Ceejay74's Personal Finance Blog

Not a great month for the markets, so our net worth fell by more than $16K (and our retirement account value by more than that; the total drop was offset by paying off a couple grand on our mortgages). But, the good news is we're still about $35K above our CoastFIRE number, so we're still on track!

Not much else to report financially since last month. I'm gearing up to do a big year-end review of our spending; I kept more detailed records of where we overspent (and a scant few places we underspent ha) so I can make a more realistic budget for 2025. This'll be a good learning-curve year for us, as AS and I will have completed our first full year of owning a business together. Overall it's been pretty good but hopefully we can do better next year now that we have more experience and more clients in our roster.

The big news this month is we heard from our auto insurance providers. Between the basic car coverage we share with our neighbors and the liability/umbrella stuff we have on our own, they are accepting our claim. (As a recap, NT struck a pedestrian and she incurred considerable medical bills and sued us.) It's still in process but it sounds like we don't have to worry about a giant damages bill. (I'm guessing premiums will go up, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Whatever it is can't be as bad as my fevered imaginings of our life savings being drained!)

That's so big that it's helping me deal with this morning's frustration, that a big hospital is apparently out of network for my insurance, so my annual mammogram came to $1500 (assuming there aren't additional bills from the labs/doctors/whatever, which sometimes happens). Our medical expenses have been well over what I budgeted for this year. It's not the only category to go over budget, though it is the biggest by far. I'm keeping close track of all unbudgeted spending and plan to do a big analysis at the end of the year to come up with more realistic budget numbers and figure out what we need to be making to cover us.

Neil is still in talks with the potential new employer, so if that works out I'm hoping they offer a good benefits package and I can get on his insurance (his current part-time job covers him and the kids well but it would cost a lot to put me on it, so I pay for private individual coverage). If not, I'll find another private provider and make sure the biggest hospital in our area is in network. (Honestly never thought to check because they are so ubiquitous.)

The other big thing that's been happening is my dad is going to build a new vacation home on the property that he deeded over to his daughters. It's not my money (unless you're talking eventual inheritance) but it's my land (shared with 7 other people officially, many more unofficially), so I've been helping with planning and estimates and stuff. Looks like it'll be about $200K plus water and some other things. It's a good chunk of his cash savings, but he also has his 401(k). I don't visit the property very often (it's in rural WV and I'm in MN), but I'm glad he's doing this because the property has immense family significance (my mom is even buried there) and the old house is falling apart.

We also found out my mom had 10% mineral rights on some land that's no longer in the family, and an oil/gas company did a lease offer, but I think it'll be about $16K divided among 4 sisters, so not much after taxes. We may end up using most of it to furnish the new vacation home anyway.

Those are all the big money updates, I think. Our net worth went up nearly $19K in September. CoastFIRE is still coasting; the number we need is $882,871 and we are at $945,679, so that's nice and comforting.

I haven't been paying attention to the markets at all this month, but we had a pretty great gain in our retirement accounts! Combined with about $2K of mortgage paydown, our net worth increased by just over $30K! I checked the CoastFIRE calculator and we're still coastin' along.

No word on the car accident lawsuit yet. Both our insurance carriers are on the case now. Hopefully between them they can sort it out and get a settlement that doesn't ruin us. This situation has convinced me though that we need to decouple our car stuff from our neighbors once this all shakes out. It's too weird and complicated. And also, we'll have teen drivers all too soon; I bet they won't want the headache of sharing a policy then!

I don't know if our neighbors will agree to sell us the car we mostly use or if we'll have to look at buying one of our own. I imagine the lawsuit will drag into next year anyway so we've got time before we need to figure that out.

On the plus side of all this, we've gone ahead with putting our rental property in an LLC and adding that entity to our insurance policy, and NT is in the process of getting liability insurance for his business. We'll be paying more attention to insurance of all kinds from now on!

On the work front, AS and I are doing well with our business. It seems to be organically building with not much work on our part. I'd like it to get a bit more profitable than it is but overall I'm happy with where we are. This is our first full year in business together and we've grossed (received and expected) $82K. For two people that's not a ton, but considering this is our first year I think it's pretty good. We don't work anywhere near full time so we have room to grow.

NT's still doing well with his part-time office job, his clothing side hustle and managing our rental property. Just recently, he got what could be a game-changing job prospect: a full time job, low six figures, involved in something he's extremely passionate about. It's too early in the talking stage with this new venture to get too excited about it or believe that it's real, but if it was, it'd be at least twice the salary he makes at his PT job! But we'll see. I'm not sure if/when he'll get a firm offer/contract or when the job would start.

