My FIRE (financial independence retire early) numbers improved a bit in January. This isn’t too surprising since I started my seasonal tax job in January which allows me to put more money into savings. My safe withdrawal rate improved to 35.89% from 37.67% in December. My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better.The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings.
I have 33.43 months of expenses saved. This is probably the better number to look at when calculating my progress towards financial independence. A SWR of 35.89% might not immediately seem like it is a long way from getting to a 4% SWR, but when I see have 33.43 months of expenses saved and I need 300 it is obvious I have got a lot more savings to do. I hope to also bring down my average monthly expenses which will help me reach the 300 goal faster. Even though the goal of 300 months of expenses is far away it is nice to know that if I suddenly stopped earning money at all I would have almost three years before I ran out of money.
February should be a low expense month and I plan to put most of my paychecks into savings. As long as the stock market isn’t absolutely terrible I should make some nice progress towards FIRE this month.