My Partner Reached FI!!! A Q&A

When I announced that my partner hit his FI number on Instagram, someone commented (and I quote in its entirety): “Blog Post.” So here is “Blog Post.” I unsurprisingly vetoed using that as the actual blog post title, but here is my lovely Partner to tell you about his journey to FI, based on questions y’all submitted in my Instagram stories. Take it away my dude!

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Hi all! Purple’s Partner here. Thanks for the questions and thanks to Purple for having me back! Like every time I try to write something short, this ended up super long. I’m skimming over some of the questions that I covered in the previous Q&A post, if you haven’t read it you can find it here:

• Purple’s Partner Spills All!: Answering Your Questions & Concerns

FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

Will he keep working even though he hit FI? Or immediately resign?
How are you preparing for your FI lifestyle before quitting or will you keep the same job for a long time?
Why is he not retiring yet?
Why does he want to keep working?
When is he planning on retiring?
Why do you continue to work? Thank you!!!

I’m planning to keep working for a few more years for a couple of reasons. I’m not saving for myself anymore, just paying my living expenses and letting my own savings compound in the market for another few years. I’m currently diverting the rest of my income to help out with retirement for some very deserving people I love (not Purple, she gets nothing), and continuing to donate to causes I believe in.

• The Psychology Of Giving: How I Tricked Myself Into Donating More

As I talked about in the last Q&A post, going fully remote and being able to live the nomad life has opened up a lot of the things I was looking forward to in retirement without needing to be retired yet, and the drive to retire ASAP to be happy seems a lot less pressing. I’m also lucky to have found a job and team I enjoy working with. So it doesn’t feel like much of a sacrifice to use my peak earnings to dump money into a good cause for a few years.

I actually have a very specific retirement date in mind, I’m just not sharing it in case my manager is reading this.

What is he most excited about being FI?! Love you two!

There’s a lot I’m looking forward to about being retired, but for now I’m really excited just to have saving for FI done. I don’t have to work any more. It’s an immense safety net. Reaching FI felt amazing, even though nothing material has changed in my life yet, because it’s something I planned and worked for for 12 years.

And there’s some relief in putting it out of my head – I largely stopped reading FIRE blogs and the r/fi subreddit for the second half of my journey, but then found my attention pulled back more and more as I was nearing the finish line, especially checking and rechecking my charts and projections and the market numbers. It didn’t help that the market vacillated wildly while I kept plugging along, so my projected FI date kept changing. It’s freeing to have it completed, and to feel like I’m in a new phase of my life.

THE JOURNEY

How did you learn about FIRE and how long did you do it before Purple joined in?
Did he need much convincing to join FIRE?

I first found out about FIRE from reddit r/personalfinance and then r/financialindependence and was pretty immediately into it, before excitedly pestering Purple about doing it with me.

• How My Partner Convinced Me To Retire Early

This many years later it can be hard to remember what it was like not to know about and agree with FIRE. I talk more about it in the previous post, but I read about FIRE at the same time I was deep diving on personal finance in general, and it felt like a very natural extension of being frugal and trying to save wisely, which I was already into. Not having spent a lot, buying future freedom always seemed like the most effective way to spend my newly made money.

I think I was kind of surprised at how accessible it seemed. On one hand, about a million dollars is a lot of money, but on the other hand it didn’t seem that much to buy a lifetime of freedom.

What is the one change that helped propel your journey to FI?

Leaving NYC was the biggest change that allowed me to spend significantly less and start saving a big portion of my income early in my career. Even if since then, raises have allowed me to save even more aggressively, the compounding gains on that early savings made a big difference.

• Transition Complete: NYC to Seattle

WORK

What field does he work in?
What was his full remote job to allow him to travel with you, while you hit FIRE?

I’ve been a programmer at a few small and medium sized startups. I chose stock options (so far worthless), and being fully remote (so far awesome), over the higher potential salaries of bigger tech companies. When I went remote it was an easy negotiation with my small company, we already had some remote programmers. From then on, I’ve only interviewed at fully remote places.

Did you have any backup plans if you could not work remote or if laid off?

If I wasn’t able to find another remote job, yeah, that would have been a pretty hard conversation with Purple about how many months she wants to travel on her own. I think more likely I would have been able to find a remote job at a lower salary, which I think I would have taken.

If laid off – I had enough money to weather a long job search again, and once we were fully remote, we could always drastically cut expenses by moving somewhere cheap if necessary.

Did you take breaks/mini-retirements along the way?

I did take a nine month sabbatical between jobs once, which may have set me back that nine months plus another nine months due to the opportunity cost of what I could have been saving, (which put me back 68k in spending and missed savings by my estimate) *but* switching jobs has always led to better pay growth, so it’s pretty hard to calculate. I really appreciated the break and time to decompress either way.

