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.
The Path so Far (updated 2019)
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.
Project Reboot Net Worth ($896,948)
To be honest when we decided to reboot our Financial Independence project we were not sure if we wanted to continue the practice of posting our net worth and savings updates. We have actually had a lot of debates about the idea of maintaining privacy versus being open about our finances, and for now we decided to continue to be open about where we are financially and post our numbers. Ultimately it comes down to trying to break down the taboo of talking about finances and numbers openingly versus having what many others call stealth wealth. For me personally I think the secrecy about personal finances and numbers are what cause many of the inequities and problems in personal finance today. People are scared to talk about their personal finances, or they use material status symbols to try and portray a picture of wealth that may not actually represent the underlying financial picture. Either way for now we are going to continue to be open with our numbers both for philosophical reasons, and the fact that personally writing everything out promotes more awareness and accountability as we pursue our FI goals.
So as of May 31st, 2019 (the official start of our FI Project Reboot) this is our current financial position:
[Read more…] about Project Reboot Net Worth ($896,948)A Project Reboot
Eighteen months ago we decided to take a break from blogging about our FIRE Project, and our life in general. It was one of those well needed breaks from many things in our life. I lost a family member after a long battle with cancer, and then we had other medical issues in our immediate family that became the focus of most of our time and energy. The time away was well needed and thankfully we were able to come out on the other side and have now finally started to experience some normalcy in our lives again. I will admit that during this time the last thing on our mind was our FI project, but luckily many of the same attitudes and goals remained intact during this time away, although a little bit delayed because of setbacks related to health and our very broken health care and health insurance system. Now that we have made it through this stage and associated challenges we both really wanted to get back to focusing on this project and the goals we set out for ourselves.