Stock market is back to near all-time highs

It’s been 6 months since my last post and a lot of positive things have happened at the macro level. Inflation went from 6.0% in Feb 2023 to 3% in June 2023. The S&P 500 index rose 14%, FB up 121%, TSLA up 60%, MSFT up 39%, AAPL up 37%, GOOG up 36%, and AMZN up 31%. These are all significant gains and it makes me wonder if I should continue my long breaks in blogging to keep this streak going.

But I cannot not blog about my personal update tonight because I’ve reached another personal milestone. Are you ready? Standby.

Changing jobs

Back in April, I took on another job, which will likely be my last “professional” job. I decided to join a small company that provides a lot of flexibility. Sometimes I do wonder if I’m already in Barista FIRE mode–that is, according to Google, “taking on a part-time job for supplemental income and potentially subsidized health insurance.” It’s probably because I’ve been in big tech for so long that I forgot how people outside of big tech operate. While my scope has increased by 4x, I feel like my stress level and time commitment is half of what it used to be. I’m able to take off half a day every Wednesday to go do what I enjoy doing outside of work, there is never any weekend work, meetings rarely go past 4 pm, and it’s significantly easier to get things done here. I can see myself here for several more years in case the economy goes down, which is something I still believe will happen.

New all-time high in net worth!

If you’ve been following my blog you may recall that I was ahead of my FIRE schedule by as much as $1.6M at the end of 2021. That is, for example, if I was supposed to be at a net worth of $3.5M, I was actually at $5.1M. Then in 2022, I had the worst financial year of my life.

I lost $1.85M.

It was extremely tough to stomach, but I decided to move forward with the home purchase and follow through with my plan because I believed that in the long term, everything will be alright as long as I don’t panic sell. After all, if my FIRE plans were robust enough it should weather the storm, right? We are now in late July of 2023 and I’m excited to announce that I’ve surpassed my previous all-time high in net worth (Dec 2021) by $100k, and I’m currently ahead of my FIRE schedule by $666,408.71! I’m not banking on this holding up in the short term, but I’m not going to lie, I went on a mini-shopping spree to celebrate. I can’t help but think back at how bad 2022 was and how I was able to claw back the $1.85M.

I hope everyone reading this was able to benefit from the last 7 months of the stock market run and never give up!