I'm not one for bringing attention onto myself, but I wanted to share my story here to offer some encouragement for those who might be just starting their path to FI.
I got interested in personal finance shortly after graduating law school, which led me to reading books, which led to reading blogs, which then led me to this website. At that time:
-My wife was contributing about 5% to her 401k
-I was not contributing to my 401k at all
-We were more focused on saving for a house rather than being efficient and optimizing our money.
After reading this blog, I did a rough calculation of my net worth and found that it was about $15,000. In June of last year I did a full-on spreadsheet and determined that it was approximately $29,000. This was despite the fact that we were a dual income couple with no kids living in an extremely low cost of living area.
Fast forward just 16 months later, and our net worth is at $106,000, an average increase of almost $5,000 per month. To be more specific: our assets have increased from $209,000 to $278,000, while our liabilities have decreased from $177,000 to $172,000.
What's even crazier is that we would have made more progress if this weren't such a crazy year. We paid for our wedding (and honeymoon), my wife's brother got married, my wife's best friend got married, I had to pay for knee surgery (huge dent in the HSA account), and I ultimately decided to buy a new car.
But, in the past two years, we are inches away from paying off my wife's student loans, we paid off her car, we are currently maxing our 401k's, and things seem to me moving forward with a great head of steam.
I didn't really have anyone to tell about this milestone, so I figured I'd post it here. For those of you just starting, keep on going--you'll get to $10k, $50k, $100k, $500k before you know it.