I'm still to much of a newbie to take any Badassity credit, but this is to exciting not the share!
Started down the MMM path a few years back and have been executing plans for FIRE ASAP.
So wife and I bought our retirement home last July (an interesting story for later) with intent to rent it out for 18 - 24 months before we retire. We got a renter in with a 1 year lease. That was great because we had improved our cash flow / savings enough to shave a year off the FIRE date.
Mother-in-law comes for a visit and jokingly states I'll never make it that long and that I'll FIRE earlier. One month later I had a new FIRE date 4 months earlier. Stress and lack of life balance at work also helped me refine the spreadsheets.
Dec 1 I fired my FA (Commission Based) as he panicked in Sept and lost out on the recent ramp up. He only had 10% of my funds and was in a 1 year trial period. He achieved a laughable 1.2% return. My funds through Vanguard returned 14.7%. My FIRE plan only needs a 3.4% lifetime return, and can withstand a large market crash without any difficulty.
Work stress really mounting and wife and I can't think of anything else but FIRE.
My Property manager calls me last week to inform me that my tenant is breaking her lease and the house will be vacant in Feb '15. Wife and I consider this great news even though we'll lose out on 8 months rent. We can now get the house fixed up how we want (interior painting, cabinet refacing, etc.) before our planned Aug move-in. Submitted my 2015 vacation schedule with that goal in mind. Shave another 4 months off the FIRE date.
Only one last hurdle to a seamless FIRE transition - sell our current 105 year old fully restored 3200 sf home.
Just put a ton of furniture on the street to sell with a huge Moving Sale sign. Had a great sale (more about de-cluttering than making money), and then near the end of the day we get a visit from one of the realtors in town. This was the realtor we were planning on seeing in Feb. Anyways, she wanted to inquiry if we'd be interested in selling our house to her as her family is outgrowing there house, and they want what our home could offer. We gave her a tour of the house and she could hardly keep from weeping as the house has everything and more that she is looking for. Although nothing has been committed to yet, it looks like we'll have our house sold to this realtor at the same time we were going to FIRE, with no realtor commission charge, no open houses, no stress. She didn't even bat an eye when I floated a desired net price, which was $15K more than I had in my projection spreadsheet.
Now I'm no rocket scientist, but I think there has been several MMM Signs/Omens in the last year that this is the time to FIRE!! None of this would have happened if I hadn't started down the MMM path a few years ago. The next 7 1/2 months are going to be a blast!! My attitude at work has improved to the point senior leadership is wanting me to consider a developmental promotion career path. More hours, more rotating shift work, more stress and not really much more money. It's really hard to keep from laughing at them.
Thanks for reading.