This is what we made in 2023.
- W’s gross income: $146,787
- M’s gross income: $39,008
Our total yearly gross income is $184,795
This is more than $21k than we made in 2022.
This puts us in the top 14% of US household income.
Category: context
Incomes 2022
This is what we we made in 2022.
- W’s gross income: $134,170
- M’s gross income: $29,350
Our total yearly gross income is $163,520
Almost $10k more than what we made in 2021.
This puts us in the top 17% of US household income.
Incomes 2021
This is what we we made in 2021.
- W’s gross income: $127,710
- M’s gross income: $25,851
Our total yearly gross income is $153,561
Almost $14k more than what we made in 2020.
Even this puts us in the top 18% of US household income.
Incomes 2020
This is what we we made in 2020.
- W’s gross income: $116,144
- M’s gross income: $23,378
Our total yearly gross income is $139,882
Almost half of the $268k we made in 2019!!
When we made decision that M would leave the high paying corporate job for low key part time jobs, we obviously knew this was bound to happen and anticipated this change. The goal was to net around $1k a month. That has been achieved, and more!
M worked a total of 8 jobs. Maybe we’ll do a post of all the jobs that are available, and not soul sucking, for part time work and can supplement in FIRE.
Even the ~$140k puts us in the top 13% of US household income!
Incomes 2019
This is what we are on track to make through the end of the year.
- W’s base salary is $101,296
- W got a bonus of $2,865
- M’s base salary is $153,000
- M got a bonus of $11,400
Our total yearly income is (or would be if we continued our employment till the end of the year) $268,561
This puts us in the top 3% of US household income. Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on that. We are incredibly blessed to have a number of factors working in our favor, a lot of which are just plain birth circumstances. Sure, we work hard and made conscious choices to invest in college educations but that doesn’t even tell half the story.
A big change in FIRE plan
In one of our first posts, The Who and the What, we had alluded to our plan (hope?) of being FIRE by 2023. The time has now come to throw some light on activities behind the scenes that will radically change the 2023 timeline.
First, why 2023? With the accelerated pay-down of our mortgage, we would outright own our home in 4 more years. Assets would have grown as well and it would be the perfect time to bow out of full-time jobs.
What’s changing? Well, we are going to super charge one of our RE (not quite the FI) date and slow burn the other’s FIRE date.
M is going to stop working full-time by beginning of 2020. (possibly earlier)
W is going to work full-time, foresee-ably, till 2030.
Why is the timeline changing so drastically and differently for both of us?
Long-ish story …
M started a job last year that increased the paycheck by about 50%. But with that added money comes the multiplied baggage of corporate America – longer hours, more responsibility, travel. Ah, travel. M has been traveling every week since the beginning of the year! People within this industry are are expected to, and do, travel a lot. Before taking the job we were aware about the travel aspect but did not quite understand the rigors it would put on the entire family. The burden it puts on one parent to take care of everything in the home.
Especially, not being home for our child, D. One thing that became painfully apparent was how much M was missing D, and vice-versa. So Travel, bye Felicia!
Another factor is the culture of the industry M works in. People are very, VERY driven. Most will not think twice before putting in an 80-hour work week. The unwritten “expectation” is 60 hours, which M was aware of and have no problem in following. The more M interacted with senior leadership the more M questioned whether M want to be like them in 5 years or so. So completely invested – heart and soul – into the company and what it stood for and the work. It is not in M’s nature to be that invested in work.
Maybe switching to a job that did not involve travel, or moving to a different industry, could be the cure?
This led to a greater introspection of what M wants from a job or life in general.
What M realized is that spending time with family is the #1 thing right now. Especially since D is growing up so fast that missing days away from family is akin to missing a new facet of personality developing. Even a job that doesn’t require travel would require going in to work from 9 to 5. During the summer. On a gorgeous day.
Go out and play. Hit a ball. Catch a fish. Kick a ball. Ride a bike. Throw a ball. Build a castle in the sand. Ride kayak. Get a couple of bruises to reminisce about.
When being at daycare is grandly trumped by the above actions!
FIRE, technically, should give us the time to spend together as family. There is a meme doing the rounds of social media. It says,
We get 18 delicious summers with our children. This is one of your 18. If that’s not perspective, I don’t know what it is.
As parents we get 18 years to really interact with our progeny to mold them into functioning human beings. I would argue that it is actually less than 18 years when you subtract the 0-4 years in front, and possibly the 4 years of high school. 10 full years. If we can’t give our kids the highest priority for these formative years, which is on average one-eighth of our life span, what does that tell about us?
