Well a pretty boring month for my nestegg but a pretty exciting month for me overall. My family and I took a 2 week out West to see some national parks and the eclipse and it was a pretty amazing experience. It makes you appreciate time alone with your family away from all of the other distractions of daily life and makes you truly appreciate what is important in life. It also makes me want to reach financial independence like tomorrow so that spending time like that is not restricted to just one two week stretch during the year.

The other exciting thing that happened while were on vacation is that my wife was offered a teaching job and accepted. So she will be working as well this year which means the MFJ household will have two primary incomes for only the 2nd year in this journey which while ironically will cut into family time here in the short term may give us more options going forward to expedite the financial independence portion. I’d like to say I’d have enough guts to take some action as early as next summer as far as scaling back my working hours, but it’s a big leap of faith and I’ll likely need some encouragement if things line up the way I anticipate they might.

The hardest part as you get near that point of financial independence is having the courage to turn off the spigot of money that pours over you for simply going and sitting in an office for 40 hours a week / 12 months a year. Everything a FI aspiring person does leading up to that point is maximize earning potential, cut costs, and treating each dollar as something sacred and then all of a sudden this same person is supposed to essentially say no thanks you can keep that extra $50k or $100k a year I think I’m just going to spend more time doing stuff with my family.

It’s a tough mental hurdle to get over and often leads at least in my experience to people hanging onto that extra security and padding that nestegg longer than is necessary. In my case the most pressing issue is the age of my kids as they are growing up faster than I ever could have imagined and if I don’t take action soon it will be somewhat for nothing as having loads of freedom in my 40s & 50s won’t be anywhere near as productive as having free-time still in my 30s when I can use that time to spend with my kids. I also turned 38 this month so me speaking like I have a lot of time in my 30s is a prime example of how time flies.

I don’t think I’m quite to FI yet as our expenses have risen quite a bit with the new house and the growing age of our kids, but deep down I know I could probably easily cut my salary in half with my wife working and not needing to save for retirement anymore and still be just fine. So if I can cut my salary in half in theory I only need to work half the year which probably would be perfect right now, but unfortunately the logistics around working part-time don’t seem to be as easy in practice as they seem on paper – especially when dealing with an employer. We will see…

Taxable Account- $48,396.05 (+1.55%)
Private Stock $63,100 (+0.00%)
Traditional Rollover IRA – $24,336.07 (-3.22%)
My Roth IRA – $176,919.71 (+0.24%)
Wife Roth IRA – $115,563.54(+3.26%)
Traditional 401k – $363,337.24 (+0.53%)

Roth/Traditional % = 36.95% (tax free)

Total Retirement Nest Egg $791,652.61 (0.75%)
Retirement Salary (4%) $31,666

Monthly Contributions $1,405.44 (401k)
SP500 Performance +0.05%
My Monthly Investment Performance +0.57% (+0.55% vs SP500)
My Monthly Individual Stocks Performance +1.11% (+1.06% vs SP500)