Eighteen months ago we decided to take a break from blogging about our FIRE Project, and our life in general. It was one of those well needed breaks from many things in our life. I lost a family member after a long battle with cancer, and then we had other medical issues in our immediate family that became the focus of most of our time and energy. The time away was well needed and thankfully we were able to come out on the other side and have now finally started to experience some normalcy in our lives again. I will admit that during this time the last thing on our mind was our FI project, but luckily many of the same attitudes and goals remained intact during this time away, although a little bit delayed because of setbacks related to health and our very broken health care and health insurance system. Now that we have made it through this stage and associated challenges we both really wanted to get back to focusing on this project and the goals we set out for ourselves.
In the last post before taking a break we were very close to reaching our initial goal, but because of health care costs and other issues we find ourselves still a fair amount away from where we want to be to reach FI (our FI number). This stems from two changes we have experienced and discussed which has led to some revisions and updates to our plan. The first is simply that we had a lot of health care expenses paid for out of pocket that were not covered by health insurance which I will probably rant on in several follow-up posts. The next was the realization that these types of events, while uncommon, necessitate the need to raise our target amount from the initial figure that we projected to a higher amount. We moved our goal for the initial $1,200,000 to $1,600,000, and have also made some changes to account for potential health care costs in the future.
So here we are again opening up our project and story for others to read and follow as we take this journey. For the blog, instead of just adding this post to the old ones, we decided to do a complete reboot and start over because so much has changed since our first post to now, plus we have decided to be a little bit more open about our lives and have less anonymity on this site at the sacrifice of a little privacy. Also, our outlook, vision, and approach has changed enough that we just decided to start fresh with content and build from this point forward. All of the old posts are archived, although we will be going through them and reposting many of them in the coming weeks with some additional context and updates. We also realize that the website needs a lot of work, but rather than wait until everything is perfect, we are just going to build this thing as we go. Personally, I was ready to just jump in and start writing again, so I did not want to wait any longer by taking the time to make sure everything works or try to figure out whether we want a redesign for the site. I actually like the minimalist approach we have taken to our site, but we will see what we come up with as we continue.
Anyway we are glad to be back writing and sharing our experiences here on this site, and are hoping to be more open about both or lives and our finances so that our story might inspire or encourage others with similar goals or values. We are not perfect and have certainly screwed things up along the way many times, but we are adamant about making this work, so here we go again…
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