Another thing that came out of the conversations was how W did not see the RE aspect of FIRE the same way M does. W really likes the work, the workplace, the people interaction. Even if we stayed on our current plan, and were to be on the verge of FIRE in 2023, W is not sure if quitting the full-time job would be the calling. W’s health insurance continuing through work is another added bonus, which in turn keeps our out of pocket costs down.
This double realization – where M does not want to continue full-time work and W does want to continue full-time work – made us stop and rethink our FIRE path forward. Could we be at a point where if we did not put in a single dollar towards investments, we still could end up being FIRE in 11 years?
And running the numbers, the answer is a resounding yes!
From our end of June post, we have $604k in retirement accounts. If we stopped funding all of our retirement accounts right now, at the end of 11 years, that sum would have grown to $1.16M, at 6% compound interest. Which is quite a conservative estimate.
It is a very realistic scenario that we might be truly FIRE by year 9 or 10.
Adam, over at Brewing FIRE, had this very lucid and dear to heart post about “Coast FIRE”. He explains the “stopping point” where “we will stop pedaling and let our momentum carry us to financial independence“. Encourage everyone to go over there and read his piece in entirety. He ran some good numbers as well.
We think we are at this coast point now. We can cut back on work, we can remain thrifty (maybe a bit more so), and can start to appreciate the mundane aspects of life.
Wait, what will M actually do after leaving full-time job? Being more involved in taking care of the family is where most of the freed up time will now be spent. Things like cooking dinner most days of the week. Mowing the yard and cleaning the house, and not outsourcing those chores. Less or no before and after school care for D. Even self-care activities as going to the gym regularly, playing on recreational adult sport teams.
M is certain to do some sort of part-time work as well in RE. M really wants to pursue some hands-on endeavor where the fruits of labor are tangible. Coaching athletics/sports, substitute teaching, tutoring school aged kids. Getting a commercial driving license and doing some seasonal work. Maybe get a CFP certification and become a financial planner to help families who aren’t as savvy. Maybe getting involved in local and grass-root activism. There are plenty of options around.
Netting around $1K a month shouldn’t be a huge deal with a few days worth of few-hours-a-day work.
M has worked all 15-years of professional life sitting in front of a computer. That is about to change and the excitement is palpable 🙂
How we slayed our student loans
This should be the last we write about student loans …we’ve written about it here and here.
This post is to give you an idea how we paid them off in about 4 years. At the end of the post you will find a Google sheet where we have painstakingly documented every penny we racked up and how we paid them off.
Granted we had a couple of things going on for us. One, both of us were working full time when we accrued these loans, so we were paying back right from the onset. Two, since we were paying them off since when they were disbursed, we avoided snowball of these loans.
To make a some things clear,
- This is not a step by step guide on how you should pay off your debts
- The loan balance changed over time, right from the beginning, based on when loans were disbursed and when (every month) we applied payments to them.
We started with student loans in the fall of 2014. The first disbursement was $10,250 by Navient. The second one was in spring of 2015, again $10,250, again Navient. The third one was $7,500 in fall of 2015 by Discover. The fourth one was for $7,500 in spring of 2016, by Discover. Our total loan amount was $35,500.
The fifth and final one was a consolidation of the outstanding Navient and Discover loans into a low interest Earnest loan of $ $15,284.50. This was not on top of the $35.5k but the balance left on that.
We paid a total of $4,417.25 in interest on the loan, which is about 3.11% blended rate over the 4 year period we had the loans for.
Here you go then, in glorious, excruciating details, the trail of money of our student loans.
Big news: Student loan paid off!
In March earlier this year we wrote about how we were consolidating a couple of student loans into one single Earnest loan at 3.25%.
The Earnest loan began on Mar 21st at $15,824.50 by paying off the Navient and Discover loans.
On Aug 13th we paid off the remaining principal of $7,248.22 and the interest accrued since the last payment of $7.10, to pay a wholesome amount of $7,255.32.
In less than 6 months we’ve paid it off! We paid $180.82 in interest in that period.
Our remaining liabilities are the car loan and mortgage. At 0.9% standing at less than $14.5k we’re in no hurry to payoff the car loan. Mortgage is the next beast we intend to slaughter. At ~$217k, we anticipate to slay this in …wait for it …..4 years!
Incomes (2018)
In this post we bare our incomes.
To state the obvious, we are a two income family. Both of us have professional, corporate, desk jobs. One of us work in a large, publicly listed corporation while the other in a small, private firm. We are salaried employees getting yearly pay raises and almost-guaranteed bonuses, though the size of those bonuses vary from year to year, as do the raise percentages.
