Progress to Financial Independence- July 2016

First off, I’d like to appologize for writing so little lately. Whitney and I have been taking a lot of weekend trips and also the wifi at our current campground is terrible which makes doing anything online very difficult (one of the downsides of living at campgrounds).

This month went really well financially. There are several reasons for the rather large jump in my net worth this month and those include:

• Five paychecks in the month of July
• Strong growth in my investments this month (S&P at all-time highs)
• Selling some of my credit card points for cash

The five paychecks was very helpful and pushed me over my monthly savings goal by a significant amount. I’ve gotten very lucky in some of my investments since the beginning of this year. Part of this is because the market doing well overall but some is also because of beginners luck with some index funds that I chose to invest in. I decided that I had accumulated way too many credit card points to use for travel over the next few years so I sold some of my points for a little over $2,000. I still have quite a few more that I may sell as well for another $3,000 or so but I haven’t decided yet.

My new estimated date of financial independence is July, 2020 which is really crazy. I’ve been working only a little over one year and that date is only four years from now. Even though the estimated date has changed based on my projected savings rate and current net worth, I’m still going to plan on September, 2020 as being my target. This is because finding new contracts that match up exactly with the end of the old contract is very difficult as a travel PT. There is a very good chance that over the next four years there will be times when Whitney and I will be out of work for a couple of weeks, not by choice but because we were unable to find suitable jobs that match our start dates. An example of this can be seen in our current assignments.

Here is our current situation. Our end date was supposed to be 8/19 and we wanted to find new jobs in VA or NC to start on 8/22 but we couldn’t find anything that would work for us. After some negotiating, we were able to extend our current contract for another week full-time and then two more weeks at 20 hours per week. This was far from ideal for us and basically means that we will lose the equivilent of three weeks of pay during the month of September. After our full-time contracts end on 8/26 now, we will work two weeks part-time, then have to take a full week off of work prior to going on vacation the week of 9/19. At that point we will just have to hope that we can find two fitting jobs that start on the Monday that we get back from our trip, otherwise we will miss out on more work. This is just one of the occasional sacrifices that have to be made as a travel PT.

Since I will likely be far from hitting my savings goal in September, my projected financial independence date will probably get pushed back to August or September, 2020 again but I’m okay with that. Whitney and I haven’t taken more than a weekend off since the beginning of June last year so a break should be nice. I’m going to do my best to enjoy the time off and catch up with family during that time. The pursuit of financial independence isn’t everything and I’ve got plenty of time to get there.