It certainly comes at an interesting time for us, because AS has expressed interest in being able to get away from the Minnesota winters (and MN in general) for longer periods of time, and that resurfaced the idea of buying a place somewhere, which we've talked about off and on over the years as a sort of someday dream. We've been thinking about Europe first, since we already have ties there. But rather than England we'd love to have it somewhere like Italy or Portugal. At present a second/vacation home is well out of reach, but if NT really got this job, that might change things considerably.

But, every time I get too excited about our future prospects, the reality of that lawsuit hanging over our heads brings me back to earth. So I'm just taking things one day at a time and managing the things I can manage.

We had a modest month of retirement fund growth and are still on track with CoastFIRE! I also had a mini-revelation a few weeks ago that we may be a lot more set than I realized. I haven't factored Social Security benefits at all into my calculations; I'm a bit of a pessimist when it comes to thinking about whether it'll still be a thing when I'm of age. But I checked our benefits out of curiosity and saw that the combined benefit of our three accounts could be $4,200 if we start drawing down at age 62 and $7,200 if we start at age 70. Our estimated required monthly funds in retirement are $5,500. I had been a bit worried that I was estimating our needs too low, but now I'm much less worried because chances are we'll receive at least partial Social Security, so I think we should be good!

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.

What a weird, weird month it's been financially. Mostly good though! Our home values and retirement account values both went up and we paid the minimum on our mortgages, which netted us over $50K in net worth! Yes, we are an asset-multimillionaire household once again.

We also heard back about our individual taxes (the business ones got done a while ago) and somehow, bizarrely, we are getting a cumulative $16K back in refunds from state and federal over our two sets of returns (NT and I file together as the legally married pair while AS files as single).

We had been running about a $4K deficit in our budget, so we'll be able to wipe that out and start June in balance again. It's been a really long time since I gave any of us spending-money bonuses, so I'm setting aside $7K of it to do that ($2K per adult, $500 per kid). I'm also setting aside $2500 for tax prep fees because I can't remember what we were quoted and I know our taxes are complex. (Our previous guy charged about $1200; I know it'll be more but I don't think it's double, but I want to play it safe. Our new accountants are GOOD though, so worth the extra expense.) I also want to put about $1K into the savings account where we keep our renters' security deposits, because it's been a bit under what it's supposed to be for a couple months and I want to bring it back into balance for peace of mind (even though all our renters just re-upped for the year or are about to).

That leaves a little under $2K, which we might just hang onto; I know there are some little home improvements and some spring yard work for our place and the rental property, so it's good to have a little wiggle room.

But I'm also tempted to put some of it in retirement beCAUSE! My CoastFIRE calculation is showing that we are only $4,224 away! We aren't putting much toward retirement these days (ever since I got laid off about a year ago), just $250/month into NT's 401(k), so it'd take about 16 months to put that much into retirement if we didn't put any extra in. So we'll see. Maybe I'll at least put a little bit in, like a grand or so, and get us a little closer to true Coasting!

Other than that, our financial life is bits of ups and downs. I'm tracking budget categories more carefully this year to get a more accurate snapshot of what our line items should be. Our medical spending is about $1000 over budget so far this year; as I mentioned our unbudgeted spending was about $4000, so at present we're running about $1K per month light, but I'm also interested to see if things even out, because our birthdays in March (including my lavish 50th bday party) and one bigger medical bill might've skewed things.

AS and I are doing pretty well with our business; not making as much as I'd initially hoped because a couple things fell through early on, but we're slowly building other clients, so maybe we'll eventually get close to what I hope we can make. I'll be interested to see where we end up at the end of this year; I'm pretty confident we can do better next year, because I was basically sidelined by viruses for 2 months this year and we're doing pretty well considering that.

Well, being a multimillionaire household (assetwise at least) was fun while it lasted; this month we lost about $24K in net worth, even more than that in retirement account worth. It's been a good run and I'm sure it'll turn around again. With me and AS still getting our business up and running we haven't been contributing to retirement; NT puts some away through his work's 401k but that's it.

Still, we're kind of living Coast FIRE right now; none of us works a 9 to 5 anymore! We do need to put some more away for retirement at some point, but it doesn't feel as urgent since I'm not champing at the bit to get out of my full-time job.

