9 Years Until FIRE

FIRE Flower

Welcome back again 🙂

It’s hard to believe we are already half way through this year. It feels like I am holding my breath waiting for each economic shoe to drop.

The topics I am going to write about today are:

  • Pre-FIRE Lifestyle
  • Travel Updates
  • 2022 Goal Progress

Pre-FIRE Lifestyle

A couple of years ago, I attended a MeetUp for people in my area that were pursuing Financial Independence. We did an activity where we built a chart of all of the hobbies and interests that we planned on exploring once we FIRE’d. My board was an interconnected web of my favorite things: travel, reading, cooking, volunteering, learning, and relaxing.

Next, the conversation shifted to discuss whether we were waiting for FIRE to pursue these activities, and why we felt we couldn’t start doing them now – and then suggested that we expand our current life to include these activities now.

The exercise caught my interest, and it noodled around in my subconscious for months. The easy excuse was saying we didn’t have the time for those things. The next easiest was that we didn’t have the disposable income for them.

Except I knew these were just excuses.

I kept thinking that if these things are our values (my partners FIRE interests closely aligned with mine – yay!), why wouldn’t we make time or spend money on them now.

My partner and I sat down and agreed that travel and adventure was a value we no longer wanted to keep on the back burner. We both knew that living in our birth state of Minnesota for the entirety of our lives was a mundane social script that our friends and family were happy to follow, but it wasn’t something we wanted to choose for ourselves.

So we started to brainstorm where we would like to live. We wanted to stay in the United States. We tossed around so many cities and ideas, but we hadn’t traveled enough yet to actually know whether we would like any of them!

We had another obstacle to overcome as well; we had bought a home together in 2018. It was in a Minnesota suburb. Now, I’m not a suburb kind of gal, but we were swept up in the idea of SeTtLiNg DoWn, so we went and bought ourselves a 4 bedroom house located a 30 minute train ride outside of Minneapolis. 

Then in 2021, an outrageous number of pieces fell into place:

  • Once COVID hit, my company went on full-time work from home, and that house in the burbs became my personal prison. But, thanks to the single-family housing market going full cuckoo bananas by 2021, we were able to sell our house to Opendoor for a 70k profit after fees.
  • At the same time that we made out on the sale of our house like bandits, the condo market in downtown areas had frozen to a halt! We negotiated 15k off the asking price of a renovated two bed condo in downtown St. Paul.
  • In line with life in the suburbs, my partner and I each had our own vehicles. We no longer needed both for the condo, and we wanted a fuel-efficient option for future road trip opportunities. We traded in my 2017 Chevy Volt and my partners 2017 Chevy Cruise for a 2018 Toyota Prius. The trade-in values of both cars covered the entirety of the price of the Prius. No car payments 🙂 FIRE win.
  • My partner moved into a fully remote position, and my job gave me permission continue working from home in 2022 even if corporate went back into the office.

All of these pieces combined to allow us to use $10k from the sale of our house to rent just over 5 months of AirBNBs on the east coast!!

Boom.

Travel Updates

We are four months into our travel as I write this. We’ve stayed in cities in Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. And we’ve just arrived in Salem, Massachusetts to spend the next month and a half in a house on the coast for a beach-side summer.

It’s been surreal.

I put together a little scrapbook for you of some of the beautiful things we’ve seen and places we’ve been. There is so much beauty in this world, and I feel indescribably lucky to be experiencing it.

Early morning walk along the Baltimore Inner Harbor – We LOVED our time in Baltimore.
Cumberland, Maryland. Check out those mountains along the back – they surrounded the whole town. Plus this scenic river cutting through! You could rent bikes and ride along the river for miles.
Cape Hanlopen beach in Delaware. Ya’ll – it takes multiple HOURS to drive out of Minnesota to another state. We can day trip across multiple states out east; it’s so wild. Also, this beach looked straight out of a romance novel with these dunes.
We stayed in this civil-war era cabin in West Virginia for a weekend. We saw bugs we’ve never seen before. It was horrifying. Everything is tainted. No memory is good.

Fine, I’m being a little dramatic.

The Baltimore wharf game was so on point. This was one of many places I liked to sit, read, and picnic.
We drove up to Brooklyn, NY for an afternoon! We stopped into 3 different pizzerias for a slice of NY pie. YUM.
Philadelphia in a mouthwatering bite.
So good, we stopped at this sub shop twice!
The day we drove to Portsmouth, NH it was Market Square Day! Vendor booths filled the streets, and there was live music and great food galore.

2022 Goal Progress

Second quarter is on the books!

When I decided to do quarterly updates, I didn’t think that much would change for me in any given three months, but I already have a financial change for you: I got a new job!

I applied to another position in my company a couple weeks ago, and accepted an offer earlier this month. I don’t officially start until mid-July. I surely wasn’t expecting to be able to make a career move while traveling! Incredible. My new base salary will be $100,000/year with a target bonus of 10%.

Check out these sexy progress bars I’ve made to review my annual FIRE savings goals with you:

Halfway through the year, and my 401(k) and HSA are well over half funded. Nice! With all our traveling, my NQ savings is still lagging, but I am confident I will reach my goal by year-end.

Thank you for stopping back to read again this quarter!!

See you next time fellow FIRE Flower.

Leave a comment