How we grew our net worth 7x in 3 years – 3 keys

Good day to everyone, and welcome back to our blog.

So yesterday, I was doing a little playing around with some of our spreadsheets and old excel files etc. as you do when you’re into this personal finance and F.I.R.E. stuff.

When I was finished with my dabbling I noticed a coincidence – first off that it had been almost exactly 3 years since I first decided to track my net worth!

And secondly, that I/we had almost perfectly 7x’d our net worth in that time.

Just to get it out of the way, yes I went from “I” to “we” over those 3 years as I’m now married but for the numbers sake Mrs. FIC came into the relationship with a net worth of basically $0 as she had/has student loans that equated to how much she had in assets at the time of us getting together.

So given that in my opinion 7x’ing your net worth.. which equates to a $300k gain was more than I ever imagined being able to accomplish in a 3 year span I’d like to recap 3 things I’ve found to be the most influential to making that possible.

Just for a visual here is the growth of our net worth over this timeframe:

1. INCOME

Much like any company out there, it’s hard to grow your bottom line earnings without first increasing your top line revenues. If your pay check are the equivalent to a company’s revenues then you’ll understand that this is the key building block to being able to grow your households net worth.

Over the past 3 years I have been able to increase my income by about 25% and hopefully can do something similar over the next 3 years but even more importantly than this jump was the jump I made in careers back in 2014.

In 2014 I was getting by but that was about it, and I had decided something needed changing – so at the age of 25 I decided to change career paths. This career change was stressful at first but in doing so I was able to increase my income by roughly 5x!

While I don’t advocate taking out any debts I will say for transparency that I did in fact take out student loans to go back to school for 2 years in order to make the transition so it did set me back financially at first but has more than paid off already.

Mrs. FIC was also able to increase her income at this point as she’s seen a raise of just over 50% in these 3 years and has also found herself in a much more enjoyable career situation. (She also had to leave her current job and branch out to make this jump.)

2. Pay Yourself First!

Yes, yes you heard it here first! Only joking as I’m sure you’ve heard this in every blog/book/video you’ve ever seen on the topic of personal finance.

Just because this tip is thrown out at every turn doesn’t make it any less true. The only real way to make consistent progress that will blow your own expectations out of the water over time is to pay yourself first!

In my occupation our employer makes it very easy to do this as they enroll you into a pension upon hiring you and also make a savings plan available where they partially match your contributions up until a certain point. Not all employees take advantage of this program to its full potential but I have been since day one.

On top of the “forced” savings that come off my pay check we’ve also made sure to top up our TFSA’s and RRSP’s each and every year we’ve been together which has coincided with our greatest earning years of our lives.

We do have goals on how much to put away but they aren’t the top priorities in our lives especially since we’ve had a child this year. We aim to enjoy our day to day lives as best we can and still try and put away at least a few thousand dollars per month on top of that but in the past, in the world where we had no children and weren’t travelling in a given month it was possible for us to put away upwards of $8,000 in a month but that was not the norm.

On top of our paying ourselves first that we do out of our pay checks a nice little side bonus has been our dividend income:

This is what our projected 12 month dividend income has been by month over this time, you’ll see a few points where we either got dividends cut or did a re-balance on our portfolio but we’re now receiving roughly $750/month in dividends that we’re able to reinvest into our portfolios.

3. Finding your teammate

All the married guys out there know that this had to be on the list haha.

While it might sound cheesy, finding a partner in crime has been an absolutely vital piece to the puzzle of growing net worth at an accelerated rate.

Not only does it give you an accountability buddy much like going to the gym or any other commitment that can be hard to stick to, but it also gives you an entire extra income to split the expenses of life with.

The single me was living in a basement suite while now we’ve been able to purchase a house and get in on the real estate market (has not been a great investment thus far to be fair) but also split the mortgage and bills associated with it.

This allows you to basically use one income to cover all living expenses while the other can be used to do your saving, investing and vacations.

So, now that I’ve shared what my top 3 contributing factors are I’d like to hear back from you. Please leave a comment below or over on our Instagram @FindependenceCanada
and we’ll be sure to get back to you!

Thanks as always for stopping by,

FIC.