Ok, after 3 years, I can make a small update on my FIRE journey.
Net worth: 400k CHF
Portfolio (more or less):
- Stocks (VT+KBA+AVUV+AVDV): 255k
- 2nd Pillar: 80k
- 3rd Pillar - VIAC (Global 100): 50k
- Gold (physical): 5k
- Bitcoin: 5k
- Cash: 5k
Savings rate: 40% (more or less, I don’t track it exactly anymore, but it’s getting worse and worse over time, and I’m thinking about starting budgeting again).
Family:
- Obviously objective number 1. The big news here is that my second son was born a year ago and we are not sleeping again (6 wakeups per night are pretty standard in our family). My first son is 6-year-old and for a year he’s been attending a German-speaking kindergarten - after attending for 4 years English-speaking krippe, it was quite smooth for him to move to a public kindergarten and pick up Swiss German. I was more terrified than him - he was a late speaker and his language skills developed quite slowly for the first couple of years, but that changed about 2 years ago and he caught up with speaking a lot. Our speech therapist at school says that she thinks he won’t have any issues with German at school. He’s now speaking 4 languages - Polish (our main focus at home), English (1 hour a week extra class), Swiss German and German (at kindergarten). It remains still one of the biggest sources of stress and fear for me, but less and less so, as we see as he progresses and improves.
- In general - home education of my older son and looking after my younger son has become my main activity outside of work. I tend to focus on three topics: language (reading, writing, speaking), maths (numbers, operations, shapes), and general knowledge (everything I can get his attention on - from atoms through space to human evolution). I started making notes for myself to structure my own general knowledge on various topics so that I could be more effective at passing it to my sons. My general idea is that “the only real education is self-education” (Isaac Asimov), so I try to teach them in playful and entertaining ways, and I don’t force them to do anything.
- Currently we’re living on one income, as my wife quit her previous (unsatisfying) job, she’s currently looking after our kids full-time, while I returned to work 100%. On the plus side here, I got a decent salary rise in recent years (even though, or maybe because, the client of my employer, one of the big Swiss banks, recently went bankrupt).
Work:
- I continue work on Kubernetes clusters, but I also started developing applications in Python (Kubernetes operators and Flask web apps). I’m pretty happy with it. I have an excellent work-life balance and I’m very happy with my work. I probably could have earned a bit more in another job, but then I’d not have so good work-life balance so I’m sticking to my current job.
- On the minus side, since the client of my employer is bankrupt, we don’t know what will happen to the company. We have some other projects going on but the situation is completely unpredictable.
Growth:
- The big achievement is that in theory, I could go back to Poland and FIRE on a decent income (with stocks on the 4% rule or buying apartments for rental). However, since our son is going to start school this year, we decided to stay here and continue his education in Switzerland. This means that we keep FIRE on hold until our kids grow up - 20 years? We will most likely half-FIRE by switching to 50% work-load (my wife was already doing this) in a few years, but we will probably never give up work totally. Our philosophy is that FIRE funds give us flexibility and financial security but we rather focus on being happier with work - rather than trying to be happy without work.
- I recently struggled with my mental health - after the COVID-19 pandemic (which elevated my anxiety levels to the roof), I got obsessed about believing that the Ukraine-Russia war was a first step to the Poland-Russia war. I wasn’t aware that something was wrong until I learned that due to stress I got prostate inflammation - due to stress my muscles contracted and pressed prostate. To recover it and relax my muscles, I got anti-depressants from my doctor which had huge negative side effects for me - I was for weeks constantly tired, sleepy, unmotivated, and totally exhausted. After a month or so, the side-effects become not so strong and I can now function normally - although my energy levels are generally lower. In two months I’ll have another prostate check-up - we will see how effective the treatment is.
- Due to mental health issues, I put on hold any hobby projects and interests that I was working on in previous years. First things first.
SUM UP: With my unhealthy imperfect perfectionism - habits, diet, sports, health, learning, etc - I decided to relax and focus instead on my family goals. I managed to drop my weight recently and I try to stick to healthy levels. I bought a weight vest for my walks (+20kg), but I need to refocus again on my diet (too many sweets) and on my budgeting/investing (save more and invest more regularly). Otherwise, I don’t bash myself anymore on my shortcomings and I’m staying positive and optimistic about the future. That’s big improvement.