January 2023

Picking up from the last blog post, 2022 was a year of rest. It didn't actually end up that restful in terms of things done, but it was restful for me. No intentional wall-to-wall hustling or new projects that I didn't want to do.

The end of December rolled around, and I knew that 2023 was coming up - my year of focus on FIRE. So, knowing that I'd have a business trip in the first week of January and hence plenty of time to read, I picked up several books on FIRE from Amazon:

• Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need, by Grant Sabatier
  
• Playing with FIRE: How Far Would You Go for Financial Freedom?, by Scott Rieckens
• The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life, by JL Collins
• Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence, by Jacob Lund Fisker  

I'd read Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez in 2021, and acquired Set for Life: An All-Out Approach to Early Financial Freedom by Scott Trench in Summer 2022, so I had a nice stack of books lined up for my business trip.

All my books didn't arrive time, but within moments of arriving at the airport, I'd started in on Set for Life.

Over the course of the trip, I consumed content like a machine. When I wasn't working, I was either driving and listening to a podcast, or else reading. I finished reading through Playing with FIRE by Scott Rieckens as well as Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier before I pulled into the driveway (in fact, my wife drove me home from the airport so I could continue to read).

The Simple Path to Wealth and Early Retirement Extreme hadn't arrived yet, but I was so through-and-through convinced of FIRE being the path forward, so much more than I was when I first arrived at the airport a few days prior, and I was on board with FIRE even then!

One of the evenings in January, I plotted out on a Google Doc the next iteration of our five-year plan. This time, building in information I'd been reading about having to do with index funds and so forth. With new eyes, I took a hard look at our finances - I remember sitting in a Walmart parking lot in my rental car going through each of our finances with my wife on the phone, talking through how much we could reduce our expenses if we cut this bill or got rid of that line item. I couldn't believe it - we could go from about $4100 of expenses down to about $3100 or so if we wanted. That was annual expenses of right at about $50,000 to about $37,000 per year. (Actually, less, because we send ten percent of our paycheck to Christian ministry work, so our actual living expenses went from more like $45,000 to a little over $33,000.)

My company offered a paycheck deferral program, where I have the option of deferring so much of my paycheck. That amount is paid, plus a premium, every quarter. I spent a lot of time over the next few days calculating and re-calculating things, looking at our budget, seeing how much I could hike my deferral amount - and thus my total annual paycheck.

Thanks to reducing our expenses about 25%, this meant that we were able to funnel this additional amount into my company's deferral program - meaning we'd have more money to pay off our debt faster, and more money after paying off debt to put into index funds.

Reduce spending, increase income, save the difference.

I told my wife that the evening I really crunched numbers for the first time was probably one of the top 2-3 most influential days of my life.

Within a day or two of arriving home, the books by JL Collins and Jacob Lund Fisker arrived. I worked my way through both of them within days. I want to do writeups (not necessarily full book reviews) of all these books at some point, but lest I never get around to it, I want to say that Jacob Lund Fisker's book is staggering. He does not limit his discussion of simply finances, but rather presents an astonishing picture, a manifesto really, of what it meand to steward resources - both economic and other - giving careful thought to how we impact the environment while also developing ourselves to fullest potential. Fisker is not a Christian, but his "Renaissance man" concept is so much in line with a Christian "Dominion man" that it's jaw-dropping. I need to read his book a couple more times.

Once I arrived home, I opened the discussion with my wife about some purchases that - shortsightedly - I'd shied away from before due to cost, but was now completely willing to consider due to my newfound ability to think long-term. In short order, we purchased a brand-new Singer sewing machine to cut down on the clothes budget for our two kids, always growing. We also researched and purchased some bento boxes (for the kids, for my wife and me) to cut down our eating out costs. (The bento boxes have paid for themselves many times over by the time of this writing, in March.)

Additionally, I re-negotiated the payment plan with the friend we'd bought our 2011 Honda Odyssey from, and he agreed to let me make payments on a quarterly basis instead of a monthly basis - which was great! Because the quarterly cadence matched my bonus/deferral payment cadence at the company, the re-negotiation meant I could take that $142 per month out of our monthly expenses, move that money into deferral and let it grow thanks to the premium my company pays on deferral funds, and I'd still be able to make car payments while that money was making me more money. (Side note, it also looked like a result of all this manglin' and wranglin' of finances that I'd be able to pay off the van entirely in the next quarter, anyway, thus saving money from additional months of interest.)

The end of January rolled around and I knew the first real month of our FIRE journey was coming. I made my elections for deferral, locking in a monthly paycheck of right at about $3000 (everything beyond this would be in deferral). I canceled services and made plans to cancel others. No turning back now!