If I Had Been Retired Today, #1

Who knows, this might become a thing, so I am preemptively numbering this Issue 1. The idea is to demonstrate the lost productivity due to having to catch up on personal financial literacy (i.e., FIRE, what other kind of personal financial literacy is there?)

If I had been retired today, instead of having to work a job to bring in money, I would have . . .

• Started in on outlining and writing a commentary for my kids on the Book of Proverbs. My 7yo is reading a lot now, and I've been wanting to write some legitimate theology books for her, on her level. And if I do them well enough, I'd be able to sell them, and make some money like that. I might even be able to get them illustrated, or do it myself with stick figures.
  
• Spent a good bit of time designing the information architecture and user flows on my Machete Press website. I have a number of things I want to do with it, including hosting audio and video and building a really nice online reading experience, and I'd have gotten a lot of really good traction today on figuring out exactly what I want in a full version if money were no issue.
• Made some substantial progress on the latest Machete Press books I'm working on publishing - a book on international relations and a book on economics geared toward teachers, written from a Christian perspective. I may even have wrapped up the current stage I'm at with both of those books and moved them forward into the next phase.

I did make a little bit of progress on the Machete Press books, and I might still be able to do a few minutes of wireframing, but it'll be a fraction of what I could've gotten done because I had to clock into the office for 8 hours and 15 minutes.

How to Retire in 5 Years

I have read several books on financial independence but have not found, that I remember, a clearly laid-out formula of what one's expenses should be to retire after five years of only working a day job with no second streams of income. Here it is, with the caveat that this is subject to revision over time:

(take-home pay, plus any pre-tax contributions like 401k) * 0.167 = expenses

Another way of saying this is that if your expenses equal 16.7% or less of whatever your take-home pay is plus any pre-tax contributions, then you will be able to retire after five years of work.

Example: if you have a take-home pay of $100,000 after taxes, annually, with no pre-tax contributions like 401k, your expenses are at or below $16,700 per year, and you sock the remaining $83,300 into index funds, then you will be able to retire after five years of this job, assuming no raises, no debt, and no inflation (let's keep the math simple for now).

The 16.7% comes from the formula of annual expenses x 25 = retirement number. This is just 25 divided by five years, plus a sixth part per year to actually live off of: 1/6 (one part for the year's expenses, and five parts for index funds) = 16.67%.

The reason we have the bit in the formula about pre-tax contributions is because you are of course putting those into index funds also, and so your real amount of money that you're putting into index funds every year is that 401k contribution in addition to the massive take-home pay amount.

More examples, assuming no 401k contributions:

• If your take-home pay is $50,000, then your expenses need to be $8,350
• If your take-home pay is $60,000, then your expenses need to be $10,020
• If your take-home pay is $70,000, then your expenses need to be $11,690
• If your take-home pay is $80,000, then your expenses need to be $13,360
• If your take-home pay is $90,000, then your expenses need to be $15,030
• If your take-home pay is $100,000, then your expenses need to be $16,700
• If your take-home pay is $110,000, then your expenses need to be $18,370
• If your take-home pay is $120,000, then your expenses need to be $20,040
• If your take-home pay is $130,000, then your expenses need to be $21,710

If your expenses are above the max allowed, then you either need do one of the following:

• Be alright with a longer time horizon for retirement since it will take longer to save up
  
• Lower your expenses to below the limit
• Do some side work to bring your income level to match that required by your expenses

If you are single this should be insanely easy. There is no reason that a teenager couldn't spend a year or two in deliberate practice gaining a solid skill, get work as an employee or a freelancer, and retire completely from mandatory work by the time others are graduating from college. If they are planning to marry and have children, they may need to work a few years longer if their to-be spouse has not also been working this same plan, since now the amount of money needed is at least doubled. But raises will factor into the equation, as will compounded interest, so the additional funds needed won't take near as long. Worst case: retirement by 25. Not so bad, is it? This is my goal with my kids.

