Path to my financial independence

I thought I will write down how am I doing with reaching financial independence, to track progress and see if it is doable, or I need to do major changes. So I’ll be updating this page yearly with recent passive income that is covering my living costs. And I’ll add a short paragraph to each year, might be nice to read in retrospective 🙂

TLDR table

Goal? Get passive income over 100%. And then just slowly grow it and diversify to make it safer. Looking forward to seeing how it will look like in 10 or 20 years!

2024

The goal is 35% expenses coverage.

2023

The goal is 30% expenses coverage. I missed the goal, as I achieved 25.98%. It's still pretty close and I am fine with it. Next year will be harder to achieve, because we will probably buy a house + replace car with bigger model. But without these extra costs, 35% is a good goal.

2022

The goal was 20% expenses coverage. Not achieved. We did have a great wedding and renovated a flat, so that took its toll on the expenses. As we missed goal in 2022, looking forward to what year we will meet the goal. 30% is a lot, but I think doing 10% a year is doable, if committed enough. Since last year, it depends a lot on stocks, crypto and real estate, so it will be less in my own hands, but mostly how much the market values particular asset.

2021

Let’s set a goal. 15% costs coverage in 2021 seems a reachable value! It all depends on how I will keep my costs down.

I did not succeed, at list not in a single number. Passive income would cover 12.37%, as I bought a flat and added 20% contribution to my expenses.

2020

Corona year. As for investing, it was a great year. I have saved a lot by not having as many abroad holidays as I used to have in previous years. Stock prices in March were extremely cheap, I bought triple the amount in March that I used to buy monthly before. I expected this sell-off will last the whole year, but unfortunately, it rebounded within a few months. Still, this was probably the best year I will experience in the following decade. 11.68% is an important number for 2020 – the percentage of costs covered by my passive income. After 5 years of investing, it’s not much.

But I am optimistic for a few reasons:

1. If corona crisis does not bankrupt p2p lending platforms, I will probably invest more there. It seems to be 11% stable XIRR, which is much higher compared to dividends from stocks (3-4%).
2. Some companies cut or suspended their dividends -> hopefully, they will put them back in the following years -> increasing my passive income.
3. On top of my monthly deposits, reinvestment of passive impact have a greater impact than ever before. Compound interest, let’s keep it rolling!

We will see, maybe I would find real estate in 2021 and it will trim my stock investments significantly. Also in capital gains (crypto and stocks), I have made probably 150% of all my costs in 2020 -> which is great, but I am not taking profit, and it may go back down.

2019

This year was hopefully the year when my massive increases in costs stop. I have bought a car in 2019 – it is 10 years old Honda Accord, so not that expensive, but still had a huge impact on my costs (car itself, insurance, gas, repairs, …). Overall I ended up with passive income covering 6.14%, which is horrible after over 4 years of investing. If it grew 6% every 4 years, I would get 100% of my costs covered in 62 years. And that is assuming, I will have same costs in 62 years – looking at yearly increases and inflation, unrealistic.

History

For P2P lending, I started with 1000 euros on bondora, which did not prove to be that profitable. Slowly increased my deposit, that is why it does not have that big of an impact on my passive income.

For stock investing, I have started with small payments in December 2015, still being a student and doing only 1 small stock purchase per month. Luckily it stuck with me and I believe after 5 years, I build up a good habit of monthly investing.