The Financial Independence Project

A Long Overdue 2020 Update

July 14, 2020 By Julia Leave a Comment

It has been several months since I have provided a substantial update on this blog and I think it is about time to start writing more and updating what has been happening since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. If you are just interested in the numbers you can skip to the last part of this post, but you will miss a lot of context that I think is important about our story so far this year. During this time there have been many challenges, a few bright spots, a few negative things, and a lot of things I would consider mixed. Most of all we have had to adapt to a lot of changes, some purposeful some out of our control. On top of everything going on with the pandemic, this has also been one of my busiest periods for work during a time where I have had limited time and focus. The best way to sum up the last few months is that I have been far too drained to write much if at all outside of my job. I have been mentally and physically exhausted and the amount of time to write for myself, such as on this blog, has been almost zero. Plus finding the words or motivation to write about personal finance during a global pandemic and the critical importance of the Black Lives Matter protests has seemed impossible and ill-timed.

Over the last few days however, I have found myself in a place where I am starting to get comfortable writing again for myself and so I decided to sit down and write a little bit about our story for the first part of this year.

So here a few of the highlights for me and my family for the last five months…

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Goals for 2020

January 29, 2020 By Julia Leave a Comment

Last week I posted a yearly review and reflection about 2019. Now we are starting to look at 2020 and I thought I would share some of our goals for this year. This post is actually a lot of copying and pasting from running minutes I took while discussing this in one of our family meetings. This is a process that we normally do a little bit sooner, either right before 2020 starts, or just shortly after, but this year we are a few weeks behind. We have been passing around an awful cold in our house since the beginning of the year, so we are a little bit behind on a lot of things, but that is ok. In the end a lot of our goals for 2020 look very similar to 2019, and we think that is probably a good thing. It means that a lot of the decisions and goals we are setting continue to push us further in the direction we want to go. I imagine that next year this may change significantly as we get closer and closer to our financial independence goal. So after a thorough discussion here are the goals we have set for 2020…

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2019: A review and some reflections

January 22, 2020 By Julia Leave a Comment

I am a strong advocate of reflecting on many things in life whether measured by time, event, or experience. It is an integral part of learning and being able to make better informed decisions in the future, and this usually works as long as the reflection is honest and focused on things that are well structured and within our control. This past week we spent several hours reviewing and reflecting on 2019 together so that we could be better informed when setting some goals and plans for 2020. While most of this post will look back at 2019 inside the framework of our financial independence project, I will also highlight a few things outside of money and finance.

I will start with the easy part, a financial review…

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Our Investing History

December 23, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

This is the third and final post where we are being completely open with the history of our income, spending, saving, and investing. If you have not already done so I encourage you to read the history of our income, and history of our spending and saving first. This final post in the series is about the history of our investing and will be the shortest and probably the least interesting one since our investing history is fairly boring, as I feel it should be.

I guess this is the part where I should provide an important disclaimer that this post discussing our investing history should only be considered informational and educational about our specific situation and circumstances. Nothing I write should be considered advice of any kind! As I also say in my profession, always do your own research from as many reputable and quality sources as you can. Then you can make your own judgements and decisions based on that research. Please don’t consider this post, or anything I write to be your single source for information about investing.

Ok with the obligatory disclaimer out of the way, here is a look at our investing history…

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Our History of Spending and Saving

December 19, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

Unlike our history of income I posted earlier, the history of our spending and saving does not go back quite as far, at least with 100% accuracy. It was only in 2010 that we started tracking all of our spending, first in spreadsheets, then in YNAB, and now back to spreadsheets (since 2016). This tracking coincides with the first year we were living together, so it seemed like a good place to start. Even though I do not have the exact numbers for the years leading up to 2010 I can make some pretty good estimates about our spending and saving that I will highlight in this post. Starting in 2010, the numbers in this Google Sheet are the exact amounts that we spent each year. If you compare this to our income, the difference (after taxes) is what we saved and in most cases invested. The exception to this is 2018 where we spent much more than we earned after taxes which I will discuss later in this post. If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to read our History of Income post first, and then also read our post on our History of Investing. Reading all three posts will help provide a lot more context that was just too much information to put into one post. The history of our income also gives our rationale for being willing to share this information so openly on the internet.

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Our Income History

December 19, 2019 By Julia 2 Comments

Before launching this blog I had a long conversation with my spouse about how open we wanted to be and how much we were willing to share online. I knew that at some point I was planning on sharing my real identity so we had to consider that once that veil of anonymity was pierced all of our finances would be open to the world. In the end we decided to go ahead and be completely open and transparent for several reasons.

First, we wanted to share our personal path and story with all the details so that anyone reading could make comparisons to their own circumstances and find things that may be similar or that they could identify with that could be modeled, considered, or learned from (good and bad). We think the more unique voices that share their stories online the better, and we wanted to add our voice in the most honest and transparent way possible.

Second, anyone who knows who I am can easily go online and look up my salary, including my previous salary by year since I am a public employee in North Carolina. To be honest, I wish all jobs shared everyone’s salary whether the job is public or private because I think It would be one step to showing both systemic and individual inequities. Whether this would promote change, I don’t know because even with public knowledge of salaries at my university there are still a lot of pay inequities based on non-relevant factors…

Finally, and one of the main reasons we are willing to be open and share our complete financial picture and history is that we are already in the public space for a much different, larger, and more important set of issues. It is hard to imagine being more of a target (online and offline) than we already are from some groups, so sharing our financial details seems so small in comparison. More importantly we want to be a voice that can say that even with certain circumstances, barriers, and systemic challenges we are still in a position to pursue financial independence. Don’t get me wrong we still have benefited from certain privileges, and in some cases luck, but we want to acknowledge and discuss all of the elements of our journey, positive and negative, as well as what is a result of our actions versus luck or circumstance.

So with the background of why we are willing to share this out of the way, this is the first in a set of three posts where we are opening up about more than just our current income, expenses, and net worth. I wanted to share the history of our path as best as it could be reconstructed that got us to this point. In this post I am going to share our income history, is followed by a post about our spending and saving and a final post on our investing history.

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