Home Buying and Other Updates

I’ve got to say, it’s been a wild month. While I was expecting July to be lower key with a week-long vacation planned, it’s turned out to be anything but.

After several unsuccessful attempts at purchasing a home dating back to February in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, we finally had an offer get accepted! Of course this had to happen right before our (supposedly) relaxing vacation, but we took it in stride. We have a quick turn around with our close in mid-August, and then we officially move out of DC at the end of August.

We’re really looking forward to be moving to a bigger space. With both of us working full time remotely and really no end in sight, our 600 sq ft basement apartment was really starting to feel tight. With the move, our residence will now be a 3 bed/2.5 bath 1,500 sq ft home! We’ll each have desks and a space for monitors, keyboards, mouse, etc (after using the couch and laptops as our desks since March…). We’ll also have a guest bedroom, instead of a couch and air mattress for when family/friends visit!

We’re both bummed at leaving DC, especially in this manner with most of our favorite things about the city inaccessible and closed. We know we’ll be back at some point, but it won’t be the same as living here.

At the same time we’re both pretty excited to be moving to a new city. It’s my fiancée’s hometown and where her parents still live, so she gets to move back and explore her own city in a different way. It’s also a new adventure for me in an area I’ve really enjoyed visiting!

It’s crazy how fast it’s all happening, and now we are coordinating a move, planning projects for the house, and oh did I forget to mention we have a wedding next year to plan as well!?

I’m planning on writing a more detailed post about the home buying process and our experience with it at some point in the future, but figure we’ll let the dust settle with the move before getting ahead of ourselves!

Future of Blog/Net Worth Updates

It should come as no surprise when I say my activity on the blog has been lackluster at best this year. It’s been a struggle to find the motivation to write on my FI journey with so many bad things going on in the world. I have a lot of feelings around it, but it just doesn’t seem right to be writing on financial topics with so many people hurting financially and without a job.

I know it’s important to celebrate wins (see above section and last Net Worth Update), but I’m trying to also be respectful of the hard times people have been having.

In regards to blog writing, the last several months, and really dating back to around this time last year (I blame moving in with my fiancée! 😉 ) I’ve been posting very sporadically.

It’s around that time that I got another promotion at work and accepted a lot more responsibility which has kept me very busy. The extra commuting time also certainly didn’t help. However, to be brutally honest with myself I’ve realized that my heart just hasn’t quite been into blogging about my journey the past year.

When I started this blog at the end of 2017, I was at the very beginning of my FI journey. I was making a good salary (~$69K) but nothing crazy for a HCOL city like DC. I was excited to share my journey and what I was learning along the way.

Since then, so much has changed and nearly all for the better! My salary has increased nearly 60% to break six figures. My Net Worth has more than doubled – just barely crossing the $200K milestone in May. I’ve optimized my finances to the point where I don’t have to think much about maintaining a 65% savings rate (which will only likely increase with the move to NC).

With all these changes it’s weighed on me that my advice now could probably be construed as “out of touch”. Let’s be real: it’s a lot easier to maintain a high savings rate and hit Net Worth milestones much faster with a high income.

I haven’t failed to notice my Net Worth has been rising a lot faster recently. Sure, with more money invested my money is working harder and returning more for me, but let’s not ignore the impact of a six figure salary on what that’s been doing as well.

While I don’t think my journey, findings, or advice is somehow invalid now that I make six figures, it just feels different and less relatable to the majority of people out there.

I write this out to give some background on my thoughts and why I’ll likely be writing even more sporadically going forward.

While I know people enjoy the Net Worth reports, I’m sad to say that last month’s was my last one. Crossing the $200K mark was an awesome milestone, and it felt like a good place to leave it at.

The $100K milestones have been arriving faster now, and the simple math says that this trend will continue. With so much of my money invested in the stock market, it’s pretty easy to tell which direction my net worth headed for the month based on the return of VTSAX. So long as the stock market has positive returns, my net worth will follow.

In addition, with a wedding coming up within the next year, my fiancée and I have determined that we’ll be combining finances at some point, likely at year end. While I was fine sharing my own net worth on a monthly basis, it’s now not just my finances that I’d be sharing.

Being cognizant of that I figured it was best to just end them altogether. I’m still trying to figure out potential other ways to give updates, but I’m not really sure what that would look like quite yet.

Where to Find Me

With all that being said, I’m not just going to disappear on you all! I’m keeping the blog around, just not making any guarantees as to how often I’ll be posting. It could be once a month, once a quarter, or heck, maybe even once a year. Someday I may rediscover the passion and get back to more regular posting, but we’ll just have to see.

In the meantime I’ll still be hanging around via Twitter and Instagram. I’m thinking I could possibly handle writing out my FI thoughts in shorter form more consistently? We’ll see!

I’ve also been actively working towards one of my goals this year by starting a new online side project which I’m excited about. It’s on pause until we complete the move, but I’m eager to get back into it. That’s also yet another reason for the lack of time put into this blog.

Last by certainly not least, if you’re interested in keeping up more closely with my happenings there’s one other way you can do that…

You see, we’ve kept it a secret from the online world for quite some time, but figured it was about time we came clean to you all. With the upcoming move it was only a matter of time before people put two and two together.

While I’ve talked about my fiancée in vague terms for quite some time, she’s actually a FI blogger herself (a more popular blogger than me at that!) where she writes at reachingforfi.com. We chose to keep our relationship status under wraps from the beginning for several reasons, but with a big move and upcoming wedding, we both agreed it was going to be pretty tough to maintain that.

A few readers of both our blogs already figured it out, and we’ve outed ourselves by attending Camp FI and Fincon together in person, but we appreciate those that knew for respecting our online privacy!

Erin writes monthly spend reports similar to my own (minus the net worth part) where you can also see what we’ve been up to on a monthly basis. So if I’ve been slacking you can keep up with our adventures over there!

While I may be writing less, I’m still fully invested (get it? 🙂 ) in my FI lifestyle and goal. It’s only a matter of time before we get there!