December 2024 Progress Update

I personally believe that one of the reasons we as a society never seem to get better at managing our own money is because we never talk about it, at least where I live in the US.  As an example, I have to be close friends with a coworker before they’d even consider sharing their salary.  Let alone any other details about what their budget looks like, or what they dream of doing with their money someday.

With this post I’m going to start sharing regular updates of our overall financial picture.  I’ve always been hesitant to share these details since cancel culture feels so prevalent.  I acknowledge that I’m in a fairly privileged position and that what I’m able to do with money is far beyond what many people making less than half as much as I do could even dream about.

If this post makes you feel as if financial independence is far out of your reach, then, well, maybe it is.  But I’d also encourage you to look for opportunities to move the needle towards having more financial freedom even if complete financial independence seems out of the cards.

On the flip side of that, I also see many people around me who DO make objectively great salaries and yet still live paycheck to paycheck.  To those people, I say: take a closer look at living more frugally so that you no longer have to be a slave to money!

Without further ado, here’s where we stand on our journey to financial independence:

Hooray!  We just paid off all of our non-mortgage debt one week prior to this blog post!  Now let’s see if we can keep it that way.  If you can tell from the graph above, we hit some snags along our debt payoff journey.  My wife and I started our marriage in 2019 with approximately $100k in student loan debt.  Which we almost completely paid off…and then the transmission on the 14-year-old car went out, so we bought a newer (still used) car.  And then when that was just paid off, a hailstorm came through our area and damaged the siding and roof.  Insurance covered half of the siding and roof…but I couldn’t imagine having only one half of the house fixed up with new siding and roofing.  We also decided to add new windows to the siding and roof job, bringing our grand total to about $50k in debt.

That $50k of debt caused a much greater emotional burden than I expected.  This came approximately 6 months after we were debt free the first time.  I had a taste of freedom, but then chose to take it away.  And yes, we had always wanted to replace the leaky, inefficient windows with energy efficient ones.  But looking back, I likely would have split up the project so that we replaced the siding and roof as was needed, but held off on the windows until we had the cash to pay for them.

Meanwhile, we’ve paid our mortgage down by about $40k.  Having this paid off is a part of what I consider financial independence, so it’s something I continue to track.  My wife and I continually debate whether we’d prefer to aggressively pay this down or aggressively invest as our next step.  Look for an article on that coming soon!

On the other side of the equation, let’s take a look at our progress on investments over the same time period:

This is one of the reasons I find retrospective analysis helpful, because dang, our investments took off since 2022!  Yes, we did have 401k contributions turned off while paying off student loans (2020-2022), but even still, that’s a crazy jump due to market activity.  Astute readers might also notice that our taxable investment account dipped in 2024.  We decided to take a chunk of that account to finish paying off our debt.

That’s all good and great, but what does that mean overall?

So we’re about a third of the way through our FI journey now that we’ve paid off all of our consumer debt.  Not bad!  We’re currently tracking March 2031 as the time when work becomes truly optional.