My name is Glasses Guy and I am 41 years old and a full time professional working in the tech industry. I am very happily married to Glasses Girl with a 13 year old son, a 4 year old daughter and a baby on the way! We live a very happy and contented middle class life in a suburb in Pittsburgh, PA. Family, building memories together, hard work and togetherness is what we are all about. We feel very fortunate to live in a place where we can afford a reasonable lifestyle on a single income from my salary in tech.
I love my job! I have awesome co-workers and I enjoy my work and the daily challenges it brings. At the same time, I also have a ton of other passions, including cooking, traveling (we love Walt Disney World), photography and baseball. So while I really like my job, I also really like my TIME too! And with two kids (and the 3rd on the way) I realize just how precious time is. And so that is why for the past several years, I have gotten really interested in the FIRE movement. For me is not about an escape from a job I can’t stand, its more about having the option to no longer have to trade so much of my TIME for the MONEY I need to take care of my family.
We are super happy with what we have. We live in a modest home, drive two modest cars (9 year old SUV and a 2 year old compact car) and don’t have any real expensive hobbies. A lot of our friends and my co-workers drive much nicer vehicles, have boats, campers, etc., but we have never really needed any of that to be content. I think our biggest vice is we do like to travel, especially to Disney World, which we do about once every year. So my goal in achieving a level of financial independence is really to support our current lifestyle.
So, how DID I get here. Well to explain that, let me take you on a little history tour of my financial journey:
Phase One: Salary Income is EVERYTHING!
I came out of college with a Computer Science degree at age 22 not knowing a ton about money. I was very fortunate that my parents paid for my education at a large public state school and I graduated on time with NO STUDENT DEBT. I had no clue at the time how big of a head start I had on so many of my peers. I took a job working as a junior level software engineer for an entry level salary. The timing of my entry into the job market was not great because it came on the heels of the dot com bubble crash in the early 2000’s and so my wages were not great. At the same time, it was enough to fund a great life for me as I got started. I was able to get married and buy my first starter house and welcomed my first child into the world with that salary. After about 4 years at my entry level job, I moved on to another company for 9 years that also did not pay exceptionally, but had good work-life balance and was close to home.
At that level of financial maturity, I thought that salary income was everything. I would think that if I could only make $X (which I assumed some senior manager or director made) everything would be great. I was initially fooled into thinking that the brand of car, size of house or the vacations that people took indicated how well they were doing financially! So I really became focused on salary income as a number, thinking that was the main ticket to doing well with money. I continued like this for the first 13 years of my professional career.
Phase Two: Net Worth is EVERYTHING!
After 13 years of mediocre salaries, I made a big move professionally and took a job with a larger national company that paid significantly well and had much better benefits. The increase in cash made me stop and think a bit more carefully about my finances. I decided to actually go through the exercise of finding out my net worth. How I had neglected to do this in my first 13 years of working is beyond me, but I did it and I was pretty disappointed with the result. It was non-zero, but with the salaries I had pulled in and how much blood, sweat and tears I had put in at work, I felt like I had little to show for it. I knew I needed to make some changes.
Starting in September 2015, I tracked my net worth religiously, always taking a snapshot on the first day of the month. I have done this every single month since! Getting that frequent feedback helped me to take action. I increased my savings rate to my 401K. I got out of some bad “investments” like a variable whole life insurance policy that had horrible fees. I took better inventory of my debt and put in better plans to pay down the balances. Every month I actually looked forward to logging into my account and seeing the number go up! I started to worry less about salary income as a thing because I realized that what REALLY mattered was the wealth I was building, not my salary. Over the next 4 years, I doubled my net worth.
Phase Three: Passive Income Is EVERYTHING!
In 2019, I made another career move to a bigger tech company and got a significant increase in salary, including equity grants that vested over time. I realized that I had an amazing opportunity. To build wealth much more quickly than before. I realized that financial independence was actually achievable, I just had to be smart with my money. This required me to expand my financial education. I scoured the internet for information and fell in love with many blogs, including Financial Samurai and Mr. Money Mustache. This was like going to college all over again (financial college) and I drank from the firehose of knowledge. I simplified my investments (going with low fee index funds from Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab), and also got into some new investments like REITS. I took advantage of the Roth mega backdoor option on my company’s 401K. I built up a solid emergency fund. I watched my net worth more than triple in just 2.5 years.
As I watched my net worth grow, I struggled to understand how my net worth could actually translate to financial independence and maybe early retirement. My net worth felt like a mishmash of savings accounts, 401K, IRA, brokerage account, equity in my home, etc. and to actually retire I needed an income! That is when I started to focus on what was the actual income my net worth could theoretically create, assuming the 4% “safe” withdrawal rate. Every month as I captured my net worth, I would track this key metric and focus on it. I am very happy to say that my current net worth could support roughly 40% of my income need assuming the 4% withdrawal rate. So I am nearly halfway to my goal of financial independence!
So that’s my story! I have a ton of stuff to share both from my learnings on financial independence, a long career in the tech industry and just general discussions on being content and happy!
Thanks so much for going on this journey with me!