Savings Report #77 - One Million Pounds!

£1m has been breached!

November was truly phenomenal. My investments earned 5.9% in a single month, earning £52,000 in interest alone, pushing us over that sought-after figure.

£1m has always been our true FIRE target. Sure, when I first started blogging 6 years ago, my initial target was £300k (I hit this at the end of 2021 ) - This was because my expenses were £12k.

It then became £600k when I started combining my finances and FIRE goals with my wife, which we reached in November 2023 . Which was only a year ago, what!?

I knew that we would have children and that we wanted to buy a bigger, farm-like property, though. £1m felt like a good figure to aim for to feel really FI. £30-£40k a year to live on? Easy! We’ve never spent that much a year in our life.

Well, do we feel like we’ve made it? Are we ready to get off the treadmill right now?

No.

Hell no.

Maybe I should have realized that I’m far too much of an anxious person to ever quit work without overshooting massively what we need and being 200% sure about it. Maybe I’ll never even be able to fully quit?

But, right now, we have a 11 week old.

We’re the most displaced we’ve ever been after being forced to leave the USA. We don’t know whether we want to try and get back to America, if we’ll even be able to, stay in the UK, or live somewhere else entirely.

We have no idea what our cost of living is going to be wherever we end up, and we still want to buy a big farm property which could cost us £500k depending on where it is (interest rates are now astronomical as well.)

The tech industry is convulsing, if I lose my job again it seems it would be very hard to find another well paying one and I feel this will only get worse.

And to go back to my previous point, our net worth went from £600k to £1m in ONE YEAR! Only £130k of that was contributions. I’m not going to break the cardinal sin of passive investing and try to time the market, but it does really seem like we’re at an all time high, especially after the recent Trump Rally. It’s very hard to not see our net worth as a pack of cards that is going to come tumbling down.

So, yeah, maybe I’m just overly worried.

It would be much easier for me to quit work if we slowly transition into our post-FIRE life while still working. This should be possible at my current employer as they still allow working from anywhere within Europe (with the potential chance to relocate to the USA again.)

I will probably continue working and saving if I keep my job until we’ve decided where we want to live and what life we want to have. You’ve got to retire to something, right? And if I lose it, we’ll re-evaluate.

Keep me accountable, though. If you still see me releasing blog posts and making excuses years from now when our net worth is even higher, leave a comment telling me to stop, haha.

Making £1m is actually the last financial goal that I have, listed in my about page . The rest are:

• Move to a rural farm-like property
• Build a house (or a barn!)
• Publish a fantasy novel
• Develop a game and release it on Steam
• Personally develop and release a successful mobile app

Looks like I better get to it.