I can't believe it's already been a year! October is the time that I update my numbers, which calls for another yearly check-in with this great community. Here's last year's update, which has some additional context on our situation.

Selections

Since my last update, my wife and I had our fourth child, so I now lovingly refer to our earning/family situation as SILK (Single Income, Lotsa Kids). Current salary is $215k, which is an increase from last year due to a new job I started. The lion's share of my raise went towards retirement savings, so annual FIRE savings amount is at about $73k now. Current FIRE assets are $318k, a sizable increase from last year due to aggressive saving and great market conditions. I continue to VT & Chill wherever possible, and in the places I can't I try to replicate it with whatever low-cost index funds they have available. We continue to save a fixed amount per child per paycheck into a separate "bucket" apart from our FIRE assets so that we're prepared to help our children with future expenses like higher education and wedding, and also just generally be involved and helpful in their lives like our parents have been to us.

Projections

FIRE number has been revised slightly downward to $2.4M. Why move the number down? Because I probably rounded up when I set it last year, haha. $2.5M is a nice round number, but our spending projections don't change with the number at $2.4M instead, nor does the Success Rate change on our FiCalc plan. Based on that number, we could now technically "coast" until a normal retirement at age 67 without contributing anything else. I have no intention of actually doing that haha but it's an exciting milestone nonetheless. We are still very much focused on an early retirement. My boss thinks I'll probably get promoted early next year, which should bring a pay raise with it. I continue to like the 95% Rule as a withdrawal strategy, and am still planning on that when the time comes. One thing I'm thinking about is asset allocation; 100% stocks still feels great to me given the number of years we are out from a possible RE, but I think I might want to revisit that in maybe 5 years. If anyone has experience tweaking their asset allocation as they get closer to RE, I would love to hear about it.

Reflections

I'm grateful for the new job I got to start earlier this year! I got a raise, and the engineering org is a better fit for what I'm looking for. There's also greater upside for me here compared with my previous job, both financially and professionally. It's more consuming than my previous job, but I haven't thought it unreasonable so far. I don't take for granted the blessing it is to have well paid employment alongside really kind, smart, and driven coworkers at a company that is growing a lot.

I'm feeling really grateful for the path that I am on! No idea what life will throw at me and my family, but we are in a far better spot to handle it than the vast majority of Americans, and I realize how privileged of a spot it is. I feel a bit guilty when I think about how much better we're doing than my siblings or my wife's siblings or most of our friends. I'm the person they all come to when they have personal finance questions, and I do my best to share best practices and first principles with them. I've even dropped some obvious comments here and there about how I'm saving for early retirement, but none of them have engaged with me much about that yet. And so, I continue to carry on down this path, ready to sell them on FIRE if they're ever ready, but most importantly just feeling really grateful for the amazing situation my awesome family and I are in.

Until next year! (well, probably before then if you're in the daily threads haha)