Congrats! That's awesome!
I fully agree with the freedom or peace of mind that a "number" brings, rather than about the number itself. May I ask aside from living a frugal life (I assume), how did you invest? Any real estate purchases?
Aside from our primary residence, no.
Debated it a few times over the years but never found the right place (and honestly, have always been a bit too afraid to take the plunge).
As much as I know real estate makes sense, it seems difficult to get into in small steps - I realize you could always decide to get out and sell, but the debt just feels like a commitment to me. I may still get into it at some point - but where my life is right now I feel I don't have the time or energy to focus on it. I know how much time and attention my primary residence requires, and I don't want to double that.
So our investments have been rather 'boring.' VTSAX and VTIAX make up the majority (with a few individual stocks here and there that we still own from when we thought investing meant picking a single company).
EDITED TO ADD:
I should say, I don't know that we're terribly frugal... not my MMM standards, but definitely by spendypants standards. We each have a car, but we've paid them off long ago and have no plans of replacing them. We are not terribly shy about spending money, but we've been very focused and careful of our return on investment with very dollar spent. Our goal over the past few years has been to cut our expenses as much as possible
without harming our quality of life. We're very careful to spend our money on the things we care about.
So, while my expenses may be much lower than many friends of mine... I don't know that I feel we're all that frugal. It's really about simply not allowing ourselves to get accustomed to things in the first place, so it doesn't feel like deprivation when you do not have them. For example, we've never had cable TV. We've never had a cleaning service, we've never gone out to eat for lunch (at work, I mean), etc.
Our home is still possibly bigger than it needs to be, but compared to most friends of ours we live in the 'small' house. On the flip side... (don't facepunch me) we do own a 70" television with a pretty incredible surround sound system. We both love watching movies, and we eventually found that if we had a system at home that gave us a similar experience to a theater, we wouldn't go to the theater as much (it's not really close, but it's close enough). We used to spend a
lot of money at the movie theater when we were younger, but not anymore (and our TV setup was all purchased second hand or refurbished, under $1000 for everything).
These all sound like dumb examples I'm sure - but I guess my point is they aren't dumb to us... we pick and choose what is worth our money, to us, for our happiness. And we try to make sure that is what we focus on. So, we may gladly spend $300 on an outing if we feel the experience is one we'll enjoy and remember together.... and yet I might be really upset with myself for accidentally getting on a toll road and being charged $1.80 (true story from last week, which I'm still annoyed about).
To me 'frugality' puts the focus on the wrong thing... I wish we had a new word that better captured the spirit of 'financial efficiency' or 'minimum effective spending.'