How has he been able to manage time zone differences with work?

Thailand was the only very hard time zone so far, we’ll see how Europe goes when we do it this fall. Otherwise, I often start work pretty early and work 7am-3pm when I’m on the west coast, and my company’s meetings are generally scheduled for a multi time zone American team.

The world also feels pretty different post COVID around our expectations of what work looks like. It feels like there’s more acceptance that people have lives and children that can interrupt meetings.

When we originally dreamed of traveling full time, I hoped I could just work whatever hours I wanted to and turn in good code once a week or something, but the realities of collaborative work haven’t really allowed that. So I do think work has still somewhat limited our ability to adventure and explore however we want.

Has FI changed your stress levels when it comes to work?

Absolutely, I’m finding myself more open about my preferences and more direct with feedback. I think it’s been a slow build up while nearing FI, not just after hitting the specific number. One example is approaching my manager and saying, “I find interviewing potential hires stressful and distracting and don’t want to do it.” I haven’t used “or fire me” as an ultimatum, and don’t think I would. This also coincides with increasing seniority, so I’m not sure how much it’s FU money vs me getting harder to replace.

Knowing I can easily take another long sabbatical if necessary has definitely made the turbulent tech market less frightening, I don’t have to worry about layoffs. And in general, I have found myself less stressed.

If you could go back to the start of your career and do it all over, what would you do the same/different?

I would focus on my own mental health and get on antidepressants sooner. Honestly that’s made the largest difference in my productivity and happiness at work, and I think it really sped up my career growth.

Alternately, I think I would have considered trying for larger, more established tech companies with higher salaries and 401k matching to kick start my savings early on, and only try shifting to startups/fully remote positions later in my career – I’m not sure though. I also probably could have gotten more raises earlier by switching companies more often.

THE NUMBERS

What was his salary range over the years?
Average annual income before retirement?
What did your income progression look like over your working years?
What was his savings rate?
What percent of monthly income do you invest?

Here are the numbers! I appreciate that Purple has been super transparent through the years, so here’s a fair bit of transparency.

You can view it larger here if you want to.

I’ve rounded my salary to the nearest 10k and raise dates to the nearest quarter for anonymity, for plausible deniability in case any of my probably FIRE-minded engineering managers are reading this.

Some dates and important notes:

2011

I was interning for pocket change, I think <$15K a year.

2012

In March I started tracking my money more carefully with a net worth of -$11K due to student loans. By mid 2012 I was salaried at $55K, and focused on paying off my student loans and saving for an emergency fund.

In Q4 I hit a net worth of $0!

2014

I switched from Mint to YNAB, finished paying off my loans and focused on bumping up my emergency fund to 6 months. Hit a net worth of $10K.

In November I received my first investment gains on the books: $70.64. Vanguard from the beginning!

2015

In the summer we moved to Seattle and the rent difference unlocked a much higher savings rate, helped by a series of raises.

2017

In Q1 I hit a net worth of $100K for the first time.

2018

In Q3 my net worth reached $200K, things felt like they were speeding up!

2019

In Q1 work got really stressful, so I saved up a $30K cash buffer, stopped investing temporarily, and quit my job in Q2 with a net worth of ~$275K with the market high. I took a 9 month sabbatical although the last few months were soured by job hunting.

2020

In March the market hit a low from COVID, with a net worth of $225K, before I found a new job with a big bump in salary to $150K.

2021

The market was steadily increasing along with higher savings. In May my net worth hit $500K and in the 14 months before that it had passed $300K and $400K, which felt pretty surreal.

2022

In April the market hit new highs and suddenly my total market returns hit >1/3rd of my net worth.

In September the market had wavered around for a while and I continued dumping savings into it. I hit a low of $526K. In retrospect this is when the market took off again.

2023

In July my net worth hit $760K, FI felt so close! I was recalculating my timeline multiple times a month, before the market declined for a few months.

In November I hit $780K, surpassing my FI goal of $777k! I cheated a bit by celebrating the day the market hit my goal, and then again on spreadsheet day the first of the next month when I got to “lock in” the number based on my monthly reporting strategy.

2024

In March, after waiting for the market to go up for a while, it then continued to rise rapidly afterwards, and my net worth hit $897K.

It was a pretty wild ride, and by wild I mean mostly boring and by ride I mean a thing that I did with careful planning.

Regarding my salary growth, according to the latest data I could find, I was in the 93rd percentile in the US in 2022. I think there’s a ton of useful knowledge in the FIRE movement for people with average salaries, and having a high savings rate can be life changing even if you aren’t able to retire early.

