Savings: Year Two

This week marks my sec­ond year of sav­ings! April 2014 is when I offi­cial­ly ramped up my FI plans after I fin­ished get­ting all the house­hold neces­si­ties. I thought it’d fun to look back over the last 12 months and see what I’ve learned, some fun stats and pret­ty pictures.

What I’ve Learned

1. Any costs occured while trav­el­ing or hang­ing out with new friends are absolute­ly worth it. New stuff? Not as good of a return for me.
2. My lifest­lye is prob­a­bly nicer than I need for a sin­gle per­son and a cat.
3. Sav­ing mon­ey is a lot eas­i­er when every­thing is auot­mat­ed and I don’t have to think about it.
4. Gym fees are not worth it, but team sports are a must for me. I love the com­raderie and exer­cise I get from things like dodge­ball, soft­ball and soccer.

 Fun Stats

-I’ve spent $8424 on my car since I start­ed keep­ing records in 2012. Of that, $4077 is gas and $1527 is parts/services.

-I’ve reached 15% of my goal to retire­ment! I esti­mate I’ll need rough­ly $600k to retire.

-Accord­ing to the Mad Fien­tist’s FI Lab­o­ra­to­ry, I have 13 years and 2 months 9 years and 5 months left until I can retire. I dropped almost 4 years off my time­line in 12 months! Wahoo!

Pretty Pictures

This is a graph of my net­worth for the past 3 years. I’ve made a lot of progress in a short amount of time! But.….….. what do those num­bers I’ve so lov­ing­ly drawn on the graph mean?

 

1. When I start­ed earn­ing my big girl pay­check and real­ly start­ed my FI journey.
2. Crossed the $50k mile­stone 13 months lat­er in Feb­ru­ary 2015.
3. Crossed the $75k mile­stone 9 months lat­er in Novem­ber 2015!
4. I wish there was a 4. That will come in month or two when I hit that fabled $100k. Right now, it looks like I’ll be sit­ting at $93k at the end of this month, so May or June the good news will happen 😀

 

I find it inter­est­ing my time­line is accel­er­at­ing so quick­ly. It took me almost 14 months to hit $50k, then 9 months to hit $75k, and now it’ll be 6 or 7 months when I hit $100k. The pow­er of com­pound inter­est is AWESOME. For real though! The mar­ket also going on a most­ly uphill pace helps that as well. No won­der my time to FI left went from 13.2 years to 9.5! They say the first $100k is the hard­est to get, and it looks like that is the case for me!

Note: This is all accom­plished through reg­u­lar con­tri­bu­tions to my retire­ment accounts, non-crazy spend­ing, a few bonus­es at work and a decent stock mar­ket. No inher­i­tances or gifts from oth­er peo­ple! Of course, I also start­ed off with no debt, so that def­i­nite­ly helped as well.

Lest you think I save all my income, here’s a fun pie chart of the cat­e­gor­i­cal break­down of all my spend­ing for the last 12 months. 

-Unsur­pris­ing­ly enough, my rent takes all up the vast part of the pie. At $1057 a month, my rent accounts for any­where from 30–75% of my total month­ly spend­ing. This graph has the aver­age at 40%. Ouch.

-Food comes in at 12% of my spend­ing for the last year. No sur­prise there either, since I love tacos. And alco­hol. And cook­ies (so long as they’re the fan­cy gluten free ones). Not includ­ed in the food cat­e­go­ry is any food or drinks I buy while on vaca­tion. That goes under the next cat­e­go­ry of travel.

-Speak­ing of trav­el, that comes in at 11%. I might even ramp this up a bit more since now is the time to explore this won­der­ful world!

-Bills and util­i­ties have gone down like crazy! When I moved here, my util­i­ties went way down and I also switched my cell provider. From almost $6k to only $2700! That just means more mon­ey for fun stuff like trav­el or my hand­some kitty!

For the rest of it, the slice of the pie has gone down a lot (I’m look­ing at you, auto and shop­ping cat­e­gories), but I’ve replaced it with oth­er things to spend it on. While I wish I could’ve banked the sav­ings, donat­ing some is impor­tant to me and I love hav­ing my cat greet me at the door when I come home after work.

 

Over­all this has been a pret­ty good 12 months for me!

How have your sav­ings been going? Approach­ing any milestones?