I’m way behind getting this up due to last week’s vacation and general laziness the two weeks before the vacation. I plan to write a post a day this week to get caught up.
My SWR for September was 39.48%. That is down from 37.25% the month before. The decrease was due to the declining stock market in September. Since I’m writing this so long after the fact I already know that the stocks recovered in October. When I don’t add any money to my savings the only changes to my SWR and months of living expenses saved are from my investment performance and the average of my trailing twelve month’s of expenses going up or down.
My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better. That goal is probably many years from being met. The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. Once I reach that point I will consider myself financially independent.
I have 30.38 months of living expenses saved which is a slight decrease from 32.21 months saved in August. I calculate my months of living expenses saved by dividing the average of my trailing twelve months of expenses by my total money saved.
There won’t be any big changes to these numbers until I start working full-time again in January and can contribute more to my savings. I’m hoping in the meantime they will at least stay about the same.
Slight stock market blip – can’t be helped!
Do you have an objective in mind for when you would like to hit the 4% SWR?
Yeah, I don’t worry too much about the market fluctuations. It is difficult to predict when I might hit the 4% SWR since my income is unpredictable. I would like to hit it before I reach normal retirement age, but I’m not too worried about it since I feel like I am semi-retired right now.