I just realized that my passive income from investments (assuming an average 7% market return) has now surpassed what a minimum wage employee would make working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. WOWZA! At the beginning of 2018 I had $237,000, which would generate $16,590 at 7% while a minimum wage employee would receive $15,080. That’s wild!
I have an invisible minimum wage employee working hella hard while I sleep, away from my day job, which I think is a very cool idea. I’ve touched on this phenomenon in a previous post, but she was just a teenager working part time after school then. Now she’s a full-timer. This just got serious!
Now we should probably working on raising that minimum wage (Washington did recently) so the average isn’t so low!
I keep surprising myself with what I say no to during this journey to early retirement. My friend and former colleague works at a company that offers discounted stays at a Four Seasons in Mexico. It looks beautiful (see above). Their rooms usually start at $400/night and we would get to stay for $75/night so $37.50/person/night. That’s a crazy discount. We would also receive half priced food and drinks…which would probably bring them to regular restaurant prices. Continue reading “Saying No To A Discount Vacation” 
I’ve always been fairly frugal. I’ve always bought generic brand everything – maybe it’s because I was in advertising, but I knew that the only difference was the label. I didn’t see the point. When I cracked down on my budget at the end of 2014 and started paying attention to what I was spending and trying to reduce it I discovered that the one place that wasn’t out of control was my grocery budget…possibly because I didn’t cook 🙂 . 
The end of Q1 2018 has me at about 0% market gains for the year (while the S&P 500 is down -1.22%). This inspired me to do a thought experiment. What if the highly improbable happened and the market remains stagnant at a 0% gain until I retire? How long would that add to my working career? My initial thought was several years since the average of 7% would add $17,850 to my current portfolio so my savings for the year would be made of approximately 20% gains and 80% savings. 
It’s the end of Q1, which means it’s once again DIVIDEND SEASON! I look forward to it every 3 months because even though I know this is a distribution from the 3,000+ businesses I partially own it still feels like it’s free money that’s dropped into my account.