Tag: doubling net worth

November Net Worth Update

If you’re just joining, our family of four is on a three-year journey to double our net worth and become location independent. Each month, I record our progress on our net worth and our spending (gulp!). This year has been a year of fixing our house (the roof) and paying off debt, plus saving as much as possible. As of October, we were roughly 24% of the way to doubling our net worth. 

At the ThreeYear house, we’re in the midst of colder temperatures (it’s currently 21 F/-6 C). Our Christmas decorations are up and we’re enjoying the few weeks of winter until we pack up and head to South America for a few weeks, where we’ll enjoy delicious summer weather.

November Net Worth Update--www.thethreeyearexperiment.com

It’s hard to believe that the end of the first year of our experiment is coming to a close. It’s been amazing to document this journey on the blog.

November was a month of higher expenses. We had my family in town, so we did some home improvement projects related to that. And we stocked up on food. My mom very generously donated money to our food costs, which I put into our savings account. Yay for extra savings! We started buying Christmas gifts for our family in Chile. We had a second month of high medical bills. For next year, we’ve switched our insurance from the high deductible to the higher cost, everything-is-covered policy. 2017’s experiment with the high deductible healthcare didn’t work for our family. Between physical therapy, psychologist visits, braces, and managing our sons’ ADHD, we pay a lot in medical costs. It would have been cheaper to pay the higher bi-weekly premiums and have less to pay out-of-pocket. Mr. ThreeYear will also rest easier knowing that whatever medical issues life throws at us, they’ll pretty much be covered by our healthcare plan. When he developed tennis elbow and decided not to pursue any more physical therapy because of the cost, it was a pretty frustrating situation for him to be in.

Thanksgiving turkey--www.thethreeyearexperiment.com
Our Thanksgiving turkey. My sister and I made a low-key, low fuss meal, and her turkey turned out beee-uu-ti-ful and delicious.

We know that December will also be a very high spending month, because of our Chile trip. We’ll also pay the remainder of our church tithe (which doesn’t show up in our monthly spending report, because we want to keep our giving on the downlow). We’ll pay off the Prius and the apartment in Chile, pay a little extra on our mortgage, and pay our house taxes.

We’re grateful that we only have one more month of monthly payments for our apartment in Chile and our Prius!!

Continue reading “November Net Worth Update”

How We Plan to Double Our Net Worth in 3 Years

I started this blog almost a year ago to document our family’s journey toward location independence over three years. We picked a three-year time frame because it coincided with several significant events in our family’s life: our oldest son finishing sixth grade, my husband turning forty-five, and me turning forty.

How We Plan to Double Our Net Worth in 3 Years

We love to travel, and we also have family who live in two different continents, so becoming location independent would allow us to spend a few years, before our boys start high school, living in an international location, or traveling between our respective families for a few years.

In order to make our plan work, we decided we would need to double our net worth and find jobs that would support us during our travel time. While doubling our net worth could allow us to live on 4% of our investments at a certain spending level, we know that with our current spending plus the need to fund two college accounts, we would prefer to have employment during our travel years, preferably employment that provides health benefits.

While we’ve talked about other aspects of our plan, we haven’t delved into how, exactly, we plan to double our net worth. So I thought I’d walk through our plan in this post.

Year 1 (roughly 33% increase):

We have almost completed Year 1 of our Three Year Experiment. This year’s focus was on paying off the last of our debts and funding some major home repair projects, all while saving and investing to grow our investments and decrease our debts.

I don’t know if we’ll increase our net worth by the full 33.33% this year, but we’ll likely be close. Here is where the majority of the gain has come/will come from. Continue reading “How We Plan to Double Our Net Worth in 3 Years”