Retire By 45

Many moons ago, when we used to see movies in actual theatres, my mom used to volunteer for a PR company that organizes movie screener/preview events. We used to get invited to movies before they opened, and we would watch them with entertainment reporters, movie critics, and preview audiences. One place they show special movie screenings is at the ILM headquarters in San Francisco. Now, if you're a Star Wars fan like we are, there is no better place to see a Star Wars screen...er than here (unless it's at Skywalker Ranch, but even we've never been invited there)! The public can walk around the campus on their way to check in with security. There's a Yoda water fountain outside, and the welcome area has cool memorabilia that rotates in from different movies. We always arrive early so we can explore everything! I feel like a little kid everytime we go there. Hopefully, we'll be able to get back there in 2021! #MayTheForceBeWithYou . . . . . #FIRE #financialfreedom #personalfinance #firecommunity #financialfreedom #financialindependence #earlyretirement #retireearly #retirement #firejourney #financialindependenceretireearly #financialindependencenumber #financialindependencejourney #firemovement #retireearly #fridayfun #fridayfunday #retiredlife #retiredlifestyle #retiredlifeisgood #retirement #retirementgoals #flashbackfriday #flashbackfriday#StarWars #MayTheForceBeWithYouAlways #DarthVader #BobaFett #StormTrooper @ Industrial Light & Magic See more

For #TBT, we're sharing one of our favorite blog posts, "How We Slacked Off in Our 20s & Still Retired in Our Early 40s" http://bit.ly/3qZPNob. The blog caught the eye of a Forbes writer, who profiled us for their site back in 2019. Dylin and I started out in the restaurant business. We actually met working at the Official All Star Cafe (as I mentioned yesterday), which was a professional athlete theme restaurant in NYC's Time Square. We moved to SF on a whim in our mid-20s, ...and through a series of fortuitous moves on our part (living in a small studio, getting lucky breaks that led to office jobs, buying our first condo for $186k) gradually progressed up the corporate and real estate ladders. By the time we FIRE'd at 43/44, we had been laid off 6 times between the two of us, owned 8 properties (including some rentals), run 2 different side hustles, and had 1 near-death experience (more to come on that at a later time!). We don't wish that kind of drama on anyone, but we wanted you to know that even our path to FIRE wasn't smooth sailing! We didn't even know what we were doing! If we can retire early with little knowledge of the fundamentals, then armed with all the information that we have on our blog or in our book, then we know that you can achieve it too! Hopefully we'll see you out on the open road, enjoying your FIRE life too! (Note: the picture in the blog is from the New York-New York casino in Vegas) . . . . . #TBT #throwbackthursday #throwbackthursdays #pathtofinancialfreedom #pathtofire #FIRE #financialfreedom #personalfinance #firecommunity #financialfreedom #financialindependence #earlyretirement #retireearly #retirement #firejourney #personalfinance #financialindependenceretireearly #financialindependencenumber #financialindependencejourney #firemovement #retireearly #retirementgoals #debtfreecommunity #invest #investing #financialplanning #retirementplanning #financialliteracy #roadtoretirement #wheretoretire #retiredlife #retiredlifeisgood #retired

You may have heard about GameStop (GME) or AMC Theatres or Blockbuster in the news lately. Their stock prices look like they've been chugging non-stop (despite the fact that BB filed for bankruptcy in 2010), but the question is, "Why?" And "How do I get into that action?" Well, the TL;DR version is that some hedge funds tried to drive down the price of these companies in order to buy them on the cheap and turn a profit. Instead, the public rallied and has been buying up ...the stock to punish the hedge funds by making them have to buy at an inflated price. At this point, all trading platforms have halted all trading on several of these stocks. So what's the average investor to do? As boring as this might sound, we don't own any single stocks. I learned my lesson the hard way at 24, when I purchased $2K in Planet Hollywood stock. Why? Because we worked for a PH restaurant, The Official All Star Cafe, and I got caught up in the excitement that PH would go IPO, and I would make bank! Four years later, PH filed for bankruptcy (for the first time), and I lost all that money. Considering that I was working for restaurant minimum wage + tips, that was a LOT of money earned working long hours doing back breaking work! Instead, we focus our investments on low cost index funds, first in our 401(k)s and IRAs, and then in our brokerage account. Our (and a lot of the FIRE community's) index fund of choice is VTSAX, which owns stock in every publicly traded company in the market. If we were to start over again, we would start by investing in VTI, which is Vanguard's ETF version of VTSAX. VTSAX has returned over 4.5% over the last month (and 14% over the last decade ). That's nothing to sneeze at! Granted, that's no one-month return of 1700% like people who invested in GME on December 28, but the likelihood of making a 1700% return on any stock is pretty small. It may seem sexy to invest in individual stocks and make money hand over fist, but the average investor will likely never pick winning stocks consistently over time. If index funds are good enough for Warren Buffet, then they're good enough for us! We believe in the slow and steady approach to finances.