But I don’t think the 9 to 15 year career timelines Purple and I have managed are accessible without high salaries, or without extreme sacrifices (which we haven’t had to make), and I always want to be up front about that.

• I Haven’t Sacrificed Anything On The Road To Financial Independence

A total aside: It’s also interesting to me that there’s such a high overlap of FIRE mindedness in programmers and engineers – probably because of high salaries, but also potentially because of lower social expectations – we’re not expected to dress well or have fancy houses in the same way as lawyers or doctors, and I’m curious what effect it has that we often start making decent money earlier into our adulthood. And maybe it’s just applying engineering thinking to money too.

As to my savings rate, why has it plateaued while my income continued to rise? That’s a good question, somebody should look into that. Turns out accounting is hard.

From what I can tell, it’s partially that my spending has gone up from $24K to $27K through the years, and partially because I’ve been giving half of all my raises to charity.

What is his FI number? Breakdown, next steps etc 🙂 
Would he be willing to share his numbers?
What is his FI goal and when did he start?
What is his FI number? How long did it take?

My original goal back in NYC when I first learned about FIRE was $1.2 million, without a ton of math behind it. I adjusted it to $600K after I had a more realistic picture of what I could comfortably spend each year in a place like Seattle. 

About two years ago I decided to switch from a 4% to 3.5% withdrawal rate, which brought my goal to $685K. I’d started at 4% due to the Trinity Study with the understanding that I had a much longer than 30 year retirement, but also had room for flexibility and adjustment in the long run.

But a number of things made me want more safety: a lot more poking at cfiresim, high CAPE numbers, recognition that my needs and spending (especially medical) might change dramatically in thirty years, and really reckoning with “past returns do not guarantee future results” and the possibility that the future looks very dissimilar to the past. Everything is personal risk tolerance, but also weighted against the opportunity cost of my current time, and it seemed less worth it to accept more risk to retire a few years earlier.

I then raised my FI number to $771K (rounded up to a nice $777K) because it was like five years out of date and I needed to adjust for a lot of inflation and my current YNAB spending data.

It would be really interesting to go back and try to find my projected FI dates through the years, based on MMM’s “one simple rule” post, and then based on my own spreadsheets.

It’s hard to account for salary growth in planning. All in all it took ~12 years post college, although the first two and a half were more planning than actual saving. 

Also, the market has continued going up dramatically since I hit my FI number. The month I hit FI, my accounts were 27% growth and 73% savings, but it’s swung up to 36% growth in the five months since then.

What is your asset allocation?
Is he 100% VTSAX too?

I have not been super principled about this. I started out liking the simplicity of a target retirement fund, and on more research and from learning my own risk tolerance, I am now sitting at ~97% stocks (80% VTSAX, 20% VTIAX international). 72% brokerage, 28% a mix of 401k, Roth IRA and Trad IRA.

The other 3% is bonds, which are mostly in target retirement funds that I bought a while ago. No crypto. (I’m also mad that “crypto” has been co-opted by cryptocurrencies from the much cooler cryptography.)

Did he do like you and prep a cash reserve?

I’m not planning to go beyond keeping ~$10K in Ally for my emergency fund and ~$12K in my checking account for expenses. I don’t fully buy the argument for a cash cushion vs just analyzing it as a fixed cash allocation, and if I’m going to have a ‘cash’ allocation I’d just make it a larger bond allocation.

I may revisit this, but it’ll largely be about cash flow (how easy it is to access money when I want to) rather than optimizing market returns by trying to avoid selling in a downturn. My goal was to have a safe enough withdrawal rate that I could not worry about it.

What method did you use to calculate your FI number?
How did you determine your number?

I’ve tracked every dollar I’ve spent for the last 10 years since I started using YNAB in 2014, and I used Mint fairly accurately before that, so I have great and pretty consistent data on what I need to spend to be comfortable. I’ve set general budgets, but have been open to going over and under them (especially when graphics cards were obscenely priced (thanks for nothing, crypto)) and Elden Ring is coming out, that spike shows up in my spending charts).

It helped to get into personal finance and FIRE before I was making enough money to actually blow it on anything. I got to design my budget from scratch and experiment.

From there, I just started with the 4% from reading MMM and r/fi, and have adjusted it since then to 3.5% like I mentioned above.

What is the difference in spending that impacted the difference in FI?

Purple and I traded off who made more for most of her career. It was only right around when she was retiring that my salary started outpacing hers. She had a few small breaks while looking for jobs while I had a 9 month sabbatical. I’ve consistently spent more than her, about ~$5-7K on average. And I was shooting for a 3.5% safe withdrawal rate compared to her 4%.

