I get my numbers through 3-month rolling averages, because my financial activities are still adjusting to my lifestyle. Here are my stats as of August 21, 2021.

Total Net Worth: ₱ 590,487.24

20.29% — Net Cash: ₱ 119,788.42

26.26% — Investment Accounts: ₱ 155,079.22

22.97 % — Retirement Accounts: ₱ 135,659.34

20.27% — Other Contributions: ₱ 119,699.20

10.21% — Real Estate: ₱ 60,261.06

Average Monthly Income: ₱ 138,718.72

Average Monthly Expenses: ₱ 90,199.21

70% — Lean Monthly Average: ₱ 63,139.44

Average Monