacation Saving Tips

This week, booking our summer vacations reminded me of some easy saving tips.

Comparing seems to be our common theme. It sure can be profitable for you also!

1- Book two separate one-way flights instead of a roundtrip one

We’ve been doing this for a while. We look up flights using roundtrip information but book it separately or at least, compare it to the roundtrip fares.

We usually save 40-50$ per vacationer. Airport fees are quite expensive up here; that may be why we save so much when we book it the other way.

2- Book directly with the hotel

Again, we use specialized sites to look for our preferable hotel but book directly on the hotel’s website or sometimes, even call the hotel on the phone.

That way, it’s often easier to get access to additional discounts or to make special requests tailored to your needs.

Our 24-Day Trip to Italy

Even though it dates way back to the hot summer of 2012, I’ve decided to write again about this fantastic trip to Italy because this adventure was so significant to us.

It really strengthened the bond in our small family. It was the first time in good old Europe for Lady C (my daughter) and me…our first time outside the Americas in fact. Lady N (The wife) already had been to Europe but never in any Italian cities.

We will forever cherish plenty of incredible memories from of our 24-Day trip to that old yet still modern country (Wow! 24 multiple of 12! I have to admit I didn’t really plan that one).

This trip also had great influence on me as a writer. Traveling and being exposed to foreign cultures is often inspiring. But this peculiar trek really gave me a boost to continue writing. Some pretty good new ideas also came out of it.

Later that year, I was able to finish my first book (Doux Espoirs written in French). Some of the characters and a lot of settings in my story we greatly inspired by what we lived in Italy. These experiences really gave a new flavour to my book and new life to my desire to continue writing.

So, let’s get into the thick of it!

Our 72-Hour Escapade to Ottawa

This year, back-to-school was kind of rough for the entire family. Little lady C had some issues adapting to a new school while Lady N and I were also facing tense working relations.

In that context, our early-November scheduled break was a relief and a nice change of pace from our hectic routine.  Caught in all that was happening; we lacked time to plan ahead for this vacation.

So at the last minute, we decided to drive to our nation’s capital for a romantic getaway (Lady C has no break this year). Even though lady N likes to travel abroad, I personally was grateful to avoid the airports and the extra cost.

  

Over there, the sunny yet brisk weather was quite rejuvenating. We did a lot of walking, a little shopping (to please N), ate well and visited museums. We also gamble and won a little at the Casino (to please myself). All this was quite relaxing yet not that expensive. Ottawa really has a lot to offer and we are glad we had the chance to rediscover this hidden gem.

Our shortened stay was effective to replenish our energy after an eventful couple of weeks.

Upcoming 6-Month Leave Signed

I’m glad to announce that my original plan to gradually Escape 9-to-5 is officially reinstated!

I finally consider myself back on the right path as I enrolled again in a great program that will grant me a 6-month leave of absence down the road.

Work Hard but Still Enjoy Life

This will be the second time I take advantage of those special working conditions as I was able to enjoy a first leave in the same fashion in 2012.

The fact that my paycheck will be deducted in early November 2015 will materialize and start this wonderful project that will enable me to take a 6-month leave from May to November 2017. According to this agreement, I will receive 75% of my salary over the 2-year program but actually will only work for the first 18 months.

Even if I don’t mind working hard, I always try to also enjoy life as much as possible.

Our Inspiring Disney Summer Vacation

Going to Walt Disney World is always a lot of fun!

Especially true for our family as my girls, both the little and the older one, really are irreducible Disney fanatics. I know…I have only one child…but Disney’s magic strongly operates on my wife as she kind of reverts to childhood around Disney characters.

For me, being exposed to Disney’s culture is also very inspiring from both a personal and business standpoint. Disney people or cast members should I say, are always positive and happy. They also encourage you to cultivate and follow your dreams.

Disney World in the Summer

Before the actual trip, we apprehended the type of weather we were going to get, as Florida is supposed to be so hot and humid in the summer, particularly in July. To Floridians, summer months are the worse weather-wise; still probably better than our cold and snowy winter. So going over there in the heart of July, we were expecting a lot of heat and thunderstorms.