I’ve just gotten really bad at blogging. There is a big difference in my energy, focus, motivation levels when I compare who I was when I started this blog and who I am now. When I started this blog I was funemployed, childless, a renter, dogless. Now I’m employed (though nearing the end of maternity leave), a mom, a homeowner, and a dog owner. I miss the motivation I had in 2020, I need to get that back – maybe that should be a goal of mine for 2023.

I also find that when I go too long without blogging, I panic about what to write. I feel silly just picking up 6 months later but ultimately – who cares, no one is reading this anyways.

And there’s the fact that our financial habits the last couple of years are not very FIRE-y. It’s sometimes embarrassing to share these numbers publicly and to look at them myself. Especially that savings rate below. But the reality is, we haven’t been very fire-y the last two years. We bought a house, bought a dog, renovated bits of the house, furnished a house and had a baby. We let life get expensive. My financial hope for 2023 is that we can increase our savings rate.

So, instead of doing a monthly summary since I’m so behind. I thought I’d just do a year-end recap of 2022.

Dividends Earned
Not quite enough to retire, but doing better than 2021.

End of Year Net Worth & FIRE Assets
I calculate Net Worth by taking into account the value of our assets (Home, Condo, Cash, Investments) and subtracting our debts – (mortgages). It’s not a perfect calculation as the market is ever changing and we’re not really sure what our home or condo are really worth right now. For our home I use the price we purchased it at and for the condo I use a conservative estimate of what I think we could sell it for. However FIRE Assets are what I care more about. To calculate FIRE Assets I ignore the value of our home but still take into account the mortgage remaining on it. The reason for this is that we will always need a place to live. Yes, we could sell our home and rent something but that is not something we have any intention of doing in the near future.

Savings Rate
Abysmal. However, we spent a ton of money in both 2022 and 2021. In 2021 we bought a house. In 2022 we did some renovations on the house AND I was on maternity leave for most of the year. I received a partial top up for about 5 months and the remainder of the year I received the maximum amount of government maternity pay. We were expecting to dip into our savings in 2022 but were thankfully saved by some hefty tax refunds.

End of Year Investment Balance
While it’s nice our investments went up by ~$11K, we actually contributed over $40k into our investments this year, as well as our reinvested dividends mentioned above. Cool cool, cool cool.

So that’s it, I’m happy we actually had a positive savings rate in 2022 since I wasn’t making my full income, and I’m happy we were able to contribute so much to our retirement investments.