Financial Independence Update- June 2026

In June, Whitney and I celebrated 3 years being married and 13 years since we started dating. We took a few day trip to Asheville, NC just the two of us, and it was awesome. It’s so hard to leave Aria overnight, but we know a little time alone is good for us especially before the baby comes and things get more hectic. We did a couple of short hikes, got massages, and had some wonderful dinners. Now that we aren’t traveling constantly, we appreciate the trips that we do take much more than we did in the past.

Besides the short trip, we were at home the rest of the month spending quite a bit of time outside hiking, going to parks, and going to the pool. Our neighborhood has a great pool that we’re doing our best to take advantage of this year. We saw a lot of friends in June including some friends who visited from out of town. Aria has also been sleeping amazingly well for a while now which has made all of our lives much better. She consistently sleeps 11-12 hours at night with a 1.5-2 hour nap during the day.

In June, I also started working part time as a PT again in our local hospital-based outpatient clinic. I hadn’t been working as a PT since before Aria was born on our last Travel PT contract in 2024, so I decided to get back to working part time to keep up my PT license. It’s also been good for me to have a routine going into the clinic twice per week. I’m just working two half days, so about 9-10 hours per week.

Income

Income from our business (FifthWheelPT and Travel Therapy Mentor) for June was up about 30% from May. It ended up being our highest earning month of the year and one of our highest earning months of all time! It feels good to have a couple of back to back high earning months, and it looks like July will be pretty good as well.

Expenses

My expenses for June were pretty low again. We spent more than last month due to the trip to Asheville, but we used hotel points for lodging so that helped. The main costs were for the massages and dinners as well as a little more than average spent on gas.

My savings rate for the month was about 90% when all was said and done.

Investments

The S&P 500 was down by 1.1% in June. After such high returns in April and May, it wasn’t a surprise to see things cool off. This year has been really good for equities so far and is right on pace with the huge yearly returns of the last two years. Right now there is a lot of hype around AI and the infrastructure buildout required to keep it growing. Inflation seems to be heading higher due to the war in Iran though, so that could really impact things negatively if it continues the rest of the year.

Bitcoin was down by about 20.5% in June! This was worst month for Bitcoin since June of 2022 exactly 4 years ago. The 4 year cycles seem to continue to play out exactly like they have in the past, which is somewhat surprising to me. I really thought that things would be similar but not exactly the same since it’s what everyone expected, but that’s been wrong so far. Usually the market doesn’t do what everyone is expecting, but for Bitcoin since the top in October it has played out just like the last bear market. Right now I’m just continuing to buy weekly while things are cheap. In the past, buying anywhere near the 200 week moving average has been a very smart move, and I don’t expect this time to be any different. If Bitcoin continues to do exactly what it did 4 years ago, we could see lower prices in September or October, but I’m not going to risk waiting to buy when we’ve already dropped 50%. Last bear market I bought some but was waiting for price to go lower for a really big buy, but it didn’t happen and I ended up regretted waiting, so don’t want to make that mistake again. I still expect Bitcoin to be at much higher prices in a few years regardless of what happens over the next few months.

Financial Independence Progress

My net assets decreased by 10.2% in June. This was the biggest percentage drop I’ve had in a month since May of 2021 and the biggest drop in dollar terms of all time. It doesn’t feel good to see such a big drop in such a short period of time, but it’s also not a surprise after seeing what happened with Bitcoin this month.

My assets are now equal to approximately 29.9 times my average annual expenses!

In case you missed it, check out this post for an update on why I adjusted my spending assumptions.