5 Years of F.I.R.E.

I was scrolling through our old blog posts the other day and didn’t realize how long we have been at this. We started this blog in April of 2019 to document our journey to becoming financially independent full-time RV’ers.

Our goal was to retire early so we could enjoy life on the road. We could have kept working remotely in some capacity, and Mrs. RVF did for a couple of months, but that wasn’t the point. The purpose was to enjoy life and traveling without the burden of financial worry or a work schedule.

At that time we were on the cusp of reaching the coveted $1M threshold in our portfolio. We also had a decent amount of equity built up in our townhouse. Combined we were only about $375k away from reaching our $1.5M goal. Since we planned to sell our house and everything we owned home equity was essentially cash in our minds.

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Starting Anew

Hello there! It’s been awhile since we have posted a blog. It’s been even longer since we posted a blog that wasn’t a financial update of some sort. Over eleven months as a matter of fact. In that blog we wrote about buying our property in Texas and being excited to start building our home. Little did we know at the time we were in for a wild ride.

As we started our home building journey it quickly became clear that our original plan was not going to work out. The builder we had at that time was becoming very difficult to deal with. After discovering some questionable line items on our build budget that relationship came to a very abrupt and contentious end.

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June 2024 Financial Update

Welcome to our very late, and probably brief, June 2024 Financial Update. Better late than never I guess!

We were hesitant to even write this blog given how close we are to another month end. However, with everything we have going on there is no telling when we will be able to get to that month end blog either. So we are using this brief window of free time to give our update.

Since our last update we have traveled back and forth between Utah and Texas twice. Both trips required a lot of our attention as our home build is really getting down to the details. This stage is both exciting and a little scary. Our design choices starting to get implemented into the house so hopefully everything comes together as planned. The problem is that we are now 1,200 miles away and can’t be there to make changes on the fly if something doesn’t pan out. Hopefully when we get back there we don’t have an “oh shit” moment.

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June 2024 Dividend Portfolio Update

With another month drawing to a close it’s time for our June 2024 dividend portfolio update. June is normally a large month for dividend distributions which we look forward to. But, for some reason many ETF’s and mutual funds are not funding distributions until July 1st this year. Maybe it has something to do with the new holiday in June?

We will have to keep this in mind when we review our numbers for June and for July as both months be skewed as a result of this anomaly. For our June 2024 dividend portfolio update we will be missing payouts from QYLD and SCHD. QYLD isn’t a huge deal as their payouts can be all over the place. However, SCHD is one of our largest holdings and the distributions are a pretty significant amount for our little portfolio.

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April 2024 Financial Update

Hello again! We are pretty late publishing our April 2024 financial update blog, but for good reason. We made the cross country trip from Utah to Pennsylvania so that we could attend our son’s college graduation! It’s crazy how quickly four years flew by and we are so proud of him! He the first person to graduate college from my side of the family and he did it with honors to boot. Obviously he gets his smarts from Mrs. RVF’s side of the family.

Thankfully, he already has an amazing job opportunity lined up starting in the fall. There’s also a good possibility that he will not be too far from our new house during a good portion of his onboarding time. So that might be a very nice bonus! In the meantime he will be taking a well deserved trip across Europe, which we are very jealous about. As for us, we will be mooch docking in his apartment until he gets back home. Then we will make the journey back across the country to Utah.

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February 2024 Financial Update

Oh, where to begin! Another month in the books and it’s time for our February 2024 financial update.

However, before we get to the numbers let us bring you up to speed on the adventure that is our life. We knew that building a custom home would be a new challenge that would take a lot of patience. In our update last month we were in the process of trying to get permits and approvals for our plans. The good news is that we have cleared all of those hurdles. The not so good news is that there are a whole new set of hurdles to jump over.

It’s not a real big deal and we are making progress, but our timeline keeps getting pushed back. It would have been helpful to know about these things months ago as we could have probably taken care of them. The problem we have is that this is all new to us. We don’t know what we don’t know. Then something comes up in conversation and we have to figure it out. It’s all part of the experience I guess!

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January 2024 Financial Update

Welcome to our January 2024 financial update. As you can imagine there is a lot going on in the RVonFire household. It feels like everything is up in the air as life is continuously evolving.

On the home front not much has changed or progressed. We agreed on terms with a new builder and visited the property to discuss a few things. Now we are in that phase of trying to get permits and approvals so we can get started on the build. For me this is the worst part of the process as I hate waiting on people, especially government types. Although we can definitively say that South Dakota and Texas government folks are much more courteous, helpful and respectful than the human debris that occupies California government entities.

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