I thought the first time I became serious about financial independence was October 2014, but I was looking at a Facebook Timehop today and was greeted with this a link to an NY Times article entitled “Why You Hate Work” and my comment “Thank you for perfectly articulating what I’ve been trying to say. Early retirement here I come!” I don’t remember posting this or what was happening at the time, but apparently exactly one year ago I declared that I would retire early. My FIRE anniversary has come early!
This seems to have come at the perfect time since I just maxed out by 401K, am halfway to maxing my HSA and already done with my Traditional IRA. I’ve already saved as much as I did all of 2014 and am exactly halfway to my ambitious savings goal for the year. 2015 is going splendidly!
In honor of this milestone I re-read FI blog posts to see if anything has changed and looked over my past finances. After re-reading one of MMM’s posts about Net Worth I did some rough calculations to see how much I have of my total salary I have saved throughout my four years of adulthood and how much of that went to NYC rent. I was shocked to discover that of all the money I’ve made since graduating after taking out a rough 25% for taxes I have saved 48% of everything I have made. And of the remainder 42% was spent on NYC rent. That means I have only spent 10% of what I’ve made on real expenses. That includes paying for that First Class roundtrip ticket to Fiji and the Maldives. That’s shocking – especially since I have only been trying to save for 9 months out of the last 4 years. Maybe some people do have an easier time saving if it was their default all along.