W’s base salary is $95,506
W got a bonus of $2,785
M’s base salary is $93,359
M’s bonus was $11,422
Our total yearly income is (or would be if we continued our employment till the end of the year) $203,072
Incidentally, this was the first year that W outstripped M in base salary!
That’s it, that is all our income.
Note: Why don’t we consider dividends as income? Fairly simple: All our dividends gets reinvested automatically into buying more shares of that underlying fund/ETF/stock. Dividends, at this stage of our life, are not something we use as cash.
In the near future, say, five months from now, one of our salary is going to increase by 50%. That will be a story for another day!
Note: If it isn’t clear, these are all gross numbers.
Purpose of this blog and why you should read it
[In our first post we had briefly described what this blog was about. This post is a deeper dive into why we are doing this.]
Another – pick your category: Personal Finance/Financial Independence/Early Retiring/Living Frugal – espousing blog? Kill me already!
Right? I’m sure that thought has gone through your mind as you came here. Relax. We’re doing no espousing. No face punches. No eye roll. No shaming if you aren’t saving 50% of your income. No judgment if you aren’t engaged in some active side hustle. In fact, this space has less to do with you and more to do with us. Specifically, our progress towards financial independence 🙂
You see, the main point of this blog is to document what we are doing. Everything else is secondary. We don’t see this turning into a profit making machine. We don’t even envision making money off the blog, nor do we pursue any strategic or tactical ways for monetization. This is not some fall back option in retirement that will generate income. That’s not the purpose of this blog.
Even though we hope to achieve Financial Independence sooner that most working Americans, we don’t think that is a realistic option for many, many folks. That is just facts. The median household income in the US in 2016 was $57,617. The top 10% households earned at least $175,000. Our household income for 2017 was a tad under $200,000 (and this year has gone past the $200k mark). This is not bragging or showing-off but being acutely aware of cold, hard, reality. We understand we are in a very privileged position. We acknowledge how lucky we are to be where we are.
The historic bull market run that started in 2009 is one of the major reasons our assets multiplied. We would be doing a disservice to not call this out. A whopping 80% of our assets are tied to the markets. There will be a crash/correction. We don’t know when. But from the crash, the markets will rise again 🙂
The *perfect* audience of this blog is someone who is in the similar income range as ours AND still not on the path to financial independence! We really hope we can inspire YOU – 30-something, probably dual-income, with kid(s), high salaried, white collar worker – to bring about a change in how you look at life, work, and freedom. Build your net worth and then control if you still want to go to the corporate job you have every morning. The answer could very well be yes, but at that point you’re making a conscious choice.
Does that mean all others are excluded? Certainly not!
Some of you reading this might be discouraged. Discouraged that the $60,000 job you have supporting your family of four is absurdly low to even think about retiring before 65. That’s not our intention. We hope you see what we are doing and take heart from it. We didn’t start off with these salaries when we got married. If you are serious about gaining financial freedom start working on YOUR net worth, with strategies strewn around in the FIRE blogosphere!
If you’re in a very similar boat as us, welcome aboard! Would love to hear from you.
Others who have gone through this stage we’re in right now – we ask for words of encouragement! Or witty admonishments. We don’t follow the typical FIRE truisms – we have 2 cars (with a loan on one!), we eat out a few meals every week, we have cable, we still use an electric dryer, we have no side gigs.
But we do everything in moderation.
The car loan is 0.9% and we still pay more than the minimum payments; none of the restaurant meals are exorbitant; we love live sports; we run exactly ONE laundry cycle every week; and we don’t have time for side gigs (we had a rental for 2 years and sold it; too much hassle) with work, family, sporting, and volunteering commitments (and till this past February, part time school!). At least for the time being, we have absolutely no qualms and guilt about keeping it that way. And still be on track to be FIRE before our mid-40s, a couple of decades before the overwhelming majority of Americans do.
As for giving advice about how to get started on this path, we think, make that we know, that there are other bloggers who have done this for a long time, in a fashion that is far better than we could (probably!) do. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Though from time to time we might sprinkle in tidbits about some interesting concepts. At times we will do some deep-dives sessions on something new we learnt or a future-state plan.
So, to recap. This blog is for anyone who cares about growing their money, and increasing net worth. We bask in the warmth (some would say “cold”; we beg to differ) of numbers. Everything you see in our monthly reports are what we are dealing in real life. No make-up, no mark-up.
Net Worth, Anon 