Hello 2020 crew ... well, the 1st month of the year is already in the books! I'm sure many of us have made good progress following the Q4-2018 drawdown. Will this be a short lived market bounce or straight to the moon?! Either way, we stuck to our plan and met our goals this month; success from a process standpoint.
January Highlights:
- I was able to take a short trip north to visit & help my parents out. Also an opportunity to see my (now 5-month-old) niece! While a good visit overall, I was able to better understand the sorts of things I hope to help out with during my longer remote-working visits I negotiated for this year.
- Health-Check: this is the best my back has felt starting out a new year since 2016, and I'm happy to have kept consistent w/my regimen of weight training mixed w/high-intensity efforts and yoga sessions. Really helps make the days fly by as well, as I'm often able to do sessions at the gym on campus. This area has been a huge journey since 2016 and I'm so thankful to feel healthy again.
- We killed our mortgage! For those who've been following along, you know we found and purchased our future FIRE home in Q4-17, and sold our current HCOL home shortly after in Q1-18. We are leasing out our FIRE home currently. Since the renters paid the lease in-full, we stood to realize income for 2018 tax purposes. Mortgage interest (and other items) paid will largely offset that income. However, now that we are in 2019, we executed our plan to payoff the mortgage (4.125%). We never intended to bring a mortgage with us into FIRE, and are extremely thankful to no longer have debt of any kind!
- We've been carrying 2 'alternative' investments on our books (small business ventures), and have now received complete payout from the 1st one. While the return premium may not have been on par with the risk (+12.7% annualized), it was a great success and that investment is now fully back in our Vanguard account. A fun fact about this investment (before we learned about FIRE), is that we funded it by 'downsizing' a car. I sold an expensive car for a cheaper one and used those dollars that would have been otherwise tied up in a depreciating asset. I guess it was a way to mitigate some of the downside risk of this small business venture. Ultimately we doubled our money in 6 years, and I still drive that "cheaper" car!
- Countdown: This will be a huge topic for us to work through this year. Our 'original' target was Q1-2021, but we've been diligent in trying to pursue a path toward Q1-2020. The math tells us that we should hit our FIRE # Q4-2020. If that truly is the case, we have lots of incentive to work a few extra months past that into early 2021. It would also lead us toward making a decision this summer to lease our FIRE home out for another term so it doesn't sit empty. Decisions and pros / cons that we will be rolling around in all year this year, as we watch the market do its thing.
EOY 2015 = 53.8%
EOY 2016 = 67.8%
EOY 2017 = 75.5%
EOY 2018 = 81.6%
// FI target defined as 3.75% SWR, mortgage-free + giving/lump sum fund //
END OF MONTH PROGRESS:
JAN 2019 84.5%
Have a great weekend, we are off to a great start for 2019!
FIREby2021