Violet Sky

I was not paying a whole ton of attention to the stock market this month, due to the aforementioned layoff at the beginning of the month, so I was pleasantly surprised when we hit an important milestone once I updated the spreadsheet.

All green, this month! Even our house appreciated a teensy tiny bit. The bigger news is, of course, finally crossing a million in pure retirement assets! Our retirement is a hodge podge of tax-advantaged accounts: Roth IRAs, a 401k, a 457b, and a couple of pensions. I’m sure we’ll dip back down below at some point, but it is certainly somewhat poignant timing that we crossed this milestone less than a month after I was laid off from my job.

I shared the milestone yesterday with a group of my friends, and one of them asked if I felt free. I do, in a way – now that I’m starting up with the job hunt in earnest, I’m far less concerned about what my future salary will be. It would be nice to match the base that I got laid off with, and certainly even nicer to have an equity component like I enjoyed for so long, but none of that is necessary as we can roll back our retirement savings even further without impacting the fact that we’ll be able to retire. I plugged some hypothetical numbers into our retirement spreadsheet – namely, that I take an $80k pay cut and only save the 401k maximum until retirement – and it still only moved our probably retirement date out two years. It’s nice to be able to breathe!