We break down the top 5 challenges we face during our FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early)! Amber and I first started our journey to financial freedom 9 years and retired early at ages 38 and 35! During that time, our average combined income was $75,000, we have 3 children under 5, and we have not inherited any money!
In this video we’re going to break down the top amber and i started our fire journey nine years ago and we retired last year at ages 38 for me and 35 for amber. during that time, our average combined income was $75,000. we had three children under five and we didn’t inherit any money. so one of the first challenges that we faced
Was care that we had when jerad was employed on medicare younger retirees like ourselves are on our own when it comes to paying for health care workplace health plans tend to offer more by employers about half of americans get their health insurance through their jobs last year we were able to get a blue
Cross blue shield no longer employed and we had an income under $75,000 with three children under five but this year we sadly won’t qualify for that plan again for a $300,000 profit in seven months which will lead itself to capital gains taxes online also with us being pregnant which we just found out
A few weeks ago that amber is officially pregnant that’s our fourth child and we know that that’s associated with it so we needed to make sure we had a good plan so we looked into a lot of different healthcare plans and different options and we ended up deciding to go with medishare and that’s a christian health sharing
Ministry that we we hadn’t found we hadn’t looked at that before but it seemed like that was the best option all things considered right and so we decided to get their highest level of coverage and we pay over 600 per month which is uh more than twice what we were paying before when i was previously employed
Which is less than my employer’s plan right uh but that’s definitely something that we expect to go over quickly since like we said amber’s pregnant and there’s going to be a lot of hospital doctor visits and eventually the hospital visit all within this year yeah again given that we’ll be having our fourth child this
Year that plan worked out for us best financially even though it sounds like a lot with that premium per month but we did all the calculations and ran the numbers and it just the total at the end was a much better price previous children ends up costing us about ten thousand dollars about 10 years medical costs
Per child and that’s even like even prior to this we had a high deductible plan so we had a fairly low premium but our deductible was like 13 pretty much paid for that through our hsa account or out of pocket yeah if you guys have any questions about the health care plan that we chose coverage or advice please let us
Know in the comments or reach out to us directly another major challenge that we are facing is that the stock market is experiencing high volatility with the s p 500 down over 15 percent from all-time highs and the nasdaq is down 24 the nasdaq just suffered its worst month since 2008 during the great recession
Particularly rough since our portfolio is invested in a combination of etfs and individual stocks over the past 12 months we have some stocks like tesla which is up 31 berkshire hathaway which is up 15 and microsoft up 11 we have more stocks though that are down like netflix which is down 62 meta platforms or facebook is
Down over 35 and corsair gaming which is down 52 okay so total transparency here guys our portfolio is down 30 and for us that equals about 300 so for us that was equal to like several years salary is how much our portfolio is down right now so that has been tough stressful enough needless to say yes we have
Learned a number of lessons that the stock market has taught us since we retired last year number one is to it’s probably just best to stay away from ipos in general uh we knew that that was going to be a risk and we wanted to take it but it just so happened that that was probably one of the worst times to do it with
The fed increasing interest rates and inflation and things like that so moving forward that’s not something we recommend and not something that we’re probably gonna do also invest your money via dollar cost averaging over a long period of time last september when we retired and for the first time we were able
To invest that money in individual stocks and not just this handful of we had that opportunity we started to invest it but in retrospect we wish we had done that more slowly over the course of like one to two years and done it in set amounts consistently over you know maybe like a monthly basis or buying every
Couple weeks over like a one to two year period instead i think we did it over a couple months helped us out with this volatility and this down market right now and potentially any more downside yet to come another lesson that we learned is that when inflation is high which which it was and the fed is looking at increasing
Rates limit your exposure to companies like ipos to growth stocks and things that are on the higher risk side we didn’t anticipate that kind of drop you know to see a company like the honest company drop what was it 81 and other ipos had similar crashes like that we just didn’t anticipate that much volatility
And so i think we were pretty unlucky unfortunately on the timing so when the stock market recovers we do plan to adjust our portfolio to have a little bit less risk and more stability another challenge that we face is social media and with this we’re talking about social media that’s consuming for us another part of
