Your FIRE Journey is full of mini celebrations in private!
Those that have been on their FIRE journey for a little while know the feeling of reaching a big milestone and celebrating like it is an amazing achievement – BUT we don’t tell anyone! Yes that’s right some of the great life milestones and you “CAN’T” tell anyone.
This week we just hit our aspirational FI number with the recent market increases and another investment that went very well this year. Trish and I went out for Japanese and a nice bottle of wine. We joked things are looking up as earlier in the day after walk with our dog, enjoying a bit of cake while basking in the sun at our favourite coffee shop – we swung by an op shop and I founds some nice $200 pair of leather shoes for $15. They made a nice clacking sound on the pavement that somehow amused us – the simple things!
I’m very thankful we can celebrate together. This celebration was like many others such as paying off the mortgage, reaching the first $1M net worth or making X amount dividends this year. We don’t tell people. Money is private in our society and we don’t want to make people feel bad. Luckily Cam does have a few trusted FIRE friends/mentors where we do disclose strategy and numbers.
In our twenties with a mortgage we had a goal on smashing the mortgage. We had friends ask during some house upgrade discussions, when we were going to upgrade the brown holland blinds (they weren’t great!) – we accidentally joked once we paid of the mortgage. Probably about 3 years later we had new blinds and literally our friends’ jaw dropped when they visited and they asked have you paid off your mortgage! We humbly confessed (we didn’t want to lie) and you could see they were shocked and didn’t say much. We didn’t want our friends to feel bad but unfortunately that can be the result of sharing.
How do you celebrate your FIRE milestones? We would love to hear.
Congrats Trish & Cam! We know exactly how you feel and it’s so frustrating sometimes. We’re also thankful that we have each other at least to discuss the ins and outs of why others aren’t doing a similar thing, and even more alarming of why they’re not even particularly curious! Sometimes the best we can do is explain to people the 4% rule and hopefully that might ignite something within them to focus on the future.
It’s a privileged conversation to even be able to have though; we have worked very hard to the point of burn-out, we have made sacrifices that others would not, and recently I would say the next phase of the challenge is that we have _perfected_ delayed gratification to a fault! It’s hard to undo decades of habits and release those purse strings now and then; especially when you know it’s going to go on sale sooner or later. (I recently got a half price circular saw for my birthday – I think I was happier with the deal than the saw!)
Anyway I’m sure we’ll continue to ponder all this for many years to come; and still be mystified. In the meantime though, keep on celebrating!
Thanks so much for your comment Matt & Grace! I think that is the reason we like to celebrate (on the quiet) as there has been some early grinding to get the money snowball started. Now it spits off more than we could ever add per year and we think it is amazing. Oh love your birthday present – happy birthday mate! Cheers Cam (& Trish)