Progress to Financial Independence- April 2019

Another Month Already?!

The end of April means that we’re almost done working for the year (yes, you read that right, for the year) and will be heading to Europe soon to spend 15 weeks traveling and exploring! April has been a busy month with working full time at busy outpatient clinics, growing the Travel Therapy Mentor website (including weekly live videos on the Facebook page), and spending our weekends exploring and hiking. I haven’t been writing much lately, but once we finish working our PT jobs for the year, I’m sure I’ll have more motivation to get back to work on articles for this site.

Income

This website and the Travel Therapy Mentor site brought in a decent amount of income again this month, which makes it a full year now that the websites’ monthly earnings have surpassed my monthly expenses. Very exciting!

Work income (from my current travel therapy contract) from the four paychecks in April amounted to about 6.5x my total expenses for the month. I also received a $500 cash credit card sign up bonus in April from my very first business card! All said and done, my net income for the month was about 8x my expenses for the month, resulting in a savings rate of about 88% in total!

Expenses

My expenses were slightly higher in April than they were in March, due primarily to our weekend trips where we spent more than usual on food, entertainment, and gas. I’ve become more lenient on my spending over the years on my path to FI, and as the goal number grows ever closer, I feel as though it’s no longer as important for me to be overly frugal as long as I’m keeping the big expenses in check.

Investments

According to my investment tracking on Personal Capital (a great free resource for tracking your net worth and investments) my portfolio was up about 3% in April! That’s a huge gain in a one month period and gave me a big boost toward my FIRE goal. If you’re interested in my asset allocation, it has only changed slightly from this article about a year ago.

Financial Independence Target Date

High income, low expenses, and great investment returns were a winning combination in April. I moved ahead a month on my FIRE date and am now on track to hit my target sometime next month! I honestly can’t believe how well things have been going lately and can only hope that the market continues to perform even remotely close to how it’s performed so far this year.

Next Month

As of the end of April, I’m less than $3,000 away from my FIRE target net worth. This is perfect timing since I’m also about one week away from being done working for at least the next 7 months, but possibly much longer depending on how things go during our travels in Europe. We have a lot of countries and states we want to see before potentially having kids in the next few years, so I plan on a lot more traveling and a lot less work! Tough life, right? Being solidly over my FIRE number by the end of May would give me some added security and allow me to not have any worries about taking the next year or more off of work as a physical therapist.

We will have a busy start to May with packing, moving, packing again, and leaving the country. My expenses will likely be quite a bit higher in May due to a higher cost of living while traveling around Europe, but I still hope to keep them reasonable. I’m planning to spend a maximum of $6,000 for our total 15 week trip, which I think will be a little tough, but definitely doable considering a spent less than $6,000 on our 5 month trip around the world last year. As long as my investment portfolio breaks even in May (or possibly even with a slight decline), my last three work paychecks this year combined with income from the websites should easily push me past my FIRE target. Stay tuned for some excitement in next month’s update hopefully!

Thanks for reading. Let me know how your journey to financial freedom is going in the comments below!