Our fire plan was to start up a business allowing us to withdraw less money out of our investments our goal was to do this over the course of one to two years and eventually start making 50 000 a year we hope that this would require less of our time than a typical 40 hour work week which would be a nine to
Five job however what we’ve found is that creating a youtube and an instagram channel is extremely time consuming if you’re doing it the right way and more difficult than we were in just a few months which is a rare thing significant money off of monetized ads researching ideas for content writing video scripts
Filming and video editing also eats up a lot of time for us it’s like two to three days depending on the video that we’re filming so another big downside that we’ve been facing on this is that we feel amber and i feel like we’ve been just glued to our devices much more so than when i was working my nine-to-five job
And we just hate setting this example for the kids for us for them to see us looking at our devices that often another thing is that we have to compete with channels that use click bait thumbnails and titles like these about that that topic in their video once from graham stefan for example the title is
Recession alert the fed just crashed the stock market and that had 385 000 views in the last four days it’s over the housing bubble just popped 532 000 views another youtube channel called andre is the recession just started 268 000 views and the title of some of his thumbnails are the stock market is collapsing right
Now 73 000 views the worst stock market collapse since 2008 77 000 views all right now this one’s my favorite i mean that sarcastically but look at these from meet kevin that’s a really popular channel out there stock market annihilation how much more stocks will fail 22 000 views in one hour and then the
Next title is i’m leaving 66 000 views in four hours just a lot of clickbait yeah and these are all clickbait and you can tell if you just go and look at any of these channels and you look at the last 50 videos they’ve done they’re all like similar iterations of the same thing if we want our videos to get views do
We have to resort to clickbait titles like these or do we stand our moral ground that’s kind of our question that we’re trying to ask ourselves our plan for social media is to try to simplify our process use block scheduling to be more efficient limit time on our devices focus on quality content instead of just
The quantity and give social media some more time to see how things progress another one of our major goals for fire was to have time to spend with our kids while they’re young we have three under five and we also have one on the way like we talked about and because of that we’re choosing to have amber homeschool our
Kids to give them the best education possible and so they can focus on learning not peer pressure not unfortunately in schools today i also found that when i was working my 9 to 5 job my time stress from leadership teams and clients so even when i wasn’t working it was really hard to disengage from that work mode
And then focus on the kids and be present and be patient with the kids the challenge that we are facing now that we’re both retired early is that we are still focusing on the stock market and building up our side businesses for additional income we’re not sure if our early retirement is really giving us more
Time to be present and enjoy our young children if it’s not a significant difference should we have actually given up the income from our nine to five jobs that’s a big question yeah now our main goal in achieving financial freedom was to have well freedom obviously and just to be candid when i retired last year i did
Feel more freedom immediately but honestly as time has gone on and these challenges that we just walked through have really been chipping away at that freedom and it makes us wonder if our sacrifices have really been worth it or not as we’ve looked into building a new house the costs and timelines have exceeded
Our expectations due to inflation and a lack of building material supply without income from a nine to five type job if we pay cash we have less money to invest and less money available to invest if we decide to buy an existing home the housing market in the charlotte area is extremely competitive most
Houses sell within a few days with multiple cash that home values are massively inflated so all these different housing factors combined make us honestly feel like we have less freedom than we did before without a 9 to 5 income and not more freedom this is not the feeling that we wanted to have or what we were
Aiming for in this fire journey for us so in order to increase our freedom we want to look at making some different changes so here’s what we’re thinking about we’re planning to create online courses to offer one-on-one money coaching sessions and to create a monetized blog we’re also exploring part-time jobs and
Side hustles that might be less time intensive and offer a more reliable stream of income for us so do you or did you have any challenges that you faced on your fire journey make sure to leave them in the comments below for us and for anyone else we’d love to build a community here that we can share our struggles and
Find solutions together to help our channel grow please do three things for us make sure to hit the thumbs up button and hit that little notification bell so you get check out this video where we break down how we became millionaires at 35 and also watch our video where we talk about our fire journey
And how we retired early at the age of 38. so we wanted to sincerely thank you guys for watching thank you for supporting us on this journey and we look forward to seeing you in the next video
Transcribed from video
WE QUIT FIRE | Our Top 5 Financial Independence Retire Early Challenges By Our Money Quest