After a rough 2022, we will look to get our finances back on track this year and hopefully see a rebound in the market. The main thing is to keep a closer eye on our spending while also ramping up the side hustles as we figure out our income plans while the kids are still in school. We start the year with just over $1.25M in investments and really the goal over the next few years is to maintain that while we spend down our short term dollars. We are looking for market gains of 8.0% on the dollars we have invested in the market. We will spend around $60,000 a year more then we bring in over the ..read more

We survived 2022 as our first full year of what I am going to fully call coast #FIRE at this point. Although we have both quit our full time jobs, we do have a goal to make over $55,000 in income this year through part time work and side hustles. On the positive side, I have enjoyed the work life balance and having more time to do what I want. There has been more time for kids activities, entertainment, and some fun trips last year. On the negative side with the market being down 20% and one of our income steams drying up in Q4, the finances ended up a lot rougher than the start of the year. W ..read more

As we began to close out the year my wife and I both realized we would need to jump back into generating income so I added some consulting work and added DoorDash to the options. On my wife’s side she went back to subbing a few days a week to help close the gap while we wait to see if her marketing gig bounces back. There was no real goal for December other then trying to end the year with $235,000 in our short term balances. My Income On the financial consulting side of the business I have added a couple of clients to bring my total to 5 different companies. The work ranges from financial ana ..read more

The dividend portfolio has made it all the way back from the rough covid timeframe to outperform both the market and VUG since its inception. We have hit new highs on the portfolio value and the quarterly dividend amount we have received. The portfolio has climbed above $150,000 for the first time and our 3rd quarter dividends were over $1,800 dollars. Due to this performance and the things I’ve learned I’m going to go ahead and double our stake in this strategy to $300,000 of our investments. I will share that new portfolio as we get started for 2023. The portfolio has moved up over $13,000 d ..read more

It’s been a rocky first year of full #FIRE as the markets fell, income was a little low, and we got hit some with health expenses that added up. It’s been a year of adjustment and planning for the future as we navigate this stage of our life. On the good side we continue to enjoy our more flexible lifestyle! It really is finding a way to survive the next 8 to 10 years until we can unlock some of our home equity and our long term retirement money. We ended up losing around $250,000 in our investments since last year with the market falling 14.4% so far this year and our income coming in a littl ..read more

It’s been almost 6 months since I posted on this blog, what happened? Did #FIRE fail spectacularly and I was embarrassed to come back on? Thankfully no, but it’s been a little bit of a rougher start then we would have hoped for! A market that’s been down over 15%, a car overheating, a fridge that won’t cool, and a consulting gig falling through for both me and my wife that was giving us over $4,000 in income a month. Honestly though, I think I needed some time to just adjust to what the new cadence of life is like. I say this as a joke, but I think there is some truth to the fact that while I ..read more

The comeback of the dividend portfolio continues! After a dreadful 2020 dividend stocks aggressively been coming back while tech stocks have been falling. It continues to be interesting how when you invest in individual stocks they still end up falling along the market return. More reasons to probably invest most of your money in index funds. The portfolio has moved up over $10,000 dollars this year to end May at $149,568.  This has allowed us to achieve a 21.4% gap on the S&P this year. After being down over 20 points to the S&P, we have gotten back within 4.9% with the strong re ..read more

We are back after a couple month hiatus. Honestly life got a little busy with kids activities and some of my work. On top of that the market hasn’t been that exciting either in the past two months. At this point thankfully most of the cash we need for the next few years is in safe investments and hopefully we will see things turn around in the next few years. We’ve lost around $150,000 dollars so far this year as the markets have fallen around 14%. Our portfolio has been slightly better then that with only a 10.4% drop. The biggest hits have been to the tech side of our portfolio while the div ..read more

This update is late as I took a short trip with my Dad out to Utah to hike through some of the national parks. It was a really nice trip filled with over 50 miles of hiking! So although April has given most of this back, March was a pretty good month from an investing standpoint as it got us back almost to even for the year. We moved back above the $1.5M mark as the market bounced back with a 3.4% return in March. We were slightly worse then the market this month due to money being in safer accounts. We continue to stay on track from an income standpoint as I figure out my consulting and Shipt ..read more

The rough start to the year continues as the market continues to trend down. On top of that it was a crazy busy month as basketball season wraps up for us and for some reason Minnesota is trapped in the coldest spring we’ve seen for a while. We did get our new car and have also learned that it doesn’t like the cold weather either. So not the most ideal start of the year, but we are adapting! We fell below $1.5M as the market continued to fall by another 2.7% in February. We were slightly better then the market this month due to money being in safer accounts. We continue to stay on track from ..read more