Hi everyone,
I am about to turn 37 (gulp!) in four days, female, married, with no kids. I have been reading the forum and blog since the summer, and thought that this would be an appropriate time to formally introduce myself. I'm a very frugal person by nature, and earn a very good income (technical writer for a software company). I saved diligently for the past 15 working years, yet not in an extreme way. I saved about 15% of my income. I really want to retire early (not necessarily "extreme" though) in the next 10 years. However I have yet to sit down and do the calculations to figure out where I am on this road. Silly, I know.
I'm in Canada and have accumulated a nice nest egg in RRSPs. I only recently started to work for a company that offers a full defined-benefit pension, but I don't want to work long enough to be able to benefit from this great pension. My calculations when I started there this summer were that I would be able to retire early with a pension at the age of 59. Yikes! I have a financial planner who helps me invest my RRSP, and we have chosen a nice selection of divident-paying stocks, preferred shares, and bond investments. Last week, I met with him and was pleasantly surprised to see that my annual income from the dividents/interest alone is currently at $7000! This motivated me to get serious about tracking my financial goals and to formalize and map out my plan.
My goals for 2012:
- Figure out my time before FI, using akratic's spreadsheet and closely track monthly expenses
- Post a monthly journal here to publicly track my process and get advice.
- Pay off mortgage balance of $27000, after which I will be debt-free!