Minutes after mentioning it in my net worth update, I got some more info on the car accident lawsuit.

Our neighbor came up to talk because he was worried--his car insurance that we're on is very basic, I think only has $100K liability, and it sounds like the victim's expenses are already more than that. Our umbrella policy has a $300K deductible, so he was worried we'd be on the hook for that big gap in there, I think. But NT printed out our policies and it turns out we have our own automotive policy as well with a $300K coverage for each incident.

So, hopefully if we're reading everything right, that insurance should cover whatever our neighbor's policy doesn't, and our umbrella should cover anything above and beyond what those two policies cover.

If this works out with only higher premiums, damn will I feel lucky, because we would have survived this only because we stumbled into a great broker who set us up with good coverage. I didn't even specifically remember getting that driver policy! And if we come out of this with our shirts on our back, we're going to be looking at all our insurance options, including making sure our rental properties and NT's side hustle get coverage, and making sure we're covered in all directions. This is the kind of experience that puts the fear in you!

Still waiting to see what the fallout is from our car accident lawsuit, but at least the markets had another good month. Part of me was wondering if there would be a big drop and right away pull CoastFIRE out from under us just when we hit it LOL, so I'm glad that didn't happen. Hopefully it never will, but we'll see!

Tonight the spouses and I are going out to a fancy restaurant on a rare date (we're all so busy with separate interests and pursuits these days!) to celebrate our CoastFIRE milestone moment.

I'm looking forward to it, but a new fear has come to replace my worries about retirement. A few months ago, NT had an accident where he was driving and hit a pedestrian. At a slow speed thankfully, but she was older and hurt, so he felt awful and it was really stressful. NT stayed with her until the ambulance took her away, and we don't know anything more about her condition.

Various documentation things have been winding their way through the process with our car insurance provider, but again we weren't sure what it would end up meaning. A couple days ago, we were served with papers for a lawsuit filed by the woman he hit.

So. I don't really know what it's all going to mean in the end. I assume it will cost us money but my imagination ranges everywhere from just a higher insurance premium to a big settlement where we lose a bunch of our assets or spend the rest of our lives putting a big chunk of our paycheck toward it. Maybe it'll be somewhere in between?

The good news is that our downstairs neighbor, with whom we share the car and insurance policy, is a lawyer. With a lot of lawyer friends. So I'm kind of trusting the process and hoping this is something that others who know a lot more than me (our insurance company and our lawyer friend) will help this come to a conclusion that isn't too ruinous to our financial security.

For tonight, I'm going to try and put those fears aside and celebrate the fact that we're a really good team and if we got this far on retirement, we can be resourceful and pull out of whatever situation we find ourselves in.

For many years, I've only checked our retirement accounts and net worth once a month, because the volatility is too much to handle. But we were SO close to CoastFIRE at the end of May and I saw the markets had had a good week. So I decided to check our retirement account values and recalculate our CoastFIRE numbers.

Obvious disclaimers and grains of salt about taking one online calculator too seriously, and the possibility we've underestimated our spending in retirement, etc., etc., etc. .... but YOU GUYS!

When I started this blog almost 17 years ago, we had very little set aside for retirement and massive, crushing debt due to a combination of bad luck and circumstances and stupidity and poor money management skills. Retirement was barely a consideration for me; I was just sick of always feeling on the brink of disaster and wanted us to stop hemorrhaging money. So to get to this moment, especially after the rollercoaster of layoffs and such that we've gone through since COVID started, even if this snapshot of our retirement is not the be all, end all solution to everything, is just ... OMG. I can't even describe how I feel right now.