Running a business is wild; I don't work 40 hours but I have a lot more responsibility so it's not something I just leave at the door when I get home. (Also I run it from home, so that probably adds to that sense of never quite leaving it.) But I really like not feeling beholden to bosses; I have clients to answer to, but there's no one client that controls my future, and I could look for other ones if my current ones don't work out for whatever reason.

Anyway, I wish I had more time to blog here like I used to, but I'm glad I'm still in the habit of doing the net worth update so I don't totally lose touch with y'all!

An exciting milestone: Our assets reached $2 million! I joked that we're multimillionaires but of course A) That's just assets, not net worth and B) There are 3 of us, so each of us has less than a million to our name. Still, it was a great one to reach!

A couple of interesting property things have happened that I'm not counting toward net worth: My dad transferred all his West Virginia properties to his kids. AS and I now each own 1/8th of the property that's my dad's main vacation destination, and I own 1/4th of three undeveloped properties in WV. They're not worth much and I wouldn't be able to sell them even if I wanted to, so I didn't count them. But the uninhabited ones especially may yield future deals with energy companies, so they're worth holding onto. (My dad also changed the title on his Virginia home to a "transfer on death" deed with me and my 3 sisters the eventual owners, but I'm hoping that doesn't change anything for many years!)

Another kinda cool thing: I checked our CoastFIRE calculations and realized I'd estimated our rental income to be $1500, but it's actually closer to $1700. When I lowered the monthly amount we'd need in retirement from $66,000 to $63,600, our right-now CoastFIRE number decreased from $916,186 to $882,871! We're at $874,651 in retirement savings right now, so in that light, CoastFIRE is much more within reach.

I mean, we're kind of Coasting now anyway; with AS and I still working to build our business up to income levels we're happy with, we've barely been able to put away any retirement income since June. NT has some amount going to retirement--$250 a month maybe?--with the 401(k) for his part-time job. Even just that little amount takes us to 3 years from CoastFIRE!

That's very good news, because even though running my own business is hard, I do not miss working for someone else, and I'd love to be able to keep doing this. The income isn't predictable, which is the main challenge. But knowing we don't need to be going full-tilt on retirement contributions makes it a lot more feasible, especially in these early days of it when we're still building a roster of ongoing clients.

It was an exciting month for net worth! NT got an inheritance from his grandma that enabled us to pay off our HELOC ($30K), I checked our rental property value and it's currently $30K higher than I had it valued at, we paid off another $2K or so of mortgage principal, and our retirement accounts went up about $25K. All told, we gained nearly $89K in net worth and our assets are $1700 away from hitting $2 million!

Our retirement accounts basically stayed stagnant and we didn't manage to contribute much, but we eked out a $3K increase in net worth due solely to two things: our regular mortgage payments and my getting info on two small retirement accounts that NT and AS have. So we're roughly where we were last month, but that's not terrible.

Money is tight here at the beginning of the year as projects for my new business have been slow to get started, but I'm talking to a lot of clients and prospects, so it looks promising that it'll get busy (and profitable) pretty soon!

What. A. Year. It was rough net-worth-wise until nearly the end, but the last two months of market gains and some debt paydown helped us end on a good note. Better place than we were at the end of 2022 but not as good as where our net worth was at the end of 2021 (our assets are higher but so is our debt compared with 2 years ago).

Snapshot of the past two years:

Dec 2021 assets: $1,579,801 ; Dec 2022 assets: $1,801,176 ; Dec 2023 assets: $1,939,211
Dec 2021 debt: $370,966; Dec 2022 debt: $791,694 ; Dec 2023 debt: $765,599
Dec 2021 net worth: $1,208,835; Dec 2022 net worth: $1,009,482 ; Dec 2023 net worth: $1,173,612

Since I haven't been blogging as regularly, I can't as easily sum up the whole year's financial activity. But the big things were: I got laid off in June, started my own business with AS, NT increased his hours at his job but we're still working to build to an income where we can comfortably afford the lifestyle we'd like and figure out how much we need to gross so it's enough after taxes.

One bright spot: I just did our CoastFIRE calculation and things are looking good. We don't have a regular cadence of retirement contributions anymore, but I ran a few different scenarios and $150 contribution per month would get us to where we need to be by 65 (16 years), and $2K per month would get us to CoastFIRE in one year! So whatever we manage to contribute this year as we build our business should help a lot, assuming the market doesn't crater again.

