We’re not your typical couple in the “F.I.R.E.” space, at least in comparison to a lot of the blogs we tend to follow. A lot of blogs seem to have very distinct dates, numbers and targets to achieve prior to reaching their ultimate goal of retirement – this isn’t the case for us.
We don’t actually know where we want to wind up, or what we want to do when we leave our jobs so instead we’ve made our target more flexible.
So what’s our goal?
As it stands, our ultimate goal isn’t to 100% retire. Instead our goal has shifted to more of a hybrid approach where we’re able to leave our current higher stress/higher earning lifestyle to pursue something a little more laid back, perhaps part-time employment? Or maybe just take months-years off to travel and explore different things before settling in to work again at a later date without the stress of having to earn as much thanks to our retirement funds already being mostly funded.
So, while realizing that we’re currently in our peak earning years and wanting to take advantage of that while simultaneously leaving ourselves the time to enjoy and do extracurriculars that we might not be able to do when we’re older we’ve instead decided to give ourselves some targets to check off before shifting into a laid back lifestyle.
Today, we share some of those goals with you all and let you in on the progress we’ve made to achieving them.
1. $600,000 in liquid assets
These assets will include our RRSP’s, TFSA’s and non-registered investment accounts as well as our cash on hand.
This will NOT include our work place pensions or Baby FIC’s funds.
$600,000 is a number we’ve said would likely give us around $25,000 per year in income as well as an emergency fund on the side (or a 6month-1year travel fund in cash on the side).
Current Progress: ~$368,000/$600,000 or 61%
2. $50,000/child for post secondary
As of now we have 1 child, a son who is 1 year old. Our goal is to be able to give our child $50,000 when they graduate highschool to use towards post secondary along with any scholarships they may also receive. This doesn’t mean we won’t provide any additional support once that time comes, it’s just roughly the bare minimum we’d like to help out with.
Thanks to the RESP program in Canada we’re able to contribute $2,500 per year with the Canadian government throwing in an additional $500 so this should be easy to accomplish. When using a FV calculator it shows us only having the max out the $2,500 contribution for 4 more years and then we can let the markets grow our $22,000 to $50,000 by his graduation using a fairly conservative 7% annual growth rate.
Current Progress: ~$6,100/$50,000 or 12%
3. ZERO DEBT!
This is a huge one, even though we aren’t in a bad spot when it comes to household debts we do still carry Mrs. FIC’s student loan on our books for now. This along with any other debts that may arise will have to be paid off before we consider leaving our current location.
Our current plan in to continue making monthly payments on the roughly $21,000 owing and have this thing paid off within a few years time, if we reach our other goals in that time then we will speed up paying this off perhaps but at just ~1% interest there is little to no incentive to do so currently.
Current Progress: $0/$21,000 or 0%
What will we do after these goals are reached?
As I covered at the start of this post, we’re not 100% sure what comes next after these goals are reached, however, we do have some ideas:
- Full-time travel: The most likely outcome immediately after quitting our current jobs will be to take 6months+ and travel. We’ve both been avid travellers for most our adult lives as Mrs. FIC has been to over a dozen countries around the world and I’ve personally been to a handful while also spontaneously quitting work in 2013 to backpack for a year.
We’ve spent quite a lot of time looking into places like Panama, Thailand, Croatia, Italy just to name a few.
We really want to take our son out into the world and expose him to different cultures while he’s younger and perhaps homeschool him for a year to do so. - RV Touring: This is the less likely, but still possible version of the above. We’ve given some thought to buying an RV and doing a tour around North America and finishing it off with a trip abroad somewhere before settling down. I’ll say that it’s an option because we do research what it’s like for others via blogs and YouTube videos but it’s not at the top of our list.
- Live abroad semi-permanently: This is another intriguing option. Mrs. FIC is from England, which means we have a lot of friends and family there to see and visit with. We’ve given serious consideration to going “back home” to England and settling down for a little while. The scenarios we’ve discussed have been to either stay for a while and then head out on our scenario 1 travel adventures or to just move to England for a year or two, enrolled our boy in the school system and settle down for a while using weekends and holidays to explore Europe.
Mrs. FIC also wouldn’t have any issues finding work in the UK so there’s a good fallback should we need to make any additional income and I could also work on becoming a legal worker there but that takes a little more time.
Does not having a plan matter?
So as you can see, we’re definitely not “gazelle intense” when it comes to setting out plans for what comes next in our lives.
The good news is you don’t actually have to be!
Regardless of which direction we go, we have a very similar path to take to get there and that will be accomplished by tackling our 3 main goals above. It’s these common needs of ours that has enabled us to keep pushing forward and making progress even though we don’t know exactly what it is we’re progressing towards.
Our plan to pay off all debts, save up a sizeable emergency fund, create an investment fund that is constantly throwing off passive income as well as having some future planning done for our son’s education will remove a lot of the stress and fears people may face when leaving a high paying job. We believe that accomplishing these 3 things will allow us to have the stomachs to face the unknown and take a chance to explore whatever it is we decide we want our next adventure to be.
That’s all we have for this topic today, let us know what you think either in the comments below or over on our social medias:
INSTAGRAM: FindependenceCanada
TWITTER: FindependenceC1
Thanks for stopping by,
FIC.