34M, $3.7m, 11 Years of Income, Expense, and NW tracking in FAANG/Bay Area, Taking Career Break

Intro/Goals:

• I used to love looking at long and data heavy posts when I first got into FIRE, seeing other people’s progression. Making this partly for myself to get feedback, and for people who like me enjoy these type of detailed posts
• Understand there can be pushback against people sharing large NW numbers, not trying to show off here but to share story, have opportunity to talk about specifics, and get feedback on investments and plan. This is one of the few places acceptable to have this level of transparency.
• First time I’ve ever posted, can re-format or move to another subreddit if preferred. Also I retroactively organized this clean-ish summary, has been a lot of work and an interesting experience. Didn’t meticulously tracks these things each month, more ad hoc.
• There’s a LOT of information here, this will be a LONG post. I won’t be able to get all my thoughts into it, so can expand more in comments

Background:

• From Non-US country, went to college for electrical/mechanical engineering, worked a few internships, and got a hardware engineering job at a big tech/FAANG company in 2015, which I’ve been at ever since, I moved to the bay area and spent most years in SF.
• Owe a lot to my upbringing and family. Very stable home life, supportive siblings and parents, a family that valued education and talked at least a small amount about money and investing. My parents paid for a big portion of my non-US school tuition, rest covered from internships and paid off with signing bonus, so financially I started ahead of many US peers.
• Also recognize I’m extremely lucky: Lucky to land the job I did, within that job lucky with coworkers, mentors, and people that advocated for me, and teams and projects I could switch to. Lucky for the massive tech stock bull run over the last ten years, which has driven most networth and career growth. Hard work and smarts played a part, but numbers in this post would be fractions of what they are if these things didn’t come together at once as a multiplier.
• I was VERY into FIRE during late college, read forums religiously, although there was a lot less content back then. Within a few months felt like I understood the core concepts, and after a few years slowly got bored of re-reading similar things and slowly dialed back over time, chose not to focus too much on it. I would still still pop in and read posts time to time, and day-dream often, but tried not to make it a core focus, just something that is happening in background. I do think sub-consciously a lot of the ideas were ingrained in me though
• Currently have a partner of 1-2 years, I do want a family and kids, and am feeling a little bit behind in that area. I could blame previous LTRs failing on these financials, to an extent I think it’s true as a recovering workaholic, but I think that is more of a personality trait than a hyper focus on FIRE specifically 

Summary:

Year	Gross Income	Net Income	Expenses	Savings %	Networth
2015	$ 132,000	$ 88,000	$ 35,000	60%	$ 57,000
2016	$ 189,000	$ 127,000	$ 65,000	49%	$ 134,000
2017	$ 188,000	$ 126,000	$ 65,000	48%	$ 212,000
2018	$ 248,000	$ 163,000	$ 65,000	60%	$ 345,000
2019	$ 326,000	$ 206,000	$ 65,000	68%	$ 576,000
2020	$ 443,500	$ 263,500	$ 50,700	81%	$ 1,080,000
2021	$ 519,500	$ 304,500	$ 70,800	77%	$ 1,710,000
2022	$ 520,500	$ 305,500	$ 143,000	53%	$ 1,490,000
2023	$ 602,500	$ 352,500	$ 136,000	61%	$ 2,280,000
2024	$ 613,000	$ 363,000	$ 146,000	60%	$ 3,143,000
2025	$ 590,000	$ 320,000	$ 127,000	60%	$ 3,855,000
Total:	$ 4,372,000	$ 2,619,000	$ 968,500	63%

• Will address in dedicated sections: Income and networth going way up after 2018, expenses exploding around 2022
• Weird to see it all in one place, would check some of these things on their own from time to time (at tax time would see income, 1-2 years I tracked expenses monthly, networth only checked sporadically over different accounts - until 6 months ago was probably only some years I looked at this often or tried to add up actively). I always did have some of these things in back of my mind, networth probably more than I should have, but this is first time I’ve had it all in one place, with historical data. It’s a bit surreal to look at, but easier to pull out trends and large changes that I didn’t notice
• What jumps out here to me is savings rate
  • My total savings rate is 63%. Interesting, from one of the original FIRE blogs I ran into, MMM ‘shockingly simple math’, it’s called out that with a savings rate of 64% you could retire in 11 years, which isn’t so different than what is happening here, although I don’t plan to retire forever. In my case, the absolute earning and saving numbers around that ratio grew wildly, but averaged over years it’s held about true
  • I knew I was making a lot - more than I ever thought possible - and fairly frugal compared to peers, but some of these years are a bit mind boggling even to me. Around COVID peaked at around 80% Savings Rate, so only spending 20% of net (not gross) income! Seems extreme, even by FIRE standards. I’ll get into it more in expenses side, but in general even outside of COVID, I didn’t often feel like I was skimping on buying things I wanted: ate out often, partying most weekends, travelled a TON, etc… I think not having a car for many years, living with roommates/partners, as well as not much taste for expensive and shiny pricy possessions (>$1k) kept expenses in check early years
  • Also interesting, my networth is getting close to my lifetime gross earnings.

