Skip to main content

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!

11 thoughts to “Home Buying and Other Updates”

  1. Good luck in NC! I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog the past couple of years. As a fellow DMV resident, I admire your willpower to forgo the walkability of DC, although obviously the coronavirus situation had to have made that decision a lot easier. Please keep us posted as you make the transition down south and let us know how you find the suburb life!

    1. Thanks so much and really appreciate the support! We love DC, though we eventually would have left anyways even without the pandemic. Like you said the decision was a lot easier with everything going on. It’ll certainly be a big change but we’re excited about it!!

  2. WORST KEPT SECRET!! 🙂 But I’m so happy you finally came clean to all of your readers. The whole “getting engaged on the same day, in the same desert” should’ve been the final clue needed 😉
    Congrats again, to both of you, on all your recent successes. Wishing you much happiness together moving forward in NC!

  3. Wait what, I’m engaged to YOU?!?? Hmmmm, this is news to me, although it *has* seemed like you’re stalking me lately with getting engaged and buying a house at suspiciously close times to when I’ve been doing those things… 😘

  4. Hi Young Fire Knight, I’m sad to hear that the updates will be more infrequent and that the net worth ones will be dropped altogether though I do understand your reasoning. I’m in a similar situation to you ($62k salary in 2018, $95k today and am just about to hit $200k net worth) so it was fun following along your journey and racing you to the next goalpost. While your success may make you less relatable at large there are still people, like myself, who are very interested in your journey since we are on similar paths – I hope you find inspiration to share more in the future.

    Best Wishes.

  5. As a frequent reader of your blog, I definitely agree that your life has changed considerably in the last year and a half, pretty much all of it for the better! I’m sad to see the net worth updates will be going away but I understand the reasoning why. I agree with some of the comments above about your partner, definitely a poorly kept secret 😂

    Great news on the house. North Carolina is one of the booming areas of the country and I think you’ll love it there. You both are well on your way to a wonderful life together. That area is quite convenient to vacation spots and other destinations as well.

    One opinion I feel I need to share based on your comments/tone in your post about your personal wealth/success: Never apologize for or feel bad about your success! You don’t have to brag about it (you certainly don’t, and that’s admirable), but because you’re in a better position than a lot of other people should not be something you feel anxious or uncomfortable about. Yes, a lot of people are hurting financially these days (many of them through no fault of their own due to the government restrictions), but you worked hard to get where you’re at through education, experience, quality employment and doing a great job in your various positions. I’d argue your success should be celebrated and looked to as a model of how to make your way in the world the proper way — no shortcuts, cheating, fancy inheritances, etc. Just good, solid hard work, preparation and planning. Please know I am not admonishing you and I hope you do not take what I said the wrong way. Just wanted to share my thoughts because your journey has been inspiring to me. 🙂

  6. Congratulations, and I get the sentiment 100%… It feels self-congratulatory once the initial struggle subsides. But hey, that means you did things right! On to bigger and better things. Congratulations again to you both!

  7. Congrats on finally getting an offer accepted! We also had like 6 offers declined until we decided to just build. This was also back in February but our house will be done on the 28th of August. And that’s pretty cool you’re engaged to another fire blogger! That almost never happens. Too bad FinCon is cancelled this year but maybe I’ll get a chance to meet y’all next year in Austin!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: