Our family officially FIREd in early 2016 at 50, 59, and 8 years old. For the first 2 years, while slow traveling around the world, moving to a different country every 1-3 months, spending an average of ~$4K/month, our AA was usually ~99% VTI and ~1% cash. World Nomads provided our travel insurance for ~$100/month. By ~2.5 years into FIRE, in late 2018, even though we'd already spent ~$120K on living expenses , our net worth had still grown by ~1/3. That level of growth in the stock market started to seem really unsustainable, so I sold off 1/4 of our shares in VTI in the taxable account and used that money to buy BND, instead, which gives us ~7 years of living expenses in bonds, which we will start using if and when the price of VTI falls below the inflation adjusted amount we paid for it in 2016.
Late last year, after moving across the country to a LCOL area, we paid cash for the first new car we've owned in the 26 years we've been together. Then, a few months later, we paid cash for a house that is way bigger than the 3 of us need, but we're thinking if and when we need to earn a little extra money, we can rent rooms or whole floors of the house out via Airbnb or VRBO or maybe to students, since we're only about a block from a college. Last year, after establishing residency in our new state, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that we qualified for Medicaid. So far, our experience using Medicaid to pay for checkups has been great. Medicaid even paid for us to get a dental check up and cleaning.
The recent stock market drop has, of course, lowered our NW on paper, a little, from what it was a couple of months ago, but we still have more money invested in stocks and bonds than we did when we started out in 2016. Plus, we've got an almost brand new car parked in front of a huge house, both completely paid for. Completely by chance, we happened to be sitting on about 4% of our NW in cash when coronavirus hit. We had been planning on using that money to hire a contractor to do some completely optional work on our new house but, now, we're planning on holding onto that cash to live off of over the next 1+ years, while we wait to see what happens with the whole Covid-19 crisis.
Feeling really, really grateful to be in the position we're in now.