June was another bad month on my progress towards financial independence. My SWR has increased to 59.41% from 55.15% the month before. Some of that is because I am setting money aside for my hiking expenses and another reason is I haven’t been saving much. And in June my investments actually lost money to make things even worse.
My goal is to save 50% of my income each month and I didn’t come close to meeting that goal in June. I made $1902.65 and managed to save $100. That amounted to a 5.25% savings rate. My June expenses were once again too high.
The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. I have 20.19 months of living expenses saved now. I had my monthly expenses up to 24 months earlier this year, but the combination of higher monthly expenses and low savings has caused me to go backwards. I probably won’t be able to reverse this trend until I return from my hike. My monthly expenses should go way down though so maybe that will help reverse the backwards trend.