Our 2025 plan is a 10-year plan to achieve our financial independence. There are two important parts to this plan:
- Keep expenses low and predictable.
- Increase our investments to a total that allows us to cover our expenses with a withdrawal rate of 4%.
For a brief summary of our progress to date, in terms of investments and expenditures against our targets, click here .
Expenses
We carefully tracked our expenses before determining the level of spending we wanted to maintain. Obviously, we always try to spend as little as possible, but we know that it’s essential to have an idea of exactly how much we’re spending so we can plan how much investment we need to meet our needs.
Based on our spending history and future plans, our initial projections were an average of $45,000 in annual spending .
In fact, from 2015 to 2019, so the first 5 years following this plan, we spent an average of $52,000 annually.
Investments
We decided to use the 4% safe withdrawal rate rule to figure out how much our total investments need to be worth in order to earn a return that will cover our expenses for the rest of our lives.
This rule originally stems from a paper, informally titled the Trinity Study, published in 1998 in the American Association of Individual Investors Journal by three finance professors at Trinity University. The authors of this paper used different retirement portfolio compositions and withdrawal rates, based on market data from 1925 to 1995, to determine the probability that assets would remain in the portfolio after 30 years, despite a constant withdrawal rate over that time period regardless of whether the market performed well or poorly. Roughly speaking, the 4% rate comes from one of the scenarios demonstrating that such a withdrawal rate is almost guaranteed to be unlikely to deplete a portfolio composed of a mix of stocks and bonds.
Many people have used the Trinity Study’s parameters to examine the 4% safe withdrawal rate in more depth, and I hope to write a more detailed article on this topic in the future. In short, for the purposes of our 2025 plan, we have chosen to use this rule to determine the total amount we need to have set aside to consider ourselves financially independent.
We do not count our home equity as an investment asset because we intend to have our mortgage fully paid off before leaving our jobs and we intend to continue living in our home after retirement. Therefore, the cost of our mortgage is also not included in our expenses.
Updated February 2017:
We decided to take some of our Celis to pay off our mortgage! Click the following link to learn how we managed to pay off a mortgage of over $150,000 in just 4 years .
Updated May 2020:
Although we used to share our monetary goal for achieving our Financial Independence (#FI) on the blog, in May 2020 we decided to change how we present this goal and now share our progress in terms of % of our #FI achieved.
You can find all our progress updates here .