April 2023

This month we had lots going on. Wife and I sat down early on in the month one Saturday for about 8 hours for me to really understand the marketing and long-term product development plan for Elderberry as a result of the business building coaching that wife is taking. We had the kids watched and broke out the whiteboards, and from about 4:30pm to a little after midnight, I just took the time to completely understand everything I could and learn the language. Wife and I mapped out a path to reach 7 figures with the business in 17 months, and that includes hitting 6 figures by the end of this year. It's really exciting because we actually understand each component involved and what's required - the marketing plans and numbers are actually doable because they're based off of knowledge, not based off of ignorant excitement. (This is how I've done marketing before, and it has sucked.) Then a few days later, we met with the rest of the team to pitch the plan, and they are bought in completely.

In bad news, the IRS hit me up for $5500. I was very ticked at this, since I generally hate being stolen from. I try to plan for being robbed, but I apparently didn't plan well enough this past year and now have to redirect money that was going to paying off debt, to paying off the mobsters. This is largely because I did not have what they in the FIRE community call "FU" money stashed away. So, our budgeting software shows that in the month of April we are behind in every single envelope, because I had to yank from those or else. This has caused me to make a change in my plans for this year's finances. Instead of using our next quarterly paycheck (which will be very large, because I leverage the deferred payment plan my company offers to defer a huge portion of my income) to pay down debt, I am going to use it to create this FU fund. I will probably put it in index funds - open my Vanguard account and stick it all in VTSAX. I have on interest in getting caught in this kind of situation again.

As I mentioned in my March post, my wife was planning on taking a trip out to Texas for three days. Originally my mother-in-law was going to watch the kids; I ended up offering to watch them for these days instead so she would watch them for an unexpected Elderberry meeting (the one where we pitched the team on our big plan). It went really well. During the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday that she was gone, I purposed to see how little energy we could use. All in all, we used about 9, 9, and 8kwh per day. We also cooked exclusively with the crock pot - I made split pea soup and lentil soup for dinners and the kids loved it. I also made Zuppa Toscana for church Sunday. (I did not turn on the stove, oven, or toaster oven one time. I also did not run the washer because we didn't generate enough dirty clothes to do that.) I've also noticed that eating massive salads during lunch (approximately 6 cups of greens, and an additional 3 cups of either more veggies or fruits) plus a good lentil or pea soup dinner leaves me not even getting truly hungry until lunchtime the next day. This is great and I love that it's lining up with the experience of Mark Sisson, the author of the Primal Blueprint book (I'm not following his ideas religiously, but am gleaning quite a lot). I even got in nearly a full week of my day job work - which I hadn't expected to be able to do while watching the kids for three days.

I'm really enjoying my time in the kitchen. I had zealously taken over menu planning a month or so back, but then it kind of fell by the wayside because of other things I was putting my mind into. Wife did not appreciate me tossing her nice menu plan and not replacing it, and so since one of my goals is for my optimization to result in as few friction points as possible for her, we agreed that we can go back to her food menu system so she has something to plan around as I don't have time this month to revamp the food menu completely. I love the food menu system she has - it's a fairly fixed menu that rotates with some variety, but same basic 5-7 meals - but I do not love the fact that it is stove/oven heavy and thus very expensive from an energy perspective. (It also relies heavily on meat, which is one of the more expensive items in our food budget for sure.) But we have agreed that I can work to transition one meal at a time over - my goal is to transition everything to crock pot meals.

I also finally got a clothesline set up. We'll see if it holds up - I'm not totally sure if the poles are far enough in the ground to withstand the weight of wet laundry, but I was trying to build it completely for free and I couldn't figure out a more guaranteed sturdier solution that didn't involve either buying concrete or buying t-posts.

At the end of the month, I took a trip for work. This trip was really terrible - I came down very ill in the middle of the trip and ended up having to take an entire day off work due to illness. I got a cute Airbnb tiny house 30 minutes away from the office in somebody's back yard; next time I'm going to pick an Airbnb that's walking distance from food and not in somebody's back yard, because the food I bought from the grocery store was great but required preparation . . . preparation I did not have energy for when I was sick, and I couldn't get delivery of decent food since I was in someone's back yard and didn't know if I could or not.

(But one highlight: my mother took me to the airport and we talked about hypermiling, FIRE, index funds, personal finance, and so forth - she's beginning to see the light and I'm so excited. She eagerly embraced hypermiling and that same day increased her mpg on her car from 32 to 39 mpg on average.)

