My name is Caitlin Pyle (Google me to learn more), and I live in Orlando, Florida! About six weeks ago, I stumbled across the MMM blog, and since then I've read every single post :-D Some more than once. My eyes have been opened.
I'm 29 and my husband Ben is 33. We are bloggers/entrepreneurs that have experienced a $1.2 million+ windfall of blog revenue in just 18 months.
Both of us came from $30k/year or less jobs. We've spent the last year traveling through South America with our laptops in tow. We're in Montevideo, Uruguay right now and we go home on Saturday. We've been pretty frugal with the accommodations in our travels -- definitely not the cheapest places (hostels and campsites are not for us), but we've found low-cost AirBnB's. Our biggest hangup has been reliable internet. Some places have had it; others have not.
We have splurged some (took a 3-week vacation in March; occasionally stayed a ritzier hotel), but we also did the following:
- paid off our 15-year mortgage 9 years early
- saved up for a down payment on a piece of land. We are going to build our dream "green" house!
- saved over $70,000 in taxes due to the foreign earned income exclusion since we were out of the country for 330 days in a 365-day period.
- invested over $360,000 in low-fee index funds and our SEP accounts (Betterment and Wealthfront). Every month when we do our numbers, we are excited to see how much we can add to our accounts. We have quite a bit of cash in a savings account but we're waiting on our accountant to finish our returns (we had an extension because of the foreign earned income exclusion) to make sure we don't owe anything.
- cut business expenses drastically. I was paying a virtual assistance company $1500 a month for 20 hours of work. Meanwhile, I was paying my office manager less than that and she was getting WAY more done!! So I cut off the overpriced VAs and gave my office manager a small raise. We also fired someone who had been doing a piss-poor job managing Facebook ads for us (saved $650 per month!).
- we stopped donating $50 a month to another couple we know who are "missionaries" -- I'd been getting increasingly tired of seeing their poor spending habits displayed on Facebook and so we finally pulled the plug. We are going to be donating to Charity: Water or Ocean Cleanup instead!
- we had put in a $1000 deposit for a Tesla Model 3. We canceled it! We're going to use the money to get solar panels on our house instead.
- We have a 2013 Hyundai Elantra (27/37), and we decided not to buy a second car when we got home from South America -- we bought bikes instead!
- instead of paying for a flight on Southwest to a conference we have to go to later this year, we signed up for a Southwest credit card instead so we could fly for FREE!
It's exhilarating to plug in the things I cut from our spending into my "How Big is Your Stash?" spreadsheet and see the expected growth over 10 years!!
Our net worth is currently $916,864 including our house (valued at $164k) that we're currently renting for $1200 per month. We expect to cross $1 million NW within six months.... before the end of the year! My husband also has a trust fund in the $400k range (he thinks) that's not included in our NW. His dad still has control over it. Crazy, I know.
We are now employing MM technique in our decisions as much as possible. We are NOT handy people, so I highly doubt we'll be using our own elbow grease to build our new house, but we are seeking out savings there where we'd otherwise have been suckered into going the more expensive route. For example, we're going to get an IKEA kitchen instead of buying a custom-made kitchen, and we're going to use the super durable luxury vinyl planking instead of porcelain wood-look tile.
This has become somewhat of a game for me -- I signed up with Personal Capital and enjoy plugging in numbers into the retirement calculator. We've calculated our FI level to be $1.5 million, but we enjoy what we do so much that we'll probably just keep on going. Why not, right?! We've automated many parts of our businesses and I currently only work 2-3 hours each morning.
Anyway :-) I wanted to share my joy and excitement with you!! I had been experiencing this strange little fear of losing my income or if it plummets at some point, I worried I would struggle finding something else to do to create income. Now that I finally get that my money can work harder than I can, I am putting it to work now... so if the high income from the blog does peter out, it doesn't even matter because I'll likely never have to "work" again! That assurance is priceless.
