In this video we're going to break down the top five challenges we have faced on our fire journey!
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
finding health care to cover the health care that we had when Jerad was employed
but while traditional age retirees can rely 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
generous benefits and are heavily subsidized 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
plan through healthcare.gov since Jerad was 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
since we flipped our house earlier this year 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
going to have significant health care costs 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
and the deductible is three thousand dollars 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
and what did we find that typically with our 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
500 max out of pocket so for every child we 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
or if you have any ideas for us for better 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
for us the stock market turmoil has been 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 amazon is down 28 we also have some ipos like honest company which is down 81
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
for example we rolled over our 401ks to iras 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
mutual funds that we could invest in so once 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
so i wish we would have had spread that out and that would have
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
expecting our youtube channel was monetized in just a few months which is a rare thing
but it's been a slow road to start earning 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
and then they don't really end up talking about that that topic in their video once
you click on it so check out some of these 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
jake uh the title of one of his thumbnails is the recession just started 268 000 views
and then another one financial education he's linked with these guys as well
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
political influences and things like that in unfortunately in schools today i also found
that when i was working my 9 to 5 job my time was not my own and i was always under pressure
stress from leadership teams and clients to meet their business deliverables
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
getting a mortgage will be a challenge and 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
offers over asking price on top of 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
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alerted whenever we publish new content 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