Will you continue to split costs 50/50?

Yep! I know it can breed resentment or not make sense for a lot of couples, but splitting everything we share 50/50 works really well for us.

What are his estimated annual expenses for retirement? How confident is he in his FI number?

I’m budgeting $27K for the first year, which has been very comfortable the last few years while traveling. I’m planning to try keeping to that for the first five or ten years, but doing research on CAPE based strategies to have a clear guide for when it’s safe to spend more.

I feel very confident in a 3.5% withdrawal rate, but also in our ability to dynamically adapt. I wouldn’t cut my spending through regular downturns, the goal of a safe withdrawal rate should be to avoid having to worry about the ups and downs. But if fifteen years go by and it starts to look like the world is *very* different than what we based our research on, we could cut costs and start making money again. I think it’s likely that I’ll continue to develop my programming skills for my own interests, and even if I had to re-enter the workforce at half my current salary for some reason, that can still make a big difference.

I also have the benefit of a few more years in the market while I work on my other savings goals, so that may help mitigate sequence of returns risk.

Would your FIRE number be higher if you didn’t have a live-in partner?

I don’t think so. I would probably be traveling less and spending more time near my family in a low cost of living area. I’m not sure I would have ventured out into full time nomad life on my own, so it’s possible I would be living pretty cheaply in a small city, but I guess it’s also possible that I would still be in NYC and would be spending $5K a month on rent and $2K a month on bars. 

PLANS

What are his plans after RE?
What would you like to do in early retirement?
Congratulations! Do you have hobbies that you are not able to spend time doing due to work?

I have a lot of interests I’d like to put more time into, but for starters I think I’ll lay face down on the floor for a month and just rest. After that, I’d love to:

• Meditate.
• Tinker with making video games.
• Learn 3d modeling in blender.
• Build a small house, with solar panels and a heat pump, and a woodworking workshop, and a separate metalworking workshop, and a squat rack. I think you want what you don’t have and nomad life is making me want to own a house and collect cool tools.
• Play Mario Kart with my nieces and nephews.
• Go on hikes and longer runs.
• Start reading books a lot more again. 
• Learn to slow down my attention span again, get off of twitter and reddit so much. I continually try that already to varying degrees of success, so we’ll see.
• Cook more and more elaborately. 
• Bake bread again.
• Take Spanish classes to force me to get over my anxious self and embarrass myself enough to practice.
• Use programming to help people I know solve problems, which actually comes up a fair bit. I’ve helped make personal sites, small company e-shops, helped write published academic code, powerpoint macros, excel programs, etc etc. Turns out lots of people have problems you can solve with code, and it’d be fun to have time to go way overboard with it.

I would love to spend more time on a lot of my hobbies now, but have found it pretty limited to when I happen to have enough brain juice left over after work, which hasn’t been that often. Work programming can be rewarding, but I feel like I have only so much motivation and deep mental focus and I spend most of it at work.

FEELINGS

How did it feel working when your partner wasn’t?
Was it hard to have asynchronous timelines with your partner?
How did he feel when you reached FI first and he still had to work?
Was he annoyed that he had introduced you to FI and then you hit it first?

I talked about this some in the last Q+A post, and I think it’s been pretty consistent. I’m really happy for her, for her happiness and contentment and hobbies and adventures. I think I’m most jealous when I don’t sleep well and just want to stay in bed in the morning.

But also, I think my revealed values showed I was just a bit more into getting lunch out and building gaming PCs and buying bikes and not travel hacking or planning trips as far in advance as she does.

What do you think will be the hardest thing about transitioning away from full time?

I got into FIRE at a very different time in my career and mental health, when it seemed like a full solution to many of my problems. I’ve since come to enjoy being good at something and solving hard problems with smart people. So I’m definitely asking myself, how do I keep myself motivated to do interesting things?

I think Purple is actually more intrinsically motivated to do things than I am, but I did find myself naturally diving into projects during my sabbatical, after a break and decompression. And how will I feel about myself if somebody isn’t paying me money to solve problems? I’ve inevitably absorbed some of our cultural expectations/values around work being a core part of our identity. 

Conclusion

Thanks for reading all this (or skimming parts, that’s fine too). Hopefully the experiences or numbers are encouraging or useful to some of you, I’m super thankful for the bloggers and redditors I learned from back in the day.

And that’s it! Thank you so much to my Partner for taking the time to answer all of these questions. I hope between this post, his writing on his donation strategies , how he makes coffee anywhere and his last Q+A post that y’all have a better idea of who he is. I’m super proud of him and so excited for us to enter this next stage of financially independent life together!

Do you have any other questions for my Partner?