Share your FIRE Milestones - 2013- 2020

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^ Good for you but it will be the longest year and a half you have every lived.
 
My 2004 Cavalier has become the official go-to car for my DS and DDIL to go into the seedy part of town. :D
 
Spent all day Saturday with my nose in a spreadsheet working on evaluating an early retirement opportunity.

Good news:
If approved, it would make late spring 2019 retirement possible, as opposed to early 2020.

Bad news:
Using our current spending rate, removing a few obvious things like commuting and parking, we're $600-$1000 a month short to age 62 (roughly 3 years) at a 3.3% draw from retirement funds. This applies at either retirement date.

To keep the plan realistic, I didn't try too hard to reduce our expenses on paper. Plan is for my wife to take SS at 62, and for me to delay until 65.

This seems like a manageable problem, especially as we're open to working part-time, but still a problem. Going to keep watching expenses month to month, especially as we have an adult child who has just started working full-time.
 
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Yes. we have about 1 M in RE - with 25K/year in income

My milestone - pay off last rental property in 2019.
Start DH SS in 2019 and mine in 2025.

IN 2020, I work part time only
 
I just called Penfed to authorize and wire the final mortgage payment. This is my first discrete, non-arbitrary, milestone. My heart is in my throat, and my shoulders feel light. Any idea on when I should see the deed?

I very well could be just months from semi-FIREd. The drudge of working through the weekend is more bearable today.
 
cooch96 said:
i just called penfed to authorize and wire the final mortgage payment. This is my first discrete, non-arbitrary, milestone. My heart is in my throat, and my shoulders feel light. Any idea on when i should see the deed?

I very well could be just months from semi-fired. The drudge of working through the weekend is more bearable today.
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niiiice!!!!
 
cooch96 said:
I just called Penfed to authorize and wire the final mortgage payment. This is my first discrete, non-arbitrary, milestone. My heart is in my throat, and my shoulders feel light. Any idea on when I should see the deed?

I very well could be just months from semi-FIREd. The drudge of working through the weekend is more bearable today.
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Congrats, that's a big milestone. :)
 
cooch96 said:
I just called Penfed ...... Any idea on when I should see the deed?
.
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We paid off Penfed loans on the N and S houses. It took months before we saw the deeds. Do make sure the loan satisfaction gets recorded at the county and a call or two to PenFed can't hurt.

Congrats!
 
Lost 2x my annual withdrawal this week. And I didn't panic. That's a BIG milestone. I wasn't retired in 2008... so I wasn't sure how I'd do with multi day big drops....

I did have to field a few panic calls from my BIL who is very nervous about the market.... told him to let it ride and when the dust settles, rebalance. Seemed to talk him off the ledge of selling everything and buying annuities. (That's his goto plan whenever the market dips... until I talk him out of it.)
 
slowsaver said:
After this dip, I'm no longer a $2 Millionaire. I guess I'll get to celebrate this milestone again someday in the future.
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I’ve tracked my net worth for years. Back in ‘08 - to about ‘10, it bounced back and forth over a significant milestone several times and then took off over several more in no time. Just keep doing what you’re doing and the pile will grow bigger.
 
Rebalanced once the S&P broke 2700 ... The retirement trigger will still be pulled at the end of the year with a 3.0 - 3.3% withdrawl rate ...... might be a little part time work, but only at my discretion. I am feeling sooooooooo good. DW and I are both 62.
 
COcheesehead said:
I’ve tracked my net worth for years. Back in ‘08 - to about ‘10, it bounced back and forth over a significant milestone several times and then took off over several more in no time. Just keep doing what you’re doing and the pile will grow bigger.
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Yep, same here. I had a lot less to play with back then, but, at the time it sure seemed like a lot! Anyway, I had hit a new peak in October 2007, but once the market started getting choppy in 2008, there was still a few times I came close to that number. Then, in Sept/Oct/Nov it all wiped out.