One important takeaway from this week's total failure: I had set a goal of clocking 72 hours for my company this week so I could secure some time off down the road. I was stressed out when things didn't go according to plan and I did not get that accomplished at all due to illness. It was during all this that I realized I am overworking myself. Cal Newport posted an article about the extreme working habits of Danielle Steel, and my wife realized that she's falling into the same trap that Cal is talking about. This article really got me realizing that our current approach to FIRE - the approach of work ourselves to the absolute max to retire as soon as possible - is not sustainable for our family. We are going to create burnout, I think, even though we are seeing tangible fruits from this extreme working - especially in wife's case with the business really starting to gain traction as a result of implementing the marketing strategies that we decided on for Elderberry. The way to achieve FIRE for our family is through slow productivity - instead of stressing the entire time to shave 3 months off our goal, we need to do it sustainably so that the journey there is sustainable and we don't burn out.

In May, here are the high-level things I want to focus on:

• Consistent bedtime and wake time. Getting to bed no later than 8:30pm every night, waking up at 5am, and shooting for just normal 8 hour workdays. Huberman says that sleep is the foundation of health, so I figure I need to take this seriously.
  
• Taking the baton on the kids more so wife can get more Elderberry work in. This means that I'm in charge of the kids while wife is in the room working. If kids have questions or issues, they come to me. This won't be a problem at all with the early-morning plan as I'll be done with my day job work around 2-3 in the afternoon.
• Sustainable scheduling. Not maxing out every day or every week to the absolute fullest, but setting an "autopilot schedule" that involves margin and then working it.

In May, here are the specific things I'd like to make progress on:

• Setting up some of the same marketing strategies we're using on Elderberry for Machete Press, and releasing one new title. I'm doing the pre-release read through now for any last errors, but I need to set up some of the automated campaigns we're doing on Elderberry.
• Transition at least a few of our menu plan meals to lentil-based crock pot meals. I need to find some good non-stove, non-oven meals for the summertime . . . 
• Keeping a more reliable Deep Finance Journey blog so that I'm not trying to remember what I did in March while I'm writing the blog post at the end of April.
  
• I'd love to make some progress on working off some old project debt I have, but we'll see. We'll call this our stretch goal.
  

March 2023

This month we tore apart the old wheelchair ramp that leads up to our house. It got very slippery during the rain and I'd fallen a couple of times recently, so I knew I needed to take it down for safety's sake. I took it apart with the kids nail by nail, and stored the wood in a shed behind our house for turning into a back stoop/porch at a future day.

With the last cold snap gone, we are down to using between 10-30kwh per day. I'm struggling with having anxiety over not being able to control everything.

Wife is 100% on board with building out a clothesline to use instead of the dryer, which was a surprise. Got a free clothesline from my mother and pulled up some old treated posts from our property to use as a clothesline.

The Primal Blueprint arrived, and I started reading. I'm holding my nose for sure on the Grok speculation/foolishness, but making major lifestyle changes, such as going without socks and shoes unless needed. (Less laundry!)

I also owed the lawn with the electric mower that I got from my cousin back in January. The battery died slightly less than halfway through mowing the lawn; after an hour and a half charge, it was enough for me to finish mowing enough before the severe weather moved in. Makes me rethink getting a reel mower - its battery won't run out.

While mowing, I listening to Andrew Huberman on cold exposure. Cold showers are good for several reasons; one reason is they don't kick the water heater in!

Wife is going out of town for several days in mid April, and the kids will be staying with my mother in law. I will have the house to myself. I will shut the entire thing down and see if I can live comfortably off 6kwh per day (4kwh is what our house used last month when we were on vacation).

I discovered the crockpot and realized you can use it far more flexibly than I imagined. You can brown ground beef in it; you can add rice about an hour before food needs to be ready and the rice will be totally cooked. You can even bake sourdough in it! I want to challenge myself: 

1. Can I create a solid breakfast plan that just never uses the stove or oven?
2. Can I create a solid dinner plan that only ever uses the crockpot?
3. If I need to use the stove to create sauces, etc., how can I batch things?

This month I also repaired my iPhone. While on vacation last month the screen broke for some reason - the pixels all died. So instead of hiring out the repair job, I ordered a new screen and repaired it myself.

