We have been investing for two years today!* Shortbread’s love of portmanteaus necessitated creating a word.

Recently I’ve been thinking about timelines and long term planning. It’s not something I’ve ever been particularly good at (Shortbread handles this part of our relationship!), but having the new addition to our little family on the way makes it hard not to think about where we want to be in 5 years, 10 year etc. It doesn’t help that we are running out of patience with our current adopted home in Asia and we’re looking at alternatives. Not sure if we want to leave the continent yet though.

In any case, celebrating an anniversary allows me to start really developing a sense of time scale. Two years ago I was obsessionally immersed in personal finance books and blogs, trying to work out a strategy for our money. I opened our brokerage account, deposited about $1000USD and, with Shortbread next to me, bought 14 shares of VUSD at $67.66. I then spent a large amount of the next few hours watching the value fluctuate while, frankly, a bit terrified.

Two years later and we’ve moved apartments twice, and invested more than we ever thought was possible. We’ve carefully considered what is most important to us and weathered a global pandemic. Looking back on what we mark as our achievements it feels like we would never have believed it was possible if we had shown our past selves our current situation. It helps to reflect on this. We didn’t do any single major thing in this time, but instead an aggregation of long term decisions led us to where we are now.

This realisation is making it easier for me to imagine the future and consider what I might actually want from it. It doesn’t seem so impossible as the huge mountains between where we are and where we want to be become are, upon closer examination, a series of manageable steps. The Millionaire Next Door book made it absolutely clear that the most common method of achieving wealth was not inheritance or incredible financial foresight about a particular asset or stock. Instead, the aggregation of small, well considered life choices over a long period of time was most important.

This is a slightly rambling post, but I think what I’m trying to say is that by acknowledging the decisions which led to current success it is easier to imagine and anticipate future success. The FIRE thing is starting to feel real (current market downturn be damned!) and I’m genuinely excited about where this might take us.

*Okay, not completely true. We put money into a high fee mutual fund for a while before we moved to a self managed, low-cost index fund approach. I’m sure we’ll discuss this in a future post about mistakes we’ve made along the way.