Here is a summation of my FIRE journey for 2019. Don’t take this post too seriously but this is more or less how everything will settle once the day is over.
Profile
About me: 38 yr old, single, gay, no children, live alone, Senior Electrical Engineer (12+ yrs of XP), lives in Southern MD (1 to 1.5-ish hours south of Washington DC), low-end six figure income, multi-month emergency fund available
Net Worth
Notes: As with a majority of folks here, the Dec 2018 dip wasn’t great for many people and my delta between the end of 2017 and 2018 was just only $31,536.39. So I kept my 2019 net worth prediction in check and assumed a relatively modest number. Boy, was I wrong. I ended up reaching my prediction net worth during the Summer of 2019. At this point, I would have been happy maintaining my net worth until the end of 2019 but my net worth went higher as the year progressed. I did jokingly said to myself sometime in August that I would probably reach close to a $300k net worth as a really bold prediction but I didn’t want to keep my hopes up. Again, I was fucking wrong. Very wrong.
If I wanted to make bold predictions for 2020, I’m hoping for a low-end $400k+ net worth. Let’s see how wrong I can get. In the words of Captain Cold from the CW shows, “make the plan; execute the plan; expect the plan to go off the rails; throw away the plan.” I expect a similar outcome.
FIRE Journey
Based on my 2019 spending habits (more on that later), here is where I stand on my FIRE path (not including Social Security):
BaristaFI - $748,784.50 (42.67% of the way there – based on BaristaFI spending habits)
LeanFIRE - $1,190,103.00 (26.85% of the way there – based on total 2019 spending habits)
FIRE - $1,360,117.71 (23.49% of the way there – based on total 2019 spending habits)
FatFIRE - $1,586,804.00 (20.14% of the way there – based on total 2019 spending habits)
Note: I feel rich. No way around it. Call it privilege, luck, sacrifice (or whatever the term-of- the-day is) but it seems a lot of the hard work is finally paying off and I feel fantastic. While I’m not at FIRE-levels yet, I’m easily at a “low-stress, everything is going to be okay, don’t have jump through corporate hoops” stage of my life. I can easily ward off lots of financial issues for either myself, my parents, and/or my siblings (and I have) while not setting myself on fire (get it?! Fozzie Bear is my spirit animal).
If everything goes the way I predicted, I can see the embers of FIRE in 6-8 years.
2019 Contribution Habits
Note: My 2020 goal is to hit all the limits again and increase my brokerage contribution to $15,000. The travel bug is starting to wane a bit and I’ve prepaid a majority of my travel expenses in 2019 so I will likely be cutting back on travel expenses in 2020.
2019 Spending Habits
While I’m not going through all the line items of what my 2019 expenses entailed of, I will point out some highlights:
Utilities: $1,833.12
Health/Medical Related: $2,694.77
Car & Renter’s Insurance: $694.22
Gasoline - $678.16
Car Maintenance - $765.28
Food - $3602.98
Internet: $1,006.40
Annual BaristaFI Expenses: $29,943.23
Note: This is the BareBonesFI expenses total plus extra spending cash dedicated to minor “wants” including, but not limited to, a new 4k TV, a PS4, clothing, camping gear, office chair, car camera, Netflix/Hulu/Spotify, etc.
Note: $11,970.83 of this amount was dedicated to vacation costs for multiple trips in 2019 and 2020 including a two-week stay in Japan (ended up being a human crane machine courtesy of a outdoor Sega convention I randomly bumped into in Akihabara), a week in Amsterdam, multiple trips back to my parents’ home in West TX, a week-long stay in Ft. Lauderdale, an emergency trip to Pittsburgh, prepayment for a 1.5-week stay in Spain in 2020, prepayment for a 2020 JoCo cruise & excursions, a Palms Spring trip in April 2020, and a couple of future trips to visit my parents in 2020.
The remaining amount are just one-offs or easily removable expenses that I kept for one reason or another (e.g. helping paying my parents’ mortgage faster, gifts)