FIRE October Update

This Month’s Story

Progress to Early Retirement: 54.4%
Progress to Financial Independence (3/4): 72.6%
Progress to Half Annual Spending: 108.8%
Percent Home Ownership: 60.8%
Net Worth / Annual spending tax adjusted: 13.6x of that Home: 2.5x Retire: 8.2x Non-Retire: 2.9x

This is becoming a long repeated story, but it has been another extreme month for me today on my W-2. Accordingly, this will be a short monthly post. I am going to try to get some more posts out there as I have a lot to say, but less time to say it. We’ll see what happens.

I was cleaning my deck back in September and I managed to put a hole in the deck. Mind you, I found a spot that was rotted through. It’s time to replace our deck. Our deck is large, in the area of 800 square feet. Our plan is to have it covered and screened in. This is common in our area as so much of our town is dedicated to wetlands. The wetlands hold water and feed all of our wells, but they also breed mosquitoes. It’s basically impossible to enjoy the outdoors in my area in the evening.

The next question is are we going to Disney or to Italy next year. That also will not be cheap. Is it worth it? Well, after the way my wife and I have been working this past year, I think we need it. I took only 5 days off for one vacation, and have been working insane hours. My wife has been too, so it’s a good spend. We are still on the 10 years to retirement plan, as we want a FATFire and to wait until after the next recession anyway. I’d like to try to time it, as best as possible, to go out on a high. That’s also when we should have our mortgage paid off.

At the moment, my wife is on one of her trips. Get this, she’s away for 4, home for 4, away for 10, home for 4, and then away for 15 days. Yeah, this month will be insane. But then, so will the points that she earns as 2 of those trips take her to another continent. The first one took her to Orlando, but after that, it’s Sao Paulo and finally a few places in India. I will be holding down the fort with the boy. She’ll miss Halloween, though.

My running update is a sad one. I got injured again. I scraped my car door hard against my calf muscle breaking the skin and annoying the tendons. I am not running much now. In September, I got about 2/3 of my 20 miles per month goal in. I tried a few times after that before the weather cooled, My asthmatic lungs do not like running in temps below 55F, I’ll have to get that checked out, but I think I just need a week or so of steroids to get the swelling down. In the meantime, I switched to strength training with low rest periods to keep the heart rate up. It’s not as good as running in some ways, but it’s better in others.

Alright, now to the charts that I like so much. We are up 7% since I started this blog last August, including our annual addition of over 20% of our gross salaries. At our current net worth, that 20+% represents about 2.5% of that improvement in our net worth. We put away 5% for our son’s college in his 529, and that is not included in this sum. Include that, and we are north of 25%, which is not too bad.

Our home’s value continues to hover around about where it was when I started blogging, but at least the last two months are on an uptrend. I hope it will grow at some point.

We have really moved money around in our non-retirement accounts, and I think that we might have to change this around to clean up the chart to make it look more useful. The blue line, the sum, is down a small amount over all as my W2’s stock dropped a bit.

Our retirement savings hung around about the same value in spite of our addition which is happily becoming a smaller and smaller portion of our net worth.

As you can see we are still between 7 to 11 years from hitting our retirement number. I generally use 10 as the number I want, but time will tell.

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