walkinwood
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
As I had explained in this post
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f29/er-on-hold-47618.html
We put our ER on hold late last year to work for a while to build up our portfolio.
DW has been working steadily (on contract) since early February and will probably continue to work through the end of the summer - maybe a little later. I have not been as lucky. My first contract petered out a month or so ago, and a new contract that I was expecting fell through. For now, I have decided against looking actively for more work and will wait for DW to finish off her contract.
We have decided to try and sell our home next spring. We will probably move out of NJ, but haven't decided exactly where we will go. If the market is soft next spring, we'll postpone the sale to the following year. We paid off our mortgage earlier this year since we plan to sell soon, and there are no safe investments that would yield more than our mortgage interest.
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f28/last-payment-49672.html#post925223
Our portfolio (adjusted for the mortgage payoff) is 11% below its value on 5/1/08, the day we ER'd. (about 15% below on a real value basis) Our withdrawal rate over the last 12 months is 3.1%, but we've been very conservative in our spending since early 2009. We use 4% of portfolio value at the beginning of the year as our annual withdrawal amount, & are running at about 83% of that amount.
We'll spend a few weeks at a couple of places that are high on our list of ER destinations this year so we can make up our minds.
All in all, we feel good about our situation, but plan to evaluate the "semi" status each year until we feel we have a comfortable margin of error again.
Thanks to the all the information here especially the real-life experiences, I feel prepared for this journey. Thank you all!
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f29/er-on-hold-47618.html
We put our ER on hold late last year to work for a while to build up our portfolio.
DW has been working steadily (on contract) since early February and will probably continue to work through the end of the summer - maybe a little later. I have not been as lucky. My first contract petered out a month or so ago, and a new contract that I was expecting fell through. For now, I have decided against looking actively for more work and will wait for DW to finish off her contract.
We have decided to try and sell our home next spring. We will probably move out of NJ, but haven't decided exactly where we will go. If the market is soft next spring, we'll postpone the sale to the following year. We paid off our mortgage earlier this year since we plan to sell soon, and there are no safe investments that would yield more than our mortgage interest.
http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f28/last-payment-49672.html#post925223
Our portfolio (adjusted for the mortgage payoff) is 11% below its value on 5/1/08, the day we ER'd. (about 15% below on a real value basis) Our withdrawal rate over the last 12 months is 3.1%, but we've been very conservative in our spending since early 2009. We use 4% of portfolio value at the beginning of the year as our annual withdrawal amount, & are running at about 83% of that amount.
We'll spend a few weeks at a couple of places that are high on our list of ER destinations this year so we can make up our minds.
All in all, we feel good about our situation, but plan to evaluate the "semi" status each year until we feel we have a comfortable margin of error again.
Thanks to the all the information here especially the real-life experiences, I feel prepared for this journey. Thank you all!