Progress to Financial Independence- July 2018

The first week of July was our last week of work for all of 2018 and the beginning of semi-retirement! It has been a whirlwind since then with a week at home prior to embarking on our around-the-world trip. We’ve been moving from place to place every 4-5 days on average and seeing as much as we possibly can in each location. That combined with keeping track of and writing about my expenses in each place we visit has kept me pretty busy.

Even with only two paychecks in July, I was able to meet my net worth target for the month. This was due to better than average market returns in July, as well as receiving a few referral bonuses from travel companies and a couple of bank account bonuses. Despite traveling through the UK where things are pretty costly, I kept my expenses reasonable for the month and hope that will continue to be the case as we move through less expensive areas in southeast Asia. I’ve got a lofty goal of spending less than $10,000 during the five months we’re out of the country, everything included. In reality I’m hoping that it will be even less than that, but I don’t want to limit my spending too much so that I can still do everything I want to do in all of these places I’ve never been before.

There’s no doubt that my progress to my FI target will slow down starting in August since I will no longer have any income coming in from work. I will be relying solely on income generated from this blog and investment returns on my current assets to cover all of my living expenses. During this time, instead of making huge strides toward my ultimate net worth goal like I have for the past three years, I’m just hoping not to have my net worth start dropping. Barring any big market corrections, I believe that I should be able to finish this trip with a higher net worth that I started with from only the sources of income mentioned above.

I’ll keep doing these monthly updates throughout the trip but will likely have much less to say in them than I have in the past. Whitney is writing about everything that we are doing in each location we visit, and I’m writing about my expenses in each place. So these monthly finance posts will be more of a quick summary for the month, and mostly me sharing whether my total net worth increased or decreased for the month. As of now, my anticipated FI date (if I continued to save as much each month as I have in the past) would still be March 2019. I expect this to move back to around August or September by the time we finish our trip, but that’s fine with me as that will still be before my 31st birthday. Being financially independent at 30 years old continues to be my primary goal and that should be possible even with the 6 month set back due to this trip!

I hope that you guys continue to follow along with these monthly updates as well as our trip and expense updates from each place we visit during our international travel. Thanks for reading!