Income / Career:

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• Tech incomes can be hard to believe, I never dreamt of making this much money. Notably, income increased massively around 2019
  • Mainly driven by promos, and more from tech stocks having a huge bull run, while having significant amount of earnings as RSUs forced to hold before vesting
• Looking back at my 11 years (outside of luck)
  • Hard work: I worked ridiculously hard when I started, the first 3-4 years. Nights, weekends, business travel 20% of the year on short notice. Set me up well, learned a ton, and always easier to make a good impression and keep it, than to try to repair a bad first impression
  • Mentor, growth: Had many managers and peers who went above and beyond teaching me skills, and overall coaching me. If you work in tech, you know there can be some pretty smart people around, if you can find them and learn from them you can grow a ton. It helped that I found a group of people who were of a similar mindset, happy to do great work and work hard, but don’t drink the tech-saves-the-world cool-aid, which helped me stay relatively sane.
  • Leadership: Lucky that I moved into some teams where the management moved up as company grew, and found myself with advocates in upper management, also from working so hard and producing, had middle/senior management in other orgs that seemed to like me. I transitioned into leading some big projects, which got a lot of visibility and attention, and was able to deliver.
  • Promotions: With above came promotions, got promoted 2017, 2019, and again 2022, all IC levels. This was fairly quick, and obviously contributed massively to my income. Again a large part of this was getting what management wanted done cleanly, and having visibility of lead role
  • Difficulties: With the crazy amount of work and pressure, I had many burnout episodes, panic attacks at one point, and almost quit MANY times. After about 6 years, I had to dial it back seriously. Since then it’s been up and down, a few crazy few month periods but not a non-stop grind, as I’ve gotten a bit older it’s more difficult to do the grind even if you wanted to. I do think I subconsciously prioritized career ahead of some other aspects of life, especially those early years, despite having a ton of hobbies and travels, this is time you can’t buy back.
• Career Advice / thoughts for FAANG
  • Play to your strengths: When you are in a large team/org, everyone has different skills. I was never as strong technically as other people, but had decent intuition and common sense, and could boil problems down into clean summaries and pragmatic next steps for management. Focus on where you have an edge or deliver the most value relative to other people, for me this naturally lead me to a more PM style role, which played to my strengths, and got visibility. Project lead roles can be great if you play them right, people working on the project can feel supported and can insulate them from pressure, and I’ve often felt that even when you clearly credit and thank people, queue them up in front of management, if you’re the one leading the project you get a lot of undue credit for being the visible one. Some of the more technical people went even quicker/farther than me on the promotion path, but I never would have gotten as far competing in that area.
  • Understand high level goals, communicate: Knowing what management a few layers up is looking for, and predicting what they will want to do, will save a lot of headaches and make you look good
  • Get a few folks in upper management on your side: With above, if some of these people start to like you, everything gets a lot easier, more trust, flexibility, and there are people advocating for you in rooms you’re not in 
  • I didn’t take, but: I never went towards management, saw it as ‘ladder-climbing’, but in retrospect after many years and things now getting stale, I think part of the benefit of changes like this - either into management or totally changing your role - is probably more about keeping things fresh and yourself learning and engaged. I would have rolled my eyes reading this a few years ago, but think it’s a valid point.

Expenses:

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• I didn’t always track this closely, as I knew it was generally not an issue. Only 2 years have categorized spending, otherwise have back worked totals, or made some estimates for 2015-2018. I will admit seeing this is a bit surprising, I assumed I was spending closer to 120k a year.
• I am a naturally frugal person (or was, current spending doesn’t seem like it), maybe from fire sub-consciously, maybe from how I was raised, wearing hand-me-downs, not really prioritizing flashy things. To this day if I’m buying things for hobbies, furniture, I’ll usually get something solid/nice and used, rather than newest or flashiest thing. 
• My expenses exploded in 2022, this is partly coming out of COVID, and partly moving after a relationship where I was splitting expenses. I almost quit and world travelled, but realized how much I was making and little I was spending, and figured it was a smart idea to up my spending significantly to enjoy life more, get an awesome apartment (~4k/mo, coming from ~$2k/mo split), buy a (used) car, and generally have a blast, and if this kept me in the job a few more years it would be worth it even in a financial sense
  • There are some one off expenses in 2023 and 2024 that are ~10-15k, things like an out of pocket medical issue, and restoring an old car, so in a way these numbers may be more than my baseline spending
• I am splitting rent now, as well as have finished car loan, so expenses should go down by ~2.3k a month, but after quitting healthcare costs may be ~1k a month and with additional travel, expect this to settle somewhere between 125-135k

Networth:

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• Again, really took off around 2018, often growing 50% year over year, a bit shocking to see how extreme these jumps are in one image
• There are huge leaps in networth year over year. Combination of getting a large amount saved early (in the first 5 years I earned 710k and saved about 415k of it), which was able to start capital compounding, and more importantly the market ripping in some prime earning years, multiplying that capital, and maybe more importantly my unvested RSU’s I think drove most of this growth
• I know I own WAY too much of this is in individual stock, I made some effort in the first ~5 years to try to rebalance into broad market, but have fallen behind on this front, need to get on this
  • Taking time off of work, can use a year or two of lower income to re-balance with less tax burden
• Did take advantage of 401k, Roth IRA, but coming from outside the US and not planning to stay at first, I didn’t see the need for HSA. Now having had many medical expenses, and knowing this is triple tax advantaged, would have been wise to use this vehicle. Also was probably more room to mega backdoor Roth
• Notable I got a few inheritances (~40k, and ~60k), this would be life changing money for many, and I’m extremely grateful and thankful. I don’t think these meaningfully changed my financial trajectory though
• “Free money”, when adding up 401k employer contributions, and Company Stock Purchase discounts, these can amount to a SERIOUS amount of money over time, in my case probably ~$250k. Also looking at how much work my capital has done, at this point capital gains makes up almost half my networth, not money I earned by working
• Even pulling out some of the stock growth, or at least capital appreciation. If I look at lifetime earnings from summary, and subtract expenses, I put away about $1.7m, so even taking the stock market run out of equation, possible I would have somewhere from $1-1.5m (difficult to back work how much this added to my income through RSU’s), but nothing like what I’ve actually accumulated
• I did expect EOY to hit ~$4m NW, but markets are what they are

FIRE:

• The number you think you need keeps growing… moving to the Bay Area messed with my idea of this, as does getting slightly older and spending to make life more comfortable. I don’t have a family yet, but know that will spike numbers from here as well
• In 2020 (my lowest spending year), did the math, funny enough I thought $3.5m would be a very luxurious FIRE number, which I’ve now made it to. But I think I was still underestimating expenses and bay area housing, and certainly cost of kids
• I’m pretty happy with my number, it can support my current very comfortable lifestyle, through some time off
• But, if you’d ask what I think long term safe and very comfortable FIRE number would be in the Bay, I think I would now say $6-8m, ~$2m in a residence, and still spitting off about $200k a year. I think it’s always easy to let the number go up and up, but I imagine past that point the mental gymnastics to justify needing more would get very difficult

Burnout and Sabbatical:

• Had a few periods of burn-out, difficulties keeping up with pace of job, where I considered quitting. Last year has been difficult - but oddly more on the disengaged front, and I think pushed me over the edge. Part of this is also seeing the financial numbers, I’m not as worried about money
• Lately the main problem are things getting stale, been doing the same thing a long time, working on the nth iteration of the same project. Working with AI has been surprisingly fun and refreshing, even though I’m usually a bit resistant to tools like that. Past that, there have been management and culture changes and many of my closest mentors and collaborators have left, which has made work feel a lot more frustrating
• I do believe it’s good not to be too emotionally invested in job, and I certainly am much less than I was the first few years, but once you hit a point of most days thinking ‘I don’t care about any of this, what am I spending my time on’, I think it’s time to change things up, at least for me this is beyond a healthy work/life boundary
• More importantly, there are a lot of personal things: see family I haven’t seen in a long time, travel - there are some cities I’d like to spend a month or two in, work on hobby projects, health, etc, etc…, that I would love to devote more time on, and reset and think about what I want to do. net. I day dreamed about FIRE so long, the idea of giving it a temporary trial run, and seeing if it’s something I even enjoy as much as I hoped I would, will be a valuable data point on it’s own. I am planning for somewhere between 6-18 months of time off, and am actively planning trips and goals during that time. Part of this feels like the last stretch of my healthy high energy youngish years, without the commitment of kids, while I have quite a bit of money - this chunk of my life doesn’t feel like something I will get back, and I would likely regret not taking some time to myself when I had this opportunity
• I do have fears about leaving a job that: Pays ~5-600k a year, is fairly flexible and I earn a lot of PTO (~20 days), and that I can actually do, however
  • Pay will likely go down to ~450 over the next year, and at this point my NW growth is more about Cap Gains than contribution from work
  • Stress level and pressure are on their way up significantly, and I’ve already been pretty burnt out for a couple years
  • Management has changed, and is feeling a bit more hostile, my trajectory here seems a shaky
  • I’m maybe naively optimistic, but I have a fairly wide network, and would like to think I could land a job back in tech (maybe making 60-80% of what I do now, in 1-2 years), or at least I’m willing to gamble on this. Similarly, another option is to change things up and work in a different space/change roles, but I’d rather take time off before starting doing that, then transitioning right into it

Other thoughts:

• Have mostly been talking numbers and this post is already very long. Some other thoughts:
  • It’s obvious, but maxing your income at one of these tech jobs, can out earn almost any spending habit, and combined with some discipline and a long early career run there, can set you up for any kind of financial goals very easily 
  • It’s tough not to let your lifestyle inflate, I’m a naturally frugal person and assumed I was more resilient than most against this, and even I saw this substantially increase. Although I was a bit purposeful about it
  • It can be easy to over-focus on FIRE instead of live your life and be present. I think I noticed this early enough to break away from being obsessive, but this theme also applies to looking for other opportunities instead of holding onto any well-paying job for dear life purely for financials