February 2023

I'm writing this post in late March, so unfortunately I won't remember everything in here.

The major item that happened here is that my wife got on board with FIRE 100%. This is a shock, since while she was generally on board, her exposure to frugal living historically has been through penny-pinching and cost-cutting in all the wrong ways, wrong places, and for the wrong motivations.

The thing that did it, though, was Playing with Fire documentary by Scott Rieckens. She watched the film and saw the emotional arc that Scott's wife went through and it so validated her own emotions that she was completely won over.

I actually don't fully understand how that worked from a logical or psychological perspective, but I think it is super cool, and it is quite shocking (in a refreshing kind of way) to me to have her so own FIRE herself that she'll proudly announce to me that she did this or that thing.

Another major advancement this month is that I began hypermiling. This is essentially composed of a bunch of tricks and tactics geared toward getting superior gas mileage out of your vehicle without engine mods. It's defined as beating what the EPA says a vehicle should be able to get. Our 2011 Honda Odyssey should get be able to get 19 miles per gallon in town, and 26 miles per gallon on the highway. I've started with just a few tricks, and have been getting between 26 and 28 miles per gallon everywhere I go, from driving around town to driving to the beach six hours away. I peaked at one point with 28.5 mpg. Not bad! I want to challenge our family to get through the month of March with only one tank of gas.

I've also put a great deal of through into our power bill. Can I reduce this substantially from 50-70 kwh per day to 5-10 kwh per day? The biggest offenders as far as our energy consumption goes are our clothes dryer, hot water heater, oven, and stove. In times past, I enjoyed running a load of laundry per day (or every other day) because it was nice to close out the day with the sound of the washer running, cleaning the dirty clothes for the day. Somehow it just signaled to me that the day had come to a peaceful close. However, I've realized that it's super wasteful to do this. Now, I'm only putting stuff in the washer if it actually smells dirty or gross. I'd love to get down to running only one load of laundry per week (and air-drying that one load) but right now we are doing an average of two or three per week. I just have to figure out how to air dry it without it smelling awful. (When our clothes dryer was broken growing up, we would air-dried our laundry; the place we would hang it did not really have much of a breeze and was not in the direct sunlight. It smelled and felt awful.)

I also have put a lot of initial thought into our food costs - building out spreadsheets to chart certain foods and meals. I haven't yet put everything into an exhaustive list, but I'm starting to realize what foods are cheap vs what foods are expensive. Our bank (Monzo) just released joint bank accounts, so I've moved the grocery budget from my wife's card into our joint account. I've also broken it out into food and non-food, so I can track each of those. I'll be able to see what our actual expenditures are on these fronts.

One other nerdy item I've started doing: copying every blog post from MrMoneyMustache.com into big Word documents. Once I finish that, I'll get print-on-demand paperbacks and read through those. I want to read everything he's written, but don't want to have to use a device to do it with. I'll do this with EarlyRetirementExtreme.com too.

This month we also took a trip to the beach. It was a decent enough trip, but we had some stressful items from our extended family we were dealing with, and then she and I were also dealing with some Elderberry related items (remember, Elderberry is my wife's side hustle I'm helping with), so it wasn't actually as restful as it could have been. We did get some good sun and time at the beach for a couple of days, and one evening we cooked hot dogs over a fire. The kindling not super dry, though, so we burned through quite a few napkins or paper bags to cook our hot dogs. Not super efficient, but memorable. During this trip, I only averaged about 28 mpg while driving - I would've expected more since this was the first time I'd done any real distance driving while consciously hypermiling. I'll have to figure out why.

I hinted at it above, but I've been able to take on a more active role in Elderberry - particularly with the finances and project management. I'm sure I'll have some opportunities to bring Early Retirement Extreme energy to the discussion (even though I won't call it out as such), but we will see. Elderberry has a real potential to grow into a six or seven figure business and drastically hasten the rate of retirement.

I bought The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson. Mr. Money Mustache mentioned it favorably on his blog some years back, so I immediately picked up a copy. I disagree with the entire premise of the book - the idea that we should live the diet and lifestyle that we suppose our evolutionary ancestors lived - but I figure there's enough solid stuff in there that it's worth a read. That should arrive sometime in early March.

