401k savings: $39k
Trad IRA savings: $11k
Taxable savings: maybe $5k
Savings rate: ~50%
Liquid NW on Jan 1 2018: $600k
Liquid NW today: ~$650k (EOY goal: $700k, briefly hit that a couple months ago. But then wahwah.)
-Side gigs: sold my in-laws' condo. Earned a 2% commission. Made a couple hundred selling old computers on ebay.
-Housing: Moving to a cheaper house. This will reduce my time to FIRE from 6y to 5y! Plan to sell my old house myself.
-Investment wins: Created an IPS after years of chaotic asset allocation changes. Hedged my index fund positions with protective puts in summer 2018. Found peace of mind and excitement in the Nov-Dec correction. Sold a junk bond (FGP) for a profit right before the company went into financial distress.
-Investment blunders: My play money was short volatility in January. Moved 401k to a more equity-heavy fund to get a lower ER - on October 30 - DOH! Got creamed selling covered calls last summer. Sold OHI at 28 and now it's 36.
-New experience: Assets are starting to snowball, but that also means I got to watch almost an entire year's worth of earnings from my job vaporize not once but twice this year in historically routine corrections. This is millionaire training. I will have to get used to watching six-figure fluctuations in my NW on a routine basis, which leads me to...
-Radical key lesson/insight of 2018: Stock prices don't matter. Because the dominant strategy is to buy all the shares you can as soon as you can, the price of your retirement portfolio will be a long-term average over many years, so today's price zig zags are irrelevant to our plans. What supports you in a 50 year retirement is the earnings per share times number of shares. The majority if EPS comes back to stockholders through growth, buybacks, dividends, debt reduction, innovation, and/or capital appreciation in the long term. With a sufficient number of diversified shares, one can retire with confidence no matter what the daily market price is. My FIRE number is now measured in number of shares times EPS, not shares times market price. When shares times EPS is greater than expenses, I am FI. This mentality makes the quest to FIRE a simple, linear, and inevitable process, rather than feeling like some kind of market-timing luck-based gamble. Also, this means falling prices represent an accelleration to FIRE, not a setback (my monthly contribution buys more shares). I applaud the recent 15% (so far!) correction and say FALL BABY FALL! At 20% down, my IPS says I can exit my hedges for fat profits. At 25-30% down, I *might* buy long-term calls to obtain double leverage.