The Financial Independence Project

The Unexpected One Car Experiment Ends

July 19, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

Well we technically made it two weeks with just one car, but as of today our one car experiment has come to an end. We spent a lot of time juggling schedules and moving appointments but after a thorough analysis of our schedules and responsibilities we just are not set up to be a one car household at this time. We could have made it work with one car for another month, but after that we realistically could not have just one car without impacting our income. If we lived somewhere with strong public transportation or one of us had the ability to bike or walk to work it could have worked, but unfortunately we are not in that situation right now. We even looked at the cost of Lyft and Uber to supplement only having one car but the cost of those services did not even come close to making financial sense, even if used very infrequently. So in the end after looking at logistics and the spreadsheets we created (I mean who doesn’t use spreadsheets for this type of decision :p) we decided to find and purchase a second car…

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The Unexpected One Car Experiment

July 11, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

Driver runs red light directly into our car

For most people and families, there are usually three big spending areas that can have a significant impact on the path to financial independence. Typically in the order of significance they are housing, cars, and food. The scale and size of the impact of these areas will vary quite a bit depending on personal circumstances, but outside of additional income, addressing these items can have a huge impact on how long it takes to reach FI.

Since we have been together, we have always been a two car family (one per adult), and have never considered the possibility of trying to get by with just one car. One reason why we never even discussed it is we have not had a car payment in almost 10 years, and we both planned to keep our cars until they stop running or cost way too much in repairs. Also, based on our schedules, kids activities, and work locations it just never seemed practical, and we never gave it much thought. While we planned on keeping our cars until they wouldn’t run anymore, this changed when our 11 year old Toyota Matrix was totaled by a college student who decided to run a red light at an intersection and directly into my wife’s car. Luckily no one was injured, including both of our children who were in the car at the time, but the car did not survive. This has left us with only one car to use for the last week once the other driver’s insurance company paid us the small amount of value they determined the car was worth. It is a very frustrating outcome because the Kelly Blue Book value is no way near the value we placed on and was provided by the vehicle. So while unplanned we are now operating with only one car, and decided to document this process and whether it is possible given our circumstances to realistically (and I do mean this literally) have only one vehicle in our family. We will probably make this a multi-part post from two different perspectives, and we will see how long this experiment can last, although based on this first week I doubt it will last long…

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Spending on what you Value

June 22, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

When I first wanted to start talking about the idea of financial independence with my wife I was hesitant because I thought she would think the idea was a little bit crazy or unattainable. I worried that if I took the wrong approach she would be turned off to the idea especially if she perceived it as simply involving not spending money on anything and living as cheaply as possible. So I decided to give her a book, Your Money or Your Life, and asked her to read it and then see what she thought of the idea from that perspective. It turns out that the approach the book takes resonated with her especially when it comes to thinking about the value of what you choose to spend money on versus how much of your life you spend to acquire or do something that costs money. In fact I think the book was one of the reasons she started to think about all the costs associated with working at her former job and this helped her to pull the plug on that and start working for herself. One of the key points presented in the book is not to deprive yourself of everything by spending as little as possible, but only spending money on what you truly value. We like that approach because everyone has different things they value and that means that everyone’s plan is a little bit different; you simply cut out spending that does not really give you value. When we started to consider what we value we found it was not items, but rather experiences.

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The Family Meeting

June 19, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

When my wife and I first got married we fell into the trap of “what’s for dinner tonight?” and “do we have enough money for this item?”, or “what are we doing this weekend/today/tonight?”. We would have these conversations everyday, at random times, or worse never make time for them at all. We were finding that operating as a family with a newly combined budget, calendar, and goals was more complex than when we were just two individuals. To address this, we started having weekly family meetings. We designed these meetings to be an opportunity to discuss our family business in a more structured and efficient way.

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Why I Plan to Leave Academia

June 15, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

I have been looking forward to writing this post ever since I decided to start a blog. When I tell people that I am planning to leave my faculty position in higher education by the age of 45 it elicits some puzzled looks. Why would I give up on a career that essentially guarantees me a job for life (under most circumstances), a flexible schedule, and three months off per year? The reason is quite simple, regardless of all the perceived benefits, it is still a job. Originally, like many people, I put too much emphasis on what I did as a career being directly related to who I am as a person. The idea of pursuing an intellectual passion and sharing that with others through research and teaching, however, is not the same thing as having a job or career as a university professor. In fact I find that in my research area, working at a university can sometimes get in the way of my true intellectual pursuits. So my plan is to leave academia by the age of 45. Below I have listed some pros and cons of working in higher education that influenced my decision to ultimately leave this career behind. Realize that not all academic institutions share every one of these attributes, but I do think there are some strong generalizations that can be made. This list is based on my experience working for both a large public research university, and a medium sized private teaching university.

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The Path so Far (updated 2019)

June 13, 2019 By Julia Leave a Comment

As I continue to add content to our Financial Independence project, I wanted to provide a little bit of context of how we arrived at the point we are currently at and where we are starting from (in terms of a formal plan). After we discovered and started thinking about financial independence in 2016 our Net Worth was a little over $600,000, and as we start blogging about this in 2019 we are currently just shy of $900,000. We were fortunate that we made a few smart money moves earlier in our life, even though we were not thinking in terms of FI. Many of those decisions are what allowed us to be in the position we currently are in and hopefully able to reach our goals in a relatively short amount of time. Of course while we did do a lot of smart things, we also made some decisions that put us behind where we could be right now, but you can’t change the past, only learn from it. We also had some setbacks due to health care costs and caring for a family member we lost almost two years ago. Even given these setbacks and a few poor decisions, when we compare ourselves with the statistical averages in the United States, we have no room to complain about our current position, especially since nothing in our life has been handed to us or passed down from family.

I figure many of my posts in the future will contain elements of lessons learned and life events that shaped our current thinking, but in this post I wanted to focus on some of the major financial milestones that I (Julia) have personally accomplished and experienced up to this point by looking at my job history, and will probably add a second post by my spouse in the near future.

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