About
Hi! I am Julkasneg
Welcome to my money and travel blog!
On this blog I am planning to share how our family of four is reaching financial independence and freedom from 9-5 while enjoying life along the way.
Our story
Both my husband and I are immigrants from Eastern Europe, who came to the United States more than 20 years ago in search of better post graduate education and prospects of work, applying our skills and technical expertise to the real life, something we couldn’t do in our country at the time.
While we both are technically/analytically inclined and have engineering/analytics related jobs, somehow we never really thought about financial independence until a couple of years ago. Having no money when we came to the United States, we learned to be frugal and mindful of the money that we earned, yet besides maximizing our 401Ks and reducing the mortgage debts as soon as we could, we never really thought about retiring early and living a different life. Until I accidentally read an article about FIRE movement.
That was the catalysis for me. Being a numbers person, I became driven. What resources do we have? What is our Net Worth? How much money we spend on core expenses annually? How would this potentially change in retirement? WHEN CAN WE RETIRE???
In search of answers to those questions, I’ve read a multitude of personal finance blogs, in my mind became friends with many of those bloggers, like 1500days, GoCurryCracker, ESI Money, OurNextLife, etc. Reading those blogs helped me form the strategy for our family.
What’s next
Next is early retirement on May 19, 2023 for me and by the end of 2023 for my husband (assuming I can’t convince him to stop working earlier). By that time we need to accomplish the following:
- Fully pay out the remaining mortgage
- Pay the college costs for our eldest son in these two years
- Save enough in Taxable accounts to get through the first five years until Roth IRA conversion ladder kicks in
After that – the world is our oyster!