December net worth update:

Finally some gains! After our values sliding for many months, we finally clawed back some net worth. A bit was Roth contributions and debt paid off but most of it was market gains.

I'm scrambling with tons of catchup on my tasks and chores after finishing NaNoWriMo, but I'll post a longer life update when I do my end-of-year net worth update next month!

All our retirement accounts went down again, but due to a silly error last month, the pain is a little less on our balance sheet. Seems like last month I typed in one of NT's retirement account balances incorrectly--in fact $10K less than the actual balance. So last month it appeared we lost $25K in net worth but actually "only" lost $15K. This month we lost $15K but because I corrected that error from last month, it looks like we only lost $5K. The net result is, we've lost $55K of net worth over 3 months, or $30K over the past 4 months (because 4 months ago we got a $25K boost).

I know 3 months of losses isn't that big a window of time. Sure feels like a long time since we had a win though! At least our shared net worth is still over a million; hopefully we can cling on to that until the market turns upward again, but I don't take anything for granted.

Dang. In July I was all excited over a $25K increase in our net worth. Well, between August and September we lost $50K in net worth (most of it this past month), so we're now DOWN $25K from where we were in July.

Oh well. I haven't been able to contribute to retirement with our recent shifting around of job situations and income streams, but I took advantage of this low market and threw $300 in each of our Roths and a couple thousand in each of our kids' 529s. And soon, hopefully, we'll get a chunk of income that will allow me to pay down $3K or so of the HELOC. So hopefully next month will look brighter!

Well, it was fun while it lasted! This month we lost roughly half of the giant net worth gain we had last month. I can't really complain too much since we haven't been putting away for retirement or paying down extra debt principal.

Our financial life feels like it's slowly getting on track; I have two steady clients for my freelance business, though I probably need one or two more to bring in the level of income I'm going to want once my severance runs out in the next few weeks. AS is starting a 3-month contract job next month that might turn into something longer term; if not, we're building an LLC together so she can go back to freelancing. She's been having fun doing consulting work for $125 an hour and is also making kits and ebooks of some of her presentations she's done over the years to try and sell those online as well. NT will up his hours at his part-time job next month, which won't be a huge bump because they're offering benefits so the hourly rate is going down a bit. But it's exciting to have a 401(k) again and we'll see if the health insurance is better than our Obamacare that I got after my layoff.

I had just started to build up our EF again but we had some discouraging bumps that will wipe it out again (and then some possibly): $500 car repair, $1300 ceiling repair, and we filed a claim with our insurance for hail damage on our rental property's roof, so we'll see what that costs us. Oh well, I'll try again next month with seeding our EF. At least we did have that money so these expenses won't be as much of a strain on our regular budget.

It was a month of gains in the retirement accounts even though we didn't manage to contribute anything to them. Between stock market gains and mortgage paydown our net worth went up over $25K!

In terms of CoastFIRE, it's hard to do a calculation since most of our income is now freelance and I'm not sure when or how much I'll be able to contribute. My freelance business is slowly building at this point so I'm not at a point where I have anything left over after bills, but I hope to get to a good place in another month or two.

So I plugged in some random numbers. If we put in $500 per month we would not reach our retirement goal. If we contributed $1000 per month, we'd reach Coast FIRE in 9 years when I was 58. If we put in $2250 per month, which is what I hope to get to in a few months, we'd be at Coast FIRE in 4 years, or age 53.

It's hard to predict when my freelance will bring in enough for that, but it's good to see the different benchmarks, very motivating to get to that point! (Although on the flip side, if we can manage to keep our work scaled back from the 40-hour work week, we're basically achieving the lifestyle I hoped to get out of reaching Coast FIRE!)

Lots going on in the ceejay household! As reported last month, I was laid off from my longtime job and my last day was June 2. I was the last person in my household with a full-time job; AS left hers about 10 months ago and NT was laid off during lockdown.

AS has been doing freelance work and talking to someone about a possible job opportunity; that will start in September as a 3-month contract, and if it works out it could become a full-time gig. NT has a half-time job and manages our rental property; he might look at going up to 3/4 time at his job in the fall. I'm currently on severance through August, and I've been booking some freelance clients. I actually think I could beat my old full-time salary with part-time work if I play my cards right! I have two clients already and that's without much networking or hunting. Both say they have tons of work, so if they like what I do for them initially, they could both be pretty regular/substantial sources of income.

