Ambition on your path to FIRE (financial independence retire early): An early retiree’s thoughts
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| Be ambitious to reach your financial goals! |
Oscar Wilde: “Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.”
Our early retirement enabled us to travel a month or longer at a time with our Pomeranian dog, Toby. Since August 2020, we’ve visited various destinations on the eastern parts of the United States, and we look forward to doing just that in the foreseeable future.
In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts and experiences on ambition and why it is vital to reach your goal of financial independence and retiring early.
Around 2010 or so, I encountered the FIRE (financial independence retire early) movement by chance. I was searching online for search terms like ‘retiring early’, retiring on 200k’, and ‘how to end the rat race’. I came upon two that struck a chord: Jacob Lund Fisker (Early Retirement Extreme) and Peter Adeney (Mr. Money Moustache).
Thanks to their blogs, I got seriously interested in reaching my goal to reach financial independence and to retire early.
In 2010, I had around $10,000 in my total retirement savings. Starting from that point forward, my wife and I started doing two things simultaneously.
- We started to pay more into our mortgage so we can pay it off quicker. *We refinanced our mortgage twice to reduce the rate and to reduce the term. We originally had a 30 year mortgage at 6.75% interest rate. We went to a 20 year mortgage at 5% interest rate, then to a 15 year mortgage at 3.5% interest rate.
It was in 2011 that we started to ramp up our savings rate from 10% to 17%. This was a huge jump as it amounted to few hundred dollar difference in take home pay each month. We adjusted to the new reality fairly quickly. At first, we didn’t think we could live on less each month, but it worked out. We learned to live with less...
Some adjustments were necessary to make this work: We had started to eat less at sit-down restaurants and started to do more take out. We didn’t go on any vacations where we took airplanes or cruises, except one to Las Vegas in 2017. We spent time with our family and/or did local trips (mini-vacations) instead.
There were times when we questioned our decision because, well, we’re human beings. There were times when we couldn’t give our parents presents during the holidays or when they would come visit us and we couldn’t treat them at nice sit-down restaurants.
All the doubts went away the longer we kept at it. Looking at our 401k statement growing each month also helped! We knew in our hearts that we made the right decision for us, and that’s all that mattered. Our parents weren’t paying our mortgage nor our bills each month. We had to live for ourselves first, then family, and not the other way around...
Few months into that, we got ambitious. There was a fire deep inside me telling me we can do more! There were nights I would try to sleep but couldn’t, as I was thinking we could do better. It’s that little voice in your head telling you to push further that’ll get you to where you want to go…
I felt if we didn’t do more, then we’ll never get to our retirement! So, after raising our savings rate to 17% few months prior, we raised it to 20%. Increasing it 3% wasn’t a big deal compared to a 7% increase.
We kept going until I reached the maximum savings rate (24% in my case) and maximum savings amount that IRS allowed at the time. *Around $19,000 around 2019. Less in 2018 by $500 or so...
In conclusion:
If we hadn’t felt that fire burning inside us telling us to keep going, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Without having that ambition to want more, to do more, to pay off debt more, we are probably still working at our jobs today.
No success story comes without hard work, learning, ambition, and sacrifice. Focus on your goal of early retirement and financial independence by committing to an actionable goal. Write down what you’ll do. More specific, the better. It’s not enough to just to say I want to retire. Be specific and say ‘I will pay down my debt by a specific amount each month/year’, and also be specific and say, ‘I will save this specific amount towards retirement!’
The sacrifice you’re going through will be well worth it once you achieve your financial independence goals!
Please check out our YouTube channel ‘Wandering Money Pig’ showcasing our travels and our Pomeranian dog! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3kl9f4W9sfNG5h1l-x6nHw