So you want to FIRE. What's the first step? Determine your "FI number." Calculate your annual expenses. Tally your monthly bills (rent/mortgage, insurance, utilities, groceries, etc.) Multiply that by 12. This is the number you will use to figure out how much you need to reach Financial Independence.... The typical advice is to accumulate 25 times (aka 25X) your annual expenses. This is your FI number. Example: Your annual expenses are $40,000 USD. Your FI number would be $1,000,000 ($40000 * 25). You can either save it up this amount of money over time (which will take a LOT of time!) or save your money and _invest_ in the market (making time your friend in this scenario!). On average, the market goes up over time. Conservative investors calculate that the market, and thus their portfolio, increases 6-8% a year. Our retirement strategy was to invest in low cost mutual funds (hint: look at the expense ratio and try to keep it under 0.5%; many of ours are under 0.1%). There are all kinds of cool calculators online that will help you determine how much your investment will increase YoY (year over year). Here's one example: https://firecalc.com/ Although 25X is the conventional wisdom, we recommend accumulating 30X or more before taking the leap into FIRE. Using our previous example, that would be $1,200,000. Some people consider this "fatFIRE," which is a turbo loaded version of FIRE, but we think it's safer (safeFIRE?). As with any financial advice you read on the Internet, you should consult with your personal advisor. We want you to be safe out there! We’ll talk about the Trinity Study and determining how much money you can take out of your portfolio to support an early retirement next week! . . . . . #TuesdayTip #FIRE #financialfreedom #personalfinance #firecommunity #financialfreedom #financialindependence #earlyretirement #retireearly #firejourney #retirement #personalfinance #financialindependenceretireearly #financialindependencenumber #financialindependencejourney #firejourney #firemovement #retireearly #debtfreecommunity #invest #investing #retirement #financialindependencenumber #fatfire

When I turned 50 last year, I had my annual checkup with my , and she told me to start drinking more water (I really dislike plain water, for some reason), get my shingles (Dylin's father caught shingles last January at the age of 80!), and do all the fun medical exams that come with getting older - colon screening (luckily, that was a non-invasive test) and another mammogram. As we were talking, it began to dawn on me that if I want another 50 years on this plane...t, I would need to take better care of the two of us! As we began Shelter-in-Place, I started doing more meal planning/tracking. Until COVID, we had never really thought much about what we were going to eat for dinner. We would often go out to a restaurant (another benefit of FIRE is being able to let other people cook for you ), or I would cook whatever was in our fridge. But with COVID, time seemed to be extra wonky and I would often lose track of what we were eating. So I decided to log and plan our meals in advance, to make sure that we ate a varied and nutritious diet (for added health!). Thus, #MeatlessMonday was born. The production of to support humanity's increasing meat habit is taking a toll on our . Not to go down a rathole, but the amount of needed, the production of methane by , and the land required to support these animals is having some pretty negative impacts on our environment. If we could eliminate meat from our diets by one day a week, we could save the equivalent emissions of driving a 350 miles a year! Healthwise, digesting meat takes a lot out of your body, so by eliminating it one day a week, you give your body a break! It's like a weekly detox for your body! And as you get older, you really begin to appreciate the body you have, because until science fiction catches up with us, this is the only body we're going to have, so we need to take care of it! That’s pretty good motivation to try out #meatlessmonday!

We have fantastic neighbors! Since the pandemic started, we have been shopping for some of the older ones, and they occasionally reward us with a yummy treat. Here are some of their goodies from the holidays. Pumpkin cheesecake with candied pecans Nut-free biscotti Cookie assortment Chicken noodle soup... We are very grateful for their generosity (although our waistline are not...)! What are you grateful for today? . . . . . #gratitudesunday #gratitudeattitude #neighborshelpingneighbors #goodneighbors #pathtofinancialfreedom #pathtofire #FIRE #financialfreedom #personalfinance #firecommunity #financialfreedom #financialindependence #earlyretirement #retireearly #retirement #firejourney #personalfinance #financialindependenceretireearly #financialindependencenumber #financialindependencejourney #firemovement #retireearly #retirementgoals #financialplanning #retirementplanning #financialliteracy #roadtoretirement #retiredlife #retiredlifeisgood #retired #debtfreecommunity #invest #investing