Our rental property was vacant in May but we managed to rent out one half of it in early June. We're finalizing details with some renters who should move into the other half in mid-July. So we lost some ground but it's looking promising that we'll be set for a year.

My dad randomly gifted us $10K without even knowing about my layoff and that was a HUGE help in covering expenses and not accruing additional debt while the rental property was vacant. I was even able to pay off some appliance debt from our kitchen reno where the deferred-interest promo period was about to end.

On top of all that, the market is up, so it's been a great month for net worth--we're up nearly $40K! I checked CoastFIRE and while we don't have any set retirement contributions right now, if I managed to put in $500 each per month in our Roths and 10% of our projected gross income, we would be 5 years away from CoastFIRE, a considerable improvement. I have to go through and work out our budget through the end of the year with severance, booked contract income and new healthcare premiums figured in, but I'm hoping things look stable enough to start putting some toward retirement. We do need to also be rebuilding our EF and paying down our HELOC after our giant tax bill last year, so I won't be able to ramp all the way up probably, but I'm encouraged we might be able to make progress after spinning our wheels on retirement for nearly a year. (I did have my 401k going during that time but most everything else was put on hold.)

Honestly, even if we don't get to Coast that fast, if we're able to scale back from full time work and still be contributing to retirement, it'll almost be like we're ALREADY Coasting!! I am now prepared for whatever curveballs; I feel like I've fully accepted that we're not in control of our destiny, but it feels hopeful to try and control what we can, barring unforeseeable circumstances.

Well it's been another eventful month! I got laid off at the beginning of the month from the company where I've worked for 17 years. I guess they're shrinking the marketing arm even more because the profits aren't there.

The good news is I got a decent severance agreement. I got 3 more weeks of work (my last day will be this Friday), 12 weeks' severance pay after that, and health insurance through June. (After that it's COBRA or Obamacare for me, NT and the kids, so I know that expense will go up.) I should get a bit of money from accrued unused vacation PTO as well. Seems they'll also hook me up with a job-finding consultancy that can help with resume building etc., so that's nice.

Even though I'll essentially get paid through the summer, I'm starting to look around at employment options now. I've got a call tomorrow with a former boss who may be able to give me some freelance writing work. Even if not, it'll be good to connect with her for networking's sake. A few other people have expressed interest in hiring me for freelance writing; I'll follow up with them once I finish out this final week of work. I figure this summer will be a good time to test the waters of freelancing/self-employment and see if I've got the temperament (and enough connections to make it a going concern).

We've been having trouble finding tenants for our rental property, but it seems we've got renters starting in early June for one side of it, and applicants who seem serious for the other half, maybe able to move in July 1. Fingers crossed on that as it's over $5K of income, over $3K of which goes to cover the mortgage and utilities, so having it empty in May really dragged down the already struggling budget!

AS's potential job thing continues to look very interesting and we should know more in a couple weeks, but she's essentially being asked to create a proposed job description and salary, and they'll see if they can make it happen for her. Meanwhile she continues to pull in freelance work, so while income is slow to come, she's definitely racking up future payments that'll help. And if this create-your-dream-job thing really comes to fruition, that'd be a massive weight off. She might even be able to put the kids on her health insurance! (Not NT because they're not legally married, but she IS legally the parent of both our kids. So then I'd just have to worry about NT on my insurance.)

My dad out of the blue decided to gift each of his kids $10K! This was a massive help to our budget deficit for May and June due to the empty rental property. We don't have the money yet but my sister is working on getting it to us. We've had to take money out of the HELOC but thanks to my dad will be able to pay it back in soon. And it'll cover the cost of a new computer, which I had to get because I've been using my company computer and need to turn that in at the end of my employment.

But for now, our HELOC debt is $7K more, we haven't been able to put away much for retirement, and the markets are slightly down from last month, so our net worth went down by about $8500. I didn't bother to do the Coast FIRE calculations since I know it'll be the same or worse compared with last month.

But, if I were able to make this freelance thing work, I could potentially be working a less than 40-hour week and pulling in the same money as before! My Coast FIRE goal was to work fewer hours but I'd have to wait until I could draw less income. This way, I could almost reach my Coast FIRE goal of less than full time before I've even reached my retirement savings goal! So we shall see.

Pretty good gain in retirement, about $10K this month. Coast FIRE now showing as 10 years away vs. 11 last month!

