My Major FI Milestones

Gen Y Finance Guy recently listed his five major milestones of financial independence as follows:

1. Ground Zero ($0 Net Worth)
2. Six Figures ($100,000 Net Worth)
3. Double Comma Club ($1,000,000 Net Worth)
4. The Magic Zone for Max Happiness ($1,875,000 Net Worth)
5. Financial Independence ($3,000,000 Net Worth)

Here's when I hit each of these and my thoughts on them:

1. My Quicken data goes all the way back to 1994 and it shows I was at ground zero. I'm not sure if this really was the case or if I just didn't have the numbers entered into Quicken, but let's go with it.

I had been married for just three years at this point. We were learning about money and wanting to retire all of our debt, but we had two condos we had to sell (at losses) so we could buy a house (which we sold a year later for a loss.) Ugh.

2. By 1995 we had over $100k net worth, which makes me think the 1994 number of zero was simply for a lack of data.

By this time we had sold our homes, moved, bought a new house and were paying down the mortgage, and I had a nice, new job that paid me much more than I was earning previously. We were also maxing out my 401k at this time.

3. We passed $1 million in 2005 and, as they say, the first million was the hardest.

By this time I had changed jobs a couple times, survived the dot-com bust, paid off our mortgage, was earning a very good salary, and was saving a ton.

4. We hit the Magic Zone in early 2011 after fighting through the financial crisis (investing all the way down).

By this time we were actually financially independent, but I did not know it.

5. We hit $3 million in 2015 thanks to the investments we made during the crisis as well as our real estate.

From there our finances have been on a rocket ship upward and we are a hair away from the next million-dollar mark.

So, that's our path through the five milestones. Where are you on this journey?

Comments

[Howard Kong]

Wow such an inspiring post.

I am definitely going to action this type of milestone structure. I think I am on the journey to the double comma club. Myself and my partner have a few different businesses that have started making us a combined income of $130,000 USD per month coming through. With that we have started making savvy investments to try and build that income up, mostly trying to diversify our portfolio of assets. Look forward to sharing with you when we get to $1.5m in liquidity.

[Cody @ Dollar Habits]

I love seeing the progress you made over several years as a result of the strong foundation you put in place. It is really inspiring. We are currently slogging away on reaching the double comma milestone and it is encouraging to see that things speed up past that point.

[Josh Stein]

I am at Level 1. Relatively close to Level 2, hoping to get there this year. Level 3 will be a little harder to get to, hahaha!