For me, being someone who's in the FIRE community is about freedom. I love what I do. I still don't want to do it for the next 30 years of my life. 65 seems like a really weird, arbitrary time to retire, so why don't I just change that number to 40? Or 35 or 37? Hi, I'm Amberly. I'm 34 years old and I achieve financial independence in February of 2022. I've really only made between $13,000 and $20,000 a year up until five years ago. And when I got my first job with $50,000 a year, I realized I can save so much money. So I continued to keep my expenses really small. I only spent $1,300 a month back then, so I had a lot of leftover money. And to me that was like the first time I could really pursue FI. I've recently had a child seven weeks ago and that has changed things short term now I spend about $3,400 a month when it comes to personal expenses.
I support my partner while we're working through a visa he can't work and it's been a year. And so that's all dependent on me to provide for my family. I have been able to spend and get whatever we need for our child without feeling extremely stressed. We're still saving almost 70% of our income because we have so much coming in and our expenses are low even with these crazy extra expenses from our child. My current finances are two 401(k) accounts that total $119,000. A taxable brokerage account with $55,000. A Roth IRA with $37,000 in it. Two HSAs that total of $12,000. A 529 education account for our kid, which is $9,000. One company stock account, which is $6,000. Truthfully, I can be completely FIRE right now. I only need a total of $40,000 a year to cover every single expense that I have.
So that's $1 million in a brokerage account or the cash flow that I currently have, which is $6,500 a month. But it turns out I don't think $40,000 is enough. I'm going to continue with my day job for the next 3 to 5 years, put another $140,000 to $200,000 away into a taxable brokerage account. And by that time, in 3 to 5 years, my entire liquid savings will be about $750,000. With cash flow from houses on the side, that will be plenty of enough money for me to feel comfortable quitting my job and walking away. For me, there are some scarcity mindset when it comes to finances. I grew up very poor and so a number will never satisfy that little hole in my heart that feels like I am never going to be secure enough. When it comes to finances. I could work ten years and that wouldn't be because of finances.
That would be because of my insecurity about money. So I always thought I'd follow a traditional path. I would go to university, get married to like my high school or university boyfriend, have some kids, get a house in Ottawa. And all of a sudden one day I decided that I was not going to apply to university. I had made a decision that I was going to become a millionaire. And so that drive to do more, be more and have more has been a huge defining factor in my adulthood. Ended up working at a tech company where I was a project coordinator. I was making $52,000 a year, more than double my parents what they had made. One of the ways that I found that I could exponentially change my journey to FIRE instead of wait 15 years of saving my paycheck at 50%, I could buy real estate and make money off of real estate. My partner and I decided to move in together and purchase a house, which is always a risky endeavor.
I started renting it out in May of 2019, then started doing short term rentals shortly after. For my second property, someone approached me about purchasing it from the seller directly. I only had $60,000 at the time, and so I was in a pinch and needed to figure out where I was going to find $40,000. So I was able to take some money out of a HELOC out of my current property that I was living in to finish that down payment off. And then it took me about a year to pay back that $40,000 HELOC. Which is going to be our family home. And I only put 5% down because I wasn't planning on buying a property and had been putting all my money towards my brokerage account and not my savings. So that one is a lot less than I actually would feel comfortable with. But we made it work. Hi, everyone.
Welcome to FinTalks. We are talking healthcare today. Amberly Grant Finance is actually in the negative because I run around the country going to speaking events and speaking at different places like Austin, California, Minneapolis. I never see myself fully retiring like the FI part of FIRE is actually what I'm going for, that freedom to do whatever I want. And what that looks like to me is bike riding to the grocery store, hanging out with our new kid, having my family go on traveling, like going on vacation to other places or living abroad for a little bit. So that's something that fire will bring us is that we can have the flexibility to be wherever we want. It makes us have a lot of freedom and the ability not to feel too much stress on a day to day basis..