It's a very interesting and weird time for us financially. I wish I had time to blog here more frequently about it, but I've got so many things going on that I never get around to it! Let's see if I can sum up...

- Both units of our separate rental property are going vacant May 1. We think we have a renter lined up for June or July for one side; the other side's had some interest but none of it has come to anything. This means about a $5500 per month budget deficit.

- We're netting around $3500 on tax refunds and have $2K in the EF, so we can just cover the one month without borrowing. If both units aren't filled June 1, we may have to dip into our LOC.

- AS has freelance work lined up over the next several months, about $25K through September. Most of it won't start paying until June, but we know it's coming so may be able to help the budget shortfall (or at least help us pay down what we take from the LOC).

- I got a 3% raise, which honestly feels like a joke even as a cost-of-living raise since our expenses have gone up more like 20%-40% over the past year (utilities and groceries especially), but it's better than nothing. Netting about $150 per month more.

- AS is having some verrrry interesting talks with a guy she met through her publishing job; it's still too early to say anything definitive but she may have an exciting and lucrative job in a few months. It'll take a while for it to take shape and we're not sure when it'll materialize or what it'll mean financially, but it's super promising.

Long story short, our finances are feeling shaky and sketchy right now, but we're feeling pretty good about them turning around a bit (or maybe a lot) by the end of the year. Which is good since we still owe quite a bit on the tax bill and kitchen reno because of inflation and these income headwinds!

Slightly better retirement gains this month, though our CoastFIRE date moved from 8 years to 11 away...probably because I turned 49. Oh well.

It's been a pretty meh year financially so far... we still have $33K of debt for the tax bill and $3K owed on our kitchen and only $1500 in EF savings. The renters on our new place are leaving at the end of this month, so if we don't have both units rented by May 1, we may have to clean out our little EF and some other pockets of money. Hopefully it doesn't go vacant or if it does, only for a month or two.

Not a very interesting net worth update... our net worth went up by about $1300, mainly due to debt paydown, which means no Coast FIRE progress. Not much ground gained on paying down our tax bill but other than that things are fairly stable. Hopefully we'll make some progress worth writing about sometime soon!

Finally a more positive net worth outlook than we've had for a while! Our retirement accounts went up in value about $40K, we paid off a bit of our tax bill, and our COAST Fire timeline got 4 years shaved off: It now says we could reach it in 8 years vs. 12!

I'm going in to 2023 with far fewer expectations about how life will go. It's just too unpredictable. However, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying! On the financial side, since we have 1.5 steady incomes (plus rental property income), there's only so much I can say we'll be able to do with any amount of certainty. So I've set up a snap shot of "good," "better" and "best" scenarios and laid out how much extra income gross would need to be made (mainly on AS and her freelance business but also anything NT and I might pick up outside our regular jobs).

I don't know if this chart will make sense to anyone else, but it really helps me and AS when we're thinking through what we might be able to get done this year! Basically, I think we can save $5K to our EF, $9K to our Roths, and have small amounts for travel, home improvement and giving on my and NT's regular income, and if AS grosses $41,667, we should also be able to pay down $30K of tax/kitchen debt. If she made double that, we could get quite a bit more money for each of those categories. And in the best case scenario, if the three of us could pull in $139,769 gross between us in addition to our regular income, we could achieve everything on my financial wish list. That's a highly unlikely scenario but I wanted to put a price tag on our ideal state, so to speak. We're not shooting for it per se but it would be exceedingly cool if we could get there!

Hi everyone! It's been about four months since my last update. Financially not much has changed; we paid down some debt and lost some more value in our retirement accounts, so we gained $1,900 in net worth over 4 months.

Lifewise, AS is doing a LOT better mentally after quitting her high-stress job and has restarted her freelance business. It takes a bit to build future work so income has been slow to come this year, but she's got tons of work booked for the first part of 2023 so things will be looking up soon. NT got a part-time office job and likes it, so that's some steady income in addition to the rental property he's managing and the bits of money from other side hustles. The kiddos are getting great grades and doing well.

I've had a lot of ups and downs myself. My job and creative pursuits are going well. But my mom went into the hospital in late November and died on Dec. 1. I was able to travel to Virginia a couple days before; she was barely aware of her surroundings but I'm glad I could help my dad and my sisters. It was really really awful and hard. We buried her the next week in West Virginia on our family property and had a beautiful ceremony. I wish she could've been there for that part instead of the days of suffering in the hospital! I feel like I'm doing okay most of the time, but it's only been a month so the grief is still fresh when it hits me at unexpected times.