By November 2009 I was hitting new peaks again. One thing I do remember about that timeframe though, is that every time the market started to take a dip again, I started worrying and thinking oh crap, we're not out of this yet! I can remember a pretty sharp dip in early 2010, but I think it only lasted about a month. Then the summer was another down period, and I was worried it was going to crash again, only to see it take off in the fall.


I think the last time I really worried about a drop was in 2011. There was one month over the summer where I lost about 16%, and I was thinking here we go into the Great Recession again. I didn't fully recover from that one until early 2012.


We've had dips here and then since then, but I don't think there has been anything as big as that 2011 hit. Of course nowadays, with social media being so much more prevalent, and fear-mongering being the cry of the times, every time the market dips, people panic.


Personally I'm a bit annoyed with the current market, simply because I was getting close to a $2M milestone back in August. But then I bought a house, which cost about $179K up front in closing costs, inspections, down payment etc. And then October knocked my NW down about $120K. So, it's going to take me a bit to recover from that.


There is an old saying that the market loses money on average, about 1 every 3 years. Of course, that's not linear...it's not like you make money two years straight and then lose some in the third. But, lately it does seem like there's a bit of a cool-down every few years. For my own personal experience, those cool-down years were 2011, 2015, and now it looks like 2018 might be thrown in there as well. FWIW, I was only down around 0.1X% in 2011. In 2015 I was up around 1.X%, but with inflation that was probably a wash.
 
Question: Posters often state, lost 5%,10%,20% of what? Where do you start, yesterdays or year end or last year? From Jan. 2016 we gained 13%, around there. But if I look at 1, 3, 5, 10 year gains, it's about 6% over 10 years. That is based on continuous re purchasing, not withdrawing anything. We switched funds around, added to stock funds but did not contribute from outside funds for over 5 years. So we have a pretty good handle on what the funds are doing over 5 years based on our re balance 5 years ago.
 
Cashed in some investments this week and paid off our mortgage and HELOC. It’s a great feeling knowing we have zero debt! Merry Christmas everyone!
 
I was reminded of a huge milestone FIRE moment in our life today. Going through some files, I found a 2007 letter from the mortgage company, confirming our loan was paid off. That letter was the culmination of several years effort to become debt free. We we continued applying that snowball toward the mortgage until we'd knocked it out. Reaching that goal was the launchpad for rolling that snowball into saving & investing. Now a decade later, we're FI and within a year we'll RE. But at that time we didn't know anything about FIRE and had no idea where this would all lead.
What a great reminder of how it all started!
 
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I have not been on here in quite awhile....but...

I FIRE'd last week!

Looking forward to more time for my hobbies (woodworking, cars, beer, travel) and maybe some new things!

Took a lot of planning, had to get health care on the exchange, move all our money from employer to FIDO and re-allocate, and so on...but that's all behind us now and the focus this year is on re-doing our wills/POAs and so on (last done in 2008).

Thanks to all on here for some good advice and encouragement along the way. I just turned 57 and no longer have to w*** for a living!

Dave:dance:
 
Finance Dave said:
I have not been on here in quite awhile....but...

I FIRE'd last week!

Looking forward to more time for my hobbies (woodworking, cars, beer, travel) and maybe some new things!

Took a lot of planning, had to get health care on the exchange, move all our money from employer to FIDO and re-allocate, and so on...but that's all behind us now and the focus this year is on re-doing our wills/POAs and so on (last done in 2008).

Thanks to all on here for some good advice and encouragement along the way. I just turned 57 and no longer have to w*** for a living!

Dave:dance:
Click to expand...

Congratulations!!!!!
 
Finance Dave said:
I have not been on here in quite awhile....but...

I FIRE'd last week!

Looking forward to more time for my hobbies (woodworking, cars, beer, travel) and maybe some new things!

Took a lot of planning, had to get health care on the exchange, move all our money from employer to FIDO and re-allocate, and so on...but that's all behind us now and the focus this year is on re-doing our wills/POAs and so on (last done in 2008).

Thanks to all on here for some good advice and encouragement along the way. I just turned 57 and no longer have to w*** for a living!

Dave:dance:
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Awesome! That kind of news makes me smile:clap:
 
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