Here I sit on my back patio in the middle of a Monday afternoon, enjoying the day.
We started our FI journey in 2008. At that time my wife and I both had high paying jobs making very good money and spending like we made very good money. But it was clear that both the companies that we worked for were starting to show signs of a business slowdown. We both had nice BMWs with about 120K owed on them. We had a nice 350K house with 230K mortgage, but we were bringing in good money. We had a net worth of 730K.
In 2010 it was clear that we were in for a bumpy ride as both of the businesses we worked for really started to decline and we got scared and started getting more conservative about our finances. We traded the BMWs in for new hybrids and we began aggressively paying down our mortgage.
Since the early 2000s we had always saved the maximum we could in our 401Ks and by 2010 we had accumulated about 200K in after tax savings as well. But we were still spendy pants consumer suckers. By 2010 we had 940K net worth and still had about 200K in mortgage debt.
We continued to reduce our spending and expenses. In 2014 we discovered MMM and really began thinking about early retirement. By then, our net worth had risen to 1.55M with about 90K in mortgage debt and no other debt.
In 2014 I got another position making less money, but also with less stress. My wife left the her job in spring of 2015 and fired. By then we had a net worth of 1.9M. In the fall of 2015 I switched jobs again, making about the same money but working 100% from my home as a contract programmer. I was prepared to work this job for 2 or 3 years before I fired.
Back in 2014, I had started having some issues typing with my right hand. I thought it was carpal tunnel or maybe I just hurt my wrist. It wasn’t to bad and barely slowed me down. By 2016 it had gotten much worse. I was now typing mostly with my left hand and navigating around the screen with the touchpad on my laptop using my left hand. I went to see the doctor.
To make a long story short, in late 2016 I was diagnosed for the first time with Parkinson’s disease. I didn’t believe it, and after taking meds for it for 4 weeks, I had no improvement. With Parkinson’s disease they can’t really tell for sure if you have it unless they biopsy your brain (I took a pass on that test) or you respond to taking Ldopa, which is a medication that increases the dopamine levels in your brain. I took the meds and did not improve, so I did not have it.......or did I.
In March of 2017, I went for my first appointment with a Movement Disorders Specialist (MDS) at Penn Medicine. Once again, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It seems the general practice neurologist that prescribed Ldopa in late 2016 did not prescribe a high enough dose. It turns out I had Parkinson’s. The good news was that I could type a little better when I took the medicine. The bad news was that I have a progressive degenerative neurological disease that will slowly (if I am lucky) take away my freedom.
Then the week after my second diagnosis I receive a call from the company I was contracting with saying that they were ending my contract. The slow typing had apparently been noticed, though they of course made up some other reason they were ending the contract.
While we were a little short of our fire goal, the budget has a lot of fluff for entertainment and vacations, so I fired in March of 2017 at the age of 51. I had the luxury of doing this because of the wisdom I learned from all the folks on this sight and from MMM. I consider myself very fortunate to be in the position to fire when I did, given the circumstances.
So here I sit on the back patio in the middle of a Monday afternoon, enjoying the day.
What’s your story?
