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
- 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.
- My lifestlye is probably nicer than I need for a single person and a cat.
- Saving money is a lot easier when everything is auotmated and I don’t have to think about it.
- 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?
- When I started earning my big girl paycheck and really started my FI journey.
- Crossed the $50k milestone 13 months later in February 2015.
- Crossed the $75k milestone 9 months later in November 2015!
- 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?
I have started following your blog very recently. Just wanted you to know that it is fun reading your posts and to know more about your lifestyle 🙂
Awesome work thus far! My savings are going according to plan. Looking forward to my move out west where I’ll ratchet up the 401k contributions and hopefully max it out by the end of July.
Dat low cost of living tho! You’re killin it!
I’ve enjoyed following your progress! We (my partner and I) did not start pursuing FI until around last October/November. We’ve managed to increase our net worth by around $20,000 since then! We’re still in the negative due to student loans, but we’re chugging along.
Wow! $20k is great progress! Thanks for following along 🙂
Awesome progress! What service are those charts from?
I use a combination of Mint and Google spreadsheets.
How do you like Google spreadsheet compared to excel? I track most of my stuff in excel (and a little in Mint and Personal Capital), but I thought about trying out Google spreadsheets. Pros and cons compared to excel?
Also great job on the progress. If my wife and I had no debt (student loans and house) we would be right around the same net worth (not including the house in our net worth because it is under major renovations and would know what to value it at in its current condition). That’s a big “if” though! Maybe we will reach FI at the same time. Keep up the great job!
It’s more or less the same thing as Excel. Maybe a few buttons moved around and some different color schemes, but nothing major. I like I can store it on Drive and access it anywhere.
Wow it sounds like you guys have a lot going on! It’s always fun to find people in a similar stage and compare 🙂
Great work! Very true that the first $100,000 is the hardest. Felt like it took forever for us. But now we’re ratcheted up a few more and they pick up speed thanks to compound interest, increased earnings, and increased expense optimization!
Wow congratulations! You’re killing it!
I started following your blog recently. I’m a fellow millennial in the Midwest! I searched “millennial” in the net worth tracker on RockStar Finance and found you:)
Congrats on the progress! And I totally agree with you about the gym fees. In my case, I started doing CrossFit in Feb and the monthly fee is a bit high. I consider it more like a team sports rather than traditional gym because of the community and support of fellow athletes (Crossfitters). I think it’s worth the money.
Keep up the good work! When I look back at my own net worth, you can clearly see a huge ramp up each time we decided to try something different to save more and invest more intelligently. All of this financial independence stuff really does pay off!