And last, but not least, our van is paid off entirely! We bought it from a friend a couple of years back for about $9,000 to be paid back in monthly installments. Late last year, it hit a deer and was also backed into by someone else. Because I had full coverage on the vehicle, we got about $3100 in insurance money for this damage, but I was never able to get it repaired due to holiday schedules, logistics, weather, lining up a backup vehicle, etc. I finally thought to ask, "Can I just use the insurance money for something else?" I checked with the internet and with a mentor, and sure enough, because from the insurance company's perspective I owned the vehicle outright (was not financed through a dealer, and the friend I was buying the van from did not have a lean on the vehicle), and the money was sent to me directly and not to a repair shop, I was in the clear to do with the funds what I wanted. I decided to use those funds to pay off the vehicle entirely. I reduced our debt by $3956.04! Now all that remains, in addition to the money we end up putting on our credit card (and paying off entirely on a regular basis), is $10,800 from an old work project that has a complicated/long story to it, and about $20,000 that my wife and I have incurred to help a friend in dire need (also a complicated story). Paid off about 11% of our debt this month!

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!

August 2021 through December 2022

The posts on the blog up to this point have varied in quality, but now that I've gotten a bit onboarded onto the ERE/FIRE system, I'd like to write in a bit more of a structured format. I'm not fully sure how to begin this more serious post, but here goes. I'll start with background leading up to the hardcore beginning of our FIRE/ERE journey in January 2023. I'm writing most of this while recovering from a week of fever, and I'm not a practiced writer, so bear with the clunky writing.

I first learned about FIRE in August 2021, traveling home from an out of state visit. I had started to deal with some burnout surrounding my job and while on my trip, on a whim, I decided to just throw my resume out there - what did I have to lose? Somewhere during this out of town trip, I also heard of this Mr. Money Mustache for the first time. I'm not sure what brought him to my attention (I think maybe I heard about him through Cal Newport?), but I was intrigued although I didn't have time right then to listen to anything or read any articles. It wasn't until the 10-plus hour drive home that I put on a podcast episode in which he laid out his method of retiring within just a few years.

Why did this idea of retiring early get my attention so quickly? Folks are interested in early retirement for all kinds of reasons. I enjoyed my work, to be sure. That specific job had become a grind, but I did actually enjoy the work that I was doing in software design. I wanted to retire because I had a very clear sense of what my calling was, and I knew I could not do my calling to its fullest extent while I had a full-time job taking 40+ hours per week; regardless of how much I enjoyed my job, I loved the snatches of time I got to do my calling more.

I define calling the way Gary North defines calling: "The most important thing you can do for the Kingdom of God in which you are the hardest to replace." Anybody can do software design, but I knew that I had a very unique calling in research. I'm not going to discuss my calling right now since that would identify me, but suffice it to say, the prospect of never having to work for money again and being free to devote the rest of my life to my calling was extremely persuasive. I knew I had an ethical responsibility to retire as soon as possible, now that I realized it was a thing.

Prior to the podcast with MMM, I had no idea I could retire early - it didn't even enter into my mind. But the podcast gave just enough construction materials to where I could put together a plan and it completely changed my outlook. I knew that if I was to have any kind of a shot at early retirement, I needed to get a job that paid quite a bit more than what I was earning - which wouldn't be hard since I was at the lower end for sure of my market.

As an important aside, my family had gone through a bit of a tumultuous last few years (coupled with a really tight paycheck) and we were all in the need for just a year of stability with no new things. I knew that plunging straight into FIRE was a bit beyond what my family could handle.

When I finished with that podcast in August 2021, I really didn't know too many details about how other people did FIRE, what it really looked like for them, or all the different strategies to get there.

My initial plan in August and September 2021 was to spend Year 1 in my new job, catching my breath and having some family stability with no new things. Years 2–5, I would begin the process of securing approximately 25 rental units, each returning an average of $200 per unit per month. This would cover our expenses, and I could retire by the end of Year 5. 

This plan was good enough for me to move forward on what I knew was the next right step: getting a job that paid $80k-100k, which was what I knew I was worth. I secured a new job by the end of September 2021, that paid at the lower end of that range, but more importantly did not have any of the elements that had been causing burnout for me at my previous job. I then took 2022 to just rest and recover from the previous few years.