Congrats!
A couple questions if you can spare the time:
Curious about your two hobbies and how that spending has increased/waned throughout FIRE.
Do you feel that with a significant increase you would increase your spending? 50% and 5 years seems like you'd be way past SORR.
I'll cheers you a Natty Ice when I get home for sure!
First hobby is target shooting. I have a lot invested into rifles, handguns, and to a lesser degree reloading equipment. I say investment because nearly everything is worth well more than I paid for it even before the pandemic and democrat takeover. My only consumables are reloading supplies (bought at a discount through the range) and range dues which add up to less than a few hundred per year.
Second hobby is small engine building. Started out by buying a Coleman minibike from the box store for the kids (and myself;) to ride around the property. Started looking into them and discovered s whole world of upgrades and improvements. I didn't want to make the kid's too fast so I bought a cheap used one off of Craigslist and started tuning. I'll admit that I have spent money that I will never get back on the minibike;). Parts break and wear out and need replacing. My bike will climb any sane hill, and get up to 40mph+ pretty quick. Sold my motorcycle when I got married and have missed it ever since. Gives me a chance to relive a bit of my riding days and turn a wrench with the kids. Probably the most fun I have with my kids. Thanks to Youtube and internet forums, I can take a small engine completely apart, repair most anything, and reassemble it. Individual parts are dirt cheap vs other offroad options (Jeeps, side by sides, etc) as China picked the Honda GX200 engine to copy and replacement parts are readily available on ebay/amazon. All said, I probably have a couple grand in it. Not much when you consider how many hours it has occupied us during the pandemic.
Our baseline spending hasn't changed much, but we are in a LCOL rural area. I am continually shocked how much pints, tickets, parking, dining, services, home prices, etc have gone up over the past few years. If we decided to move back to a major city, I would probably need to start working again for some period of time to boost the stach, but we don't plan on moving.
When covid hit, we scrapped a $12k vacation to Alaska, and our fuel budget, driven by commuting*, kid fetching, and regular weekend road trips dropped to a small fraction of normal. Both of which freed up a lot of cash that we really haven't found ourselves spending. The Alaska trip was a conscious decision to spend a bit more money given our extra income*.
*I did leave out the part where my wife went back to work (low wage job she enjoys) which has dropped our withdrawls to zero with the exception of vacations, and buoyed our net worth a bit. I've never obsessed over withdrawal percentages, only paying enough attention to make sure we don't go broke. I rarely even look at account balances any more...
Cheers!
