I’m far too lazy to make a long update post, but… well, I have a lot of updates.
First of all, primarily due to internal financial issues (i.e. bankruptcy), I left my previous employer and jumped ship over to a new and hopefully more stable one. I’m still working in compliance. It’s a small startup that’s expected to go live in the next few weeks, and guess what my salary is?
$90,000.00.
Yeah. Crazy, right?
For those who aren’t aware from my previous posts, I recently joined the compliance industry in December of 2020 as an AML Analyst making about $42k or $45k per year. A year later, I company-hopped and started making $65k. Now I’ve jumped yet again, with less than two full years in the industry, and am now making $90k. That’s not even including the stock options, which are 3,000 shares @ 8.31 each, vested over 4 years. I’m more concerned about salary than anything else though, so I’m just over the moon about making 90k!
So, now I’m making $90k and my partner is making $84k. After taxes we bring home about $112k annually, or $9,400/month. We live in a very LCOL area, so we’re able to save a ton of that each month… or at least, we would be if we weren’t aggressively trying to pay down our debts, which are as follows:
OUTSTANDING DEBTS
Credit Card Debt: $22,000
HELOC: $39,600
Student Loan: $5,800
TOTAL: $67,400
I really don’t like having that much debt, so the next year or two is going to be spent very, very, very aggressively paying off that debt to the best of our ability. Aside from those debts, our monthly expenses aren’t bad at all, and spend somewhere between $3,000 and $4,000/mo. for living and discretionary spending. Hell, our mortgage and utilities alone only clock in around $750/mo. So, theoretically, paying off our debt shouldn’t be impossible sooner than later. Note that I’m not including our own home mortgage, or car loan in these calculations as we don’t really considered them “outstanding debts,” or at the very least debts that we’re not directly benefiting from/utilizing.
In other news, I bought a second rental property! It’s currently gutted and being worked on, but I can’t wait to get it ready and rented out. I’m expecting to be able to get about $300/mo profit after all expenses, but we’ll see. Rents have gone up so much in the area, that my other rental should be pulling about $500 to $600/mo in profit after expenses, but I haven’t raised the rent since the tenant there doesn’t give me too much trouble. But once they leave, I definitely plan on updating the place and renting it out for market rents.
Anyway, now that my partner and I have an amazing household income and a plan to pay off our debts, I’ve revisited my FIRE plan with a renewed vigor. Once I’m done paying down the bulk of our debts, I’ll focus hardcore on tucking away as much as I can into ETFs and more rental properties, but I’m still confident that we’ll be able to lean FIRE by 35. My partner and I are 28 and 26 now, so we’re getting close… but I think we can do it! I’ll post more about a plan in another post in the future.
Later!
N.
Neurotic Finance 