Hey everyone! First post here. Figured I'd do a quick intro here since my FIRE goal is 2026 as well. I'll be 40 in 2026. :)
First off - background on my username. I'm a finance professional, investing capital on behalf of the bank I work for in middle market companies.
I LOVE to hike and one my buddies who's in his 70's and FIRE (He's a Mustachian, just doesn't know the term) gave me the trail name "Loan Shark" since I'm in the banking/investing business. I thought it was funny and tongue-in-cheek, so figured I'd use it as my username here. :)
I'm 32, my wife is 30 and we love to travel and hike. As I mentioned, I'm in finance and she works for our public utility.
I've always been interested in finance and began saving early in life. I got serious about it after starting my professional career. I keep a quarterly personal balance sheet so I can track my performance quarterly and make sure I'm saving enough. I've saved 50%+ since I started tracking this back in 2009.
Here's where my wife and I are at now:
Cash - $236,000 (Goal is to keep $200,000 liquid in case I find an investment I want to make or distressed asset to purchase)
Wife and I's 401k - $371,000 (maxed each of our accounts for the past six years or so)
Home - $444,000 cost basis (market value is $500,000)
"Other assets" (personal possessions, cars, etc) - $198,000
Debt - $95,000 in car notes at a blended cost of capital of 1.55%.
Our cash is earning 1.6% in money market accounts so the debt is essentially a wash and I like keeping the cash liquid for opportunities to invest on the side.
Total net worth is ~ $1.1MM.
This is the most cash I'll keep though and start funding post-tax retirement funds here shortly.
Our over arching goal was to become debt free and we achieved that last year when we paid off our home in September (I don't consider our car notes debt given the wash on our money market interest rate).
Second goal over the past year was to build up $200,000 in cash savings which is now done in case I want to buy an asset at distressed prices in the event of a "market correction".
Next goal is to start funding retirement accounts outside of our 401k to the tune of $100-200,000 a year. That'll start in Q4.
We're starting the process of analyzing our monthly "spend" which we'll then use to figure out where we need to be officially FIRE'd.... My rough calculation of this is $30,000-60,000 a year though currently. Most of this "spend" has been spent on travel over the past four years - that's totaled about $10-12,000/year - but we've done that consciously as we want to see the world and enjoy the time we have with each other while we're young and healthy and don't have children yet.
At any rate, that's a little bit about us. I've been reading MMM for the past few years along with other books/blogs and I've really enjoyed it! Not sure what "retirement" would mean yet but I my goal is to figure that out over the next few years. I do genuinely enjoy what I do though and paying off our home and becoming "debt-free" has been great for reducing stress as my work environment can be quite stressful.
I look forward to learning more about everyone's journey and working toward that 2026 goal!
Best,
Loan Shark