The Financial Independence Project

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.

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.