Where the Monthly Status Reports End

I’ve been post­ing month­ly sta­tus reports for over 5 years now. I was inspired by blog­gers like the Fru­gal­woods, Mr. 1500, J. Mon­ey and oth­ers. It was so help­ful to see what suc­cess­ful peo­ple’s bud­gets and net worth pro­gres­sion looked like. I got so much use out of their reports that I start­ed pub­lish­ing my own each month. Check out the first one from March 2015! 

In March 2015, I was 24, still in the Air Nation­al Guard, gear­ing up for my (first) Chau­tauqua trip lat­er that year, rent­ing a sin­gle fam­i­ly house, in and out of short-term rela­tion­ships and dri­ving my old car. My net worth was around $50,000. 

Now, I am 30 years old. I’ve moved rough­ly 8 times in the last 6 years, changed employ­ers 3 times, bought a house, sold a house, bought anoth­er house, bought a new car, and have real­ly found who I am as a person. 

When I start­ed my FIRE jour­ney, blog­ging about my finances was an excel­lent way to stay engaged with my per­son­al finance jour­ney. I basi­cal­ly hyper­fo­cused on ear­ly retire­ment for 6 straight years. I was stoked to update my spread­sheets the first day of each new month. I loved see­ing the num­bers go up and up and up each month. I got a lot of val­i­da­tion and approval from peo­ple which encour­aged me to keep going. 

But there were months when the num­bers did­n’t go up. There were months when I did­n’t want to share my finances, either because I gave away a bunch of mon­ey and did­n’t want to look like I was brag­ging, or because I spent a bunch of mon­ey on some­thing and did­n’t want the peanut gallery chim­ing in on some­thing that was­n’t “FIRE opti­mized”. Rarely were the com­ments rude or mean but when they were it cut extra deep. There were months when I was free­lanc­ing where the mon­ey on hand just went down, down and fur­ther down, while the mon­ey com­ing in was a small trick­le instead of mul­ti­ple streams. So much of who I was as a per­son was tied into being a per­son who was good with mon­ey that it was even more embarass­ing to post “bad months”.

Now that I am an 30 year old with a part­ner, a house, and a high­er net worth than aver­age, it feels more wrong than right to post the sta­tus updates. My finances aren’t mine alone now. My part­ner has nev­er said any­thing against it, but they are a pret­ty pri­vate per­son in gen­er­al and I don’t feel like it’s some­thing they’re entire­ly com­fort­able with. I am also con­cerned post­ing so much detail online as a high­er net worth woman. It’s dif­fer­ent when you’re 24, just start­ing out and only have $50k. (“only have $50k”, I know.) So many of my friends aren’t any­where near my net worth and I feel bad (even though I absolute­ly should­n’t because we have very dif­fer­ent lives). The high­er my net worth gets, the more it feels like brag­ging to me, and I don’t want that. 

I also don’t need the sta­tus reports to keep myself inspired and on track any­more. I’ve fig­ured out what works for me, what does­n’t work for me, and put every­thing on autopi­lot. Mon­ey comes in, mon­ey gets redi­rect­ed, mon­ey goes back out. I don’t need to spend so much time on my finances any­more — which is excel­lent since I don’t have the same time avail­able to me now. 

I am incred­i­bly grate­ful to have such detailed records for the last 5 years though. It’s been real­ly help­ful to be able to go back and look at each month to see where I was in life. Like a detailed, pub­lic jour­nal for my finances!

So, the last spend­ing report I post­ed was the last. I’ll maybe do a spend­ing report at the end of the year, but it won’t be any­where near as detailed as years’ past. I want to move to post­ing bet­ter arti­cles on a less con­sis­tent basis. Month­ly sta­tus reports are great blog­ging fod­der, but I am no longer being ful­filled by them, so it’s time to let them go. 

Don’t wor­ry, I’ll still be updat­ing my spread­sheet each month and keep­ing track of every­thing. I just won’t be com­pil­ing the results here on the blog anymore. 

As Dob­by said, “Mas­ter has giv­en a sock. Dob­by is free!”