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(In case any one is wondering - this was assigned homework from my "10 year anniversary" thread)
part I - Introduction
Some folks have expressed amazement that we survived 10 years from 1999 without crushing losses to our investments or having to go back to work. We are not surprised, and I guess the main reason is that being conservative people we would never have stopped working at such young ages (39 and DH 44) if we didn't believe we had more than ample resources to get us through some tough times and more than enough padding in our estimated expenses to pay for a lot of fun travels and a few toys, etc.
Nevertheless, looking at the past 10 years, from 8/9/99 the day I retired, our net worth has gained 22% from the initial value. At the peak in Oct of 2007, we were up 55% from where we started. Boy were we felling good! But then you all know what happened next. At the bottom of the market in March (actually, the numbers I have are for end of Feb) we had lost 6.4% from our starting value. That was a bit shocking at first, but then I realized that we had already enjoyed almost 10 years of fun retirement living, got to do a lot of fun things, and bought a motorhome. Looked at that way, I felt like maybe we were OK after all.
Neither my husband nor I had seriously thought or planned for early retirement although I certainly had fantasized about all the cool things I would do if I were "independently wealthy". But when the company I had worked for for 14 years finally went public in 1995, all of a sudden all that "funny paper money (stock certificates)" we owned was real. I realized that maybe in a few years I really wouldn't have to work anymore if I didn't care to - what an intriguing idea! At that point I started seriously considering what I felt would be enough money on which to retire. A couple of years later I had some pretty concrete goals, and we started seriously to "work the plan" AND keep our fingers crossed!
To reach FI, we took the ultimate risk - kept all our eggs in one basket. We were young enough to take such a risk, AND given that our initial investment in buying our stock options was not that high with respect to our savings I never felt that we were imprudent in placing this bet. In fact, I was very cognizant of the fact that we were lucky to have this opportunity and it was probably the only one coming our way!
So, we achieve FI, have enough where we can really stop working if we want to. What next - figuring out how to invest and live during retirement.
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