Anyway, it's been a real mixed bag of a year. Financially, we didn't get much farther on paying down the tax bill or the remainder of what we borrowed for the kitchen, and we haven't built up the EF yet. Coast FIRE is way, way off track since we haven't been able to put much to retirement for the past 6 months or so. But, in good news, I'm restarting our monthly Roth contributions, 50% of the max so $750 per month. If AS's freelance income is good I'll fill in with more contributions, but I also have to think about paying down the tax/kitchen debt, which is currently at about $39K, and rebuilding our EF, ideally to $20K. We also have to fix an electrical issue at the rental property that will be a few thousand. So we shall see.

I'll put our detailed current net worth and Coast FIRE calcluations below, but here's a snapshot of how things changed in 12 months:

December 2021 assets: $1,579,801 ; December 2022 assets: $1,801,176

December 2021 debt: $370,966; December 2022 debt: $791,694

December 2021 net worth: $1,208,835; December 2022 net worth: $1,009,482

CURRENT HOUSEHOLD NET WORTH

COAST FIRE STATUS

I use this Coast FIRE calculator (https://walletburst.com/tools/coast-fire-calc/) and according to it,  our retirement goal is $1.65 million by the time I'm 65 (17 years). It says we're currently 12 years (I'd be age 60) from our Coast FIRE number of $1.356 million. (That's with our 50% Roth contributions and my 401(k), which are the only two savings baked into our budget at this point.)

Here are the Coast FIRE parameters I use:

Ideal budget      Monthly

Housing            $0        (rents covering prop expenses)

Healthcare        $1,500

Groceries         $1,000

Fun      $1,500

Travel  $1,000

Utilities $500   

Giving  $500   

Home improvement       $500   

Gifts     $250   

Transportation  $250   

Monthly $7,000

Minus rental income      -$1,500

Total monthly    $5,500

Annual  $66,000          

I'm in between my spouses' age, so I used my age but our combined retirement investments.

Current age: 48

Retirement age: 65

Annual spending in retirement: $66,000

Monthly contribution: $1,451

Investment growth rate: 7%

Inflation rate: 3%

Withdrawal rate: 4%

Current invested assets: $688,216

Coast FIRE number at current age: $847,066

Last time I checked in (April), I was eyeing the possibility that we were only a couple years away from Coast FIRE. We had about $26K we'd taken out from HELOC and a zero-interest card for the kitchen reno, but I felt confident about paying it off.

Fast forward to early June. We expected we'd owe some taxes on the sale of the UK flat, but we'd already paid about $5K to the UK for capital gains, so we didn't think it'd be much in the US once they factored that in. We were wrong. We owed over $45K to the IRS and state.

We were able to pay it with our EF plus $30K on the LOC. I made the painful decision to make some cuts to our budget to pay pay down that amount on the LOC and save up $20K to rebuild our EF. We cut all retirement except my 401k, home improvement savings/repayments and charitable giving, freeing up about $4500 per month, so we figured we could have it paid off by March 2023 and restart retirement. The loss of 10 months toward Coast FIRE would be painful but not ruinous.

(Meanwhile of course our retirement funds continued to tank; we've lost 13% value in the past year.)

We managed to make better than expected progress on paying down the HELOC; $11,500 in about two months! But AS has been crumbling under the weight of her high-paying job for a few months, and things came to a head this month, necessitating her resignation.

Now the $4500 we'd cut from the budget is not quite enough to break even. So not only are we not putting much toward retirement, we're not putting anything toward paying back the tax bill either. So we're kind of stagnating.

But, the good news is I redid Coast FIRE and if we restarted retirement today, we'd only be 6 years from coasting. That's a loss of several years of coasting, but it's not as bad as I thought considering we've lost over $100K in retirement fund values.

Of course we can't restart retirement until we make more progress on the tax bill, but it's somewhat comforting.

Our current budget (which doesn't have retirement, home improvement or charitable giving) has us coming up about $1K short starting in October, but we've got two adults working on finding income to bring in, so covering living expenses won't be a challenge. The real challenge will be bringing in enough to quickly knock out the tax bill and restart our retirement contributions.

