I recently found this old throwaway login and thought it might be a good time to do an update 5 years later and wiser?

TLDR: consistent earnings, savings and investing, paired with reasonable expenses has paid off, part time work is now feasible, taking time off to decide and think about what we want in life.

In the same vein as the previous post, this one doesn't really have a point, more just my thoughts after reviewing the previous post and with the experience of the past 5 years.

In just 5 short years, through pretty interesting times, our net worth has more than doubled to $2.2M, and we didn't make any of the $1.2M increase with Toronto/Vancouver real estate, crypto, meme stocks, TSLA stock, etc.  My wife continues to make a modest salary, and mine went up slightly to a combined \~$250k/year gross.  We continued to save and invest as much as we could, trying to get to 50%.

We invest purely in Vanguard ETFs, VCE, VFV, VUN, VXC, VIU, with the only exception being the wife's DB pension.  The market has continued to grow at an extreme rate and has been the majority of our increase.

On the job side, I took a voluntary package in January, which provided almost 2 years salary.  That paired with the trump tariff dip at the time I invested the majority of it resulted in quite the windfall, maybe the only time I will defacto "time the market".

On the financial side, we decided to pay down as much of our mortgage as we can (70k/year for 2 years, our mortgage max prepayment) to limit exposure to interest rates, and at renewal next year our mortgage balance will be 60k.  We sold all our rental properties, 2 at a loss, 1 at a gain, and netted out about 70k after taxes.  In hindsight, only my first rental made economic sense, the other two were dogs, lots of stress, time wasted, and in the end I had to pay to get rid of them.  The motivation to sell the properties was to free up time and mental capacity, since we have so much now we don't need to speculate on the rental market at all, its not worth it.

We've stopped tracking our spending so closely, as found it wasn't encouraging lowering expenses, which were already reasonable, we weren't discovering insights at all.

We are essentially at coast FI right now, even with budgeted large expenses like replacement vehicles in the future, or things like a new roof or water heater etc. We still see ourselves financially comfortable and our investments growing.  Its made us think about what we want to do now, and be deliberate in how we use our limited time.  We've decided to loosen the reigns on spending a little, getting some small luxuries we would have declined before and thinking about doing 1 or 2 big trips a year with the grandparents, like Mexico, Maui, East coast Canada, maybe Europe?  We were both relatively fit and healthy before, but now we really prioritize it, with both of us exercising almost everyday, and spending more time together (I recently finished my MBA which took up a considerable amount of free time).

Right now I am not looking for work, I may take 1-3 years off, and the wife will reduce her teaching hours to 50% starting this fall or next.  We've decided this summer will be a lot of kids with the kids, and we booked our first (very expensive) vacation to Mexico over Christmas.

It's funny to see how we thought a European vacation would be possible or moving to another province.  We are glad we've done neither, our family is close to home here, and having two kids is already a lot of work.  We visit our friends in BC and go on short weekend/long weekend trips via plane to visit friends while the grandparents look after the kids, those are great.

Thats it for my ramblings, thanks for getting to the end.  Not really any insights other than "the system works", consistent saving and modest spending really does pay off, we are financially secure in our 30s.  Open to others thoughts or recommendations for what we should consider!



$2.2M net worth, 5 year post update!