Financial Independence Update- April 2024

8 Years of Monthly Updates!

April 2024 makes eight full years (96 months) of these financial independence updates! It is very hard for me to believe that it has been that long since I started this website (April 2016). In a very real way, me starting to do these monthly updates made a massive positive impact on my life.

How you ask? Well, there was a time back in 2017 where I really lost my passion for writing about travel therapy and financial independence. I came out of the gate hot when I started this site and wrote about all of the big topics I wanted to cover in the first six months or so. To give some perspective on this, I wrote 26 articles in the first five months. That’s more articles than I wrote in all of 2023. I was making very little money for the amount of time I was putting into researching and writing articles back then (less than $2/hour), and I didn’t really have any compelling topics to continue to write about. I also had almost no consistent readers, so it wasn’t unusual for a monthly update to get less than 10 views.

I can remember a few months back then where I very seriously considered letting the website fizzle out. I mean, what’s the point of putting so much effort into something that almost no one is reading and is earning very little money? The only reason I didn’t let the website go was because of these monthly updates. I hate to quit things when I’ve built up a streak, and so every month when the month was almost over and I hadn’t written my monthly update, I’d log back in and do it to keep the streak alive.

Eventually, the site started to get more traction, which led to emails and comments with encouragement that gave me ideas and got me back into the swing of writing. That led to creating our other website, Travel Therapy Mentor, so that this site would be more focused on finances and our personal travels, while Travel Therapy Mentor would focus strictly on travel therapy topics. That split between the two websites was huge for the trajectory of our business. None of that would have happened if it wasn’t for these monthly updates forcing me to stay consistent and stick with it.

How My Life Has Changed in 8 Years

It’s crazy to reflect back on how much both I and my life have changed since I first started doing these updates eight years ago. At that time, I was less than a year out of PT school, fired up (pun intended) about financial independence, and had dreams of one day traveling the world. I was immature and way too focused on my finances. Back then, I used to stress to an unhealthy degree about almost every little expenditure. I was doing everything possible to make as much as I possibly could– working overtime whenever possible, working extra hours PRN whenever I could, constantly researching and applying for new credit cards and bank accounts to get bonuses, and writing on this site with any free time I had. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I was regularly working 60-70 hours/week between work and various side hustles. That wasn’t sustainable though. I wasn’t sleeping enough, exercising enough, or spending time on relationships like I should have. While all of this did allow me to reach financial independence much quicker than I or anyone else thought possible, in hindsight it would have been much healthier to slow down and enjoy life a little more even if it meant a few more years to reach FI.

Now, here I am eight years later with a life I could have never even dreamed of back then. Whitney and I are in a better financial position than I ever thought possible, we have a thriving online business, we work extremely part time and 100% on our own terms, and we spent the better part of the last five years traveling all over the country and the world while actually continuing to improve our finances (not dwindle our savings) and grow our business.

On a personal note, we are married, own a townhouse that we paid for in cash, and we are expecting our first baby this fall! Yep, in case you missed our big news on social media, Whitney is pregnant! We are very excited for this next phase of our journey as we start our own family!

The irony of my financial independence journey is that while I spent all that time early on sprinting toward retirement, I now realize that true “retirement” isn’t fulfilling and isn’t actually what I want. What I really wanted was the option to not have to work if I didn’t want to and the feeling of security. I’ve grown up a lot in eight years, and being able to go back and read these updates from back then is enlightening to me to see where I was then and how far I’ve come, not only financially but also psychologically.

For fun, here is my first excel graph charting my path to financial independence in the April 2016 article to look at the financial side of things.

My net worth was equal to just over 4 times my annual expenses, and I had a projected FIRE date of September 2020. I was so excited when charting the path out to see that hitting FIRE in a little over four years from then was a possibility.

In reality, I ended up getting there even quicker though, passing 25 times my annual expenses for the first time in June of 2019, exactly four years after I graduated and started working full time.

What a wild ride it’s been since that first post!

So now, onto this month’s update!

April 2024 Financial Independence Update

Income

Income from our websites (FifthWheelPT and Travel Therapy Mentor) for April was about 20% less than in March, but still much better than February. It was a pretty average month overall. I did earn extra money in April though because we’re currently working part time travel physical therapy contracts. While sixteen hours per week on a Travel PT contract isn’t a significant amount, it’s still more than enough to cover all of my monthly expenses. It’s also been really nice to be back in the clinic working with patients again, even though the first few weeks were pretty tough.

Expenses

April expenses were fairly low besides paying taxes. We didn’t go on any trips or have any unexpected expenditures. My only real spending outside of taxes was day to day things, along with our rent at our travel jobs. As far as taxes go, we did a much better job with our quarterly payments in 2023, so our tax liability that was due in April was very low. We did have Q1 quarterly payments due as well though, so that was pretty substantial.

In total, my savings rate for the month was around 70% when all was said and done.

Investments

The S&P 500 was down by about 4.2% in April. This wasn’t much of a surprise overall. The market has been red hot this year, so a correction was overdue. Whether this small correction will turn into something bigger is yet to be seen. The economy seems to still be holding fairly well all things considered, although inflation still remains a big problem with lots of low and middle income families struggling.

The Bitcoin price decreased by about 15% in April. While that certainly hurt, it also wasn’t unexpected after seven straight green months adding up to huge gains in the proceeding months. It was amazing to see how quickly sentiment shifted with the drop though. Just one negative month seems to have caused most people to think the bull run is cancelled. I was taking profits on the way up, so the drop wasn’t as painful as it would have been otherwise. If this turns into a bigger correction, then I’ll be looking for an opportunity to redeploy those profits this summer. If this is just a correction before moving higher, then I’ll continue to take profits steadily on the way up.

Financial Independence Progress

My net assets decreased by about 4.7% in April. That’s the first drop of more than 1% in almost two years! I had been on a crazy streak of growth with my assets more than doubling since June of 2022. That sudden increase is a big reason why I’ve been adamant about taking profits and shifting more and more to less volatile assets. There’s just no reason for me to take big risks with large portions of my portfolio anymore. A wise investor once said, “when you win the game, stop playing” — and while I don’t intend to take all of my chips off the table, decreasing risk definitely makes sense.

With this decrease in my net asset value, my assets are now equal to approximately 95.9 times my average annual expenses!

Next Month

In May, we will continue our time in Charlottesville, Virginia on our Travel PT contracts. We will also find out the gender of our baby! This has been a really exciting time for us, and we can’t wait for this next phase of our lives.

How was April for you financially? Let me know in the comments!