Announcing Stunning Benefits to Our Money Approach these Next 100 Months to Financial Independence

What are we doing different in the next 100 Months to Financial Independence? We are more cognizant of the fact that we are at an age when “things happen” to people. Part of this is modifying our approach to the psychology of money and making sure we have time to maximize our experiences.

Counter Intuitive Approaches

• It may be surprising that we are not saving every dime on our journey the next 100 Months to Financial Independence (FI) to walk away from “paid” employment.
• Even though we are “maxing out” our pre-tax retirement accounts, we are no longer trying to “max out” post-retirement savings. 
• Instead, we are focusing our after-tax discretionary funds as spending money on ourselves in terms of experiences (mostly travel) and doing extra things for our kids.  Our children, for the most part, are frugal and money conscientious. 

Reinforcing the Good Financial Habits and Positive Life habits

• Our children will come out of their undergraduate collegiate year’s debt free.  They understand this is a major life gift that sets them up financially better than most of their college age peers.  Striving for debt-free post-baccalaureate education will be a major accomplishment, but this is not a certainty for our children yet.
• Our children are putting into practice our same types of money habits, such as trying to max out Roth IRA’s, investing in pre-tax retirement accounts and/or building an “emergency fund” with their college year earnings.
• So as not to fuel our children’s depravation side of being less inclined to spend on themselves—sometimes it’s nice to offer to pay for a weekend getaway or invest in an experience.  We always tried to be generous with our children.  God knows our children have lived a great life, as have we. 
• For years we’ve also shown financial restraint, and there were times in our lives when we told our children, “We cannot afford that” or “we are doing X instead of Y”—one of the unfortunate things about this language, is that I have later learned from our children that they at times thought that we were “poor.”  This led to a psychology of money in believing that we were so poor, in fact, that they were concerned about our ability to have basic necessities.
• We definitely have a lot of friends that lived larger than or could afford to spend more on certain things than we could—but all of us have lived a blessed life. 
• We’ve tried to teach our kids that material things our nice, but we still maintain like Alicia Keys song “If I ain’t got you,” that the most important things in life are people and relationships. 
• Money comes and goes, so do people, but it’s the connectedness to others that gives meaning and purpose in life.  Personally, I was only going to be with a spouse that wanted me for me, and not for my money or a material life.  Ironically, while this blog is focused on money, the older I get, the less material I get. I am motivated by how we can best use our money and influence for good in life for our family and for others.

The Journey Ahead These Next 100 Months

Personally, I feel like I’m in my prime for my work. Even though there are ups and downs, I’m still motivated to compete every day and continue to rack up wins for good.  I know that my efforts result in good things happening and helping others even though I do not always get to see the direct, rubber meets the road results. 

There is also something about seeing progress in our “retirement funds” going up (certainly better than seeing the retirement accounts going drastically down for a few years or during the Great Recession of 2008-2009). 

In these next 100 Months to Financial Independence the goal would be to do the following:

• Meet or exceed our target financial figure that we have calculated based on drawing down retirement funds based on the four percent rule.
• Allowing for one major trip per year (overseas or elsewhere for one- to two-weeks) and four to five minor trips per year (likely long-weekends but could be longer, typically U.S. based).
• We just sent in our passports for renewal and are anticipating utilizing the 10-year time frame for international travel with the hope that we can do additional international travel after these initial 10 years.
• Help our children graduate debt-free from post-baccalaureate college which gives them the ultimate advantage of a degree without the financial hole setting them up nicely on their own financial abundance goals.
• Investing in ourselves in smaller ways like performances (such as going to the local performance of A Christmas Carol or concerts) or splurges on things that bring us pleasure (shopping at Trader Joe’s to get the produce we love instead of our closer grocery store to hanging out at our local coffee shop).
• Help others to understand and put into practice financial independence.
• Continuing to be generous to family, friends, and our community.

Holding Us Accountable these next 100 months

It will be difficult to walk away from work and making “paid work optional” as much of our personal identities are tied to work. 100 Months means that we will be reaching our FI Number by August 2024. We are making this 100 Month timeline public because we know we will need to be held accountable to “step away” from paid employment in 100 months if financial goals have been met. Full disclosure, given our psychology of money issues, the 100 months includes some “hedging” because it builds in a one more year timeframe. Ironically, at the same time we are trying to be on the lam from the Retirement Police we are also trying to be held accountable for making “paid work optional.” Please join us on our journey to reach FI by age 59 and a half.