There have been so many financial hits I'm past reeling; the pandemic has had this kind of numbing effect where I'm always in a state of low grade stress that I don't notice, so other stressors sometimes don't seem to shock the system. (Other times relatively small stressors can completely overload my system, so it's all unpredictable.) We're just trying to be proactive. AS is restarting her self-employed writing/editing business and already has her first job lined up (writing a children's book for $700). NT has applied to a part-time job and is looking for more; meanwhile he's started doing DoorDash to bring in a bit. He also does a bit of work for our downstairs neighbors and manages our rental property, which is a vital part of our income. So we're fighting back, trying to regain momentum.

My plan is preliminary; maybe we'll end up restarting some retirement before we pay back the hole left by the tax bill. There may be other flaws in my calculations as well; we'll have to see how quickly our income comes back up and what other factors change. Because as many surprises as we've had, I'm not going to assume there are no more waiting around the corner! Hopefully there will be some good along with the bad surprises...

Meanwhile, I decided I should do a net worth and Coast FIRE status update. Fingers crossed this is a low point and we'll go up from here!!

Assets:

NT's UK pensions:

AV1: 22,397 pounds ($27,996)

SW: 27,225 pounds ($34,031)

AV2: 7,567 pounds ($9,459)

NT's trad. rollover IRA: $97,645

NT's Roth IRA: $63,092

NT's SEP/SIMPLE: $3,397

AS's trad. rollover IRA: $24,556

AS's Roth IRA: 88,082

AS's SEP IRA: $65,490

CJ's 401(k): $214,173

CJ's Roth IRA: $68,289

CJ/NT/AS house: $592,200 ($630,000 value -6%)

CJ/NT/AS rental property: $520,760 ($554,000 value -6%)

---

TOTAL ASSETS: $1,809,170

Debt:

Main mortgage $356,076

Rental property mortgage: $394,029

HELOC $38,500

Appliances CC $3,983

Loan from friends (duplex) $9,000

---

TOTAL DEBT $801,588

Current Estimated Net Worth: $1,007,582

April 2022 estimate: $1,110,372

Change in net worth: -$102,790

COAST FIRE:

We are currently only contributing $620 per month to retirement, so Coast FIRE is just a theoretical construct at this point. But if I assumed that NT and AS together can come up with $84K annual income, and if we can restart $1500 per month ROTHs plus put away 10% of their income, and if our rental property provides $1500 per month in passive income in retirement (which I'm reflecting in reduced expenses in retirement), we could potentially hit Coast FIRE in six years. Those are a lot of IFs in our current situation; if we only put $620 per month away, we wouldn't hit our retirement goal number by the time I turn 65. So clearly restarting contributions is a big priority, and hopefully we can do that earlyl next year.

I use this Coast FIRE calculator (https://walletburst.com/tools/coast-fire-calc/) and according to it,  our retirement goal is $1.65 million by the time I'm 65 (17 years). It says we're currently 6 years (I'd be age 54) from our Coast FIRE number of $1.072 million.

Here are the Coast FIRE parameters I use:

Ideal budget      Monthly

Housing            $0        (rents covering prop expenses)

Healthcare        $1,500

Groceries         $1,000

Fun      $1,500

Travel  $1,000

Utilities $500   

Giving  $500   

Home improvement       $500   

Gifts     $250   

Transportation  $250   

Monthly $7,000

Minus rental income      -$1,500

Total monthly    $5,500

Annual  $66,000          

I'm in between my spouses' age, so I used my age but our combined retirement investments.

Current age: 48

Retirement age: 65

Annual spending in retirement: $66,000

Monthly contribution: $2,561

Investment growth rate: 7%

Inflation rate: 3%

Withdrawal rate: 4%

Current invested assets: $696,210

Coast FIRE number at current age: $847,066

It's crazy that just under a year ago we had nearly $800K in retirement. We would be so close to Coast FIRE! But most of that loss was due to the stock market, so there's nothing I can do about that now.

This is something I just started thinking about yesterday, and I thought who better to ask than my SA buddies!

I use this calculator when tracking our progress toward potential Coast FIRE status:

https://walletburst.com/tools/coast-fire-calc/

As some of you may have read, we recently bought a rental property. While it's not fully rented yet, when it is, we think we can count on about $1500 monthly income after expenses.

Since we intend to hold onto this property and keep renting it, I was looking at the Coast FIRE calculator trying to figure out how to factor that in. The only solution I could come up with was to reduce the projected spending in retirement (since some of the spending would theoretically be covered by rental income vs. drawing down retirement funds).

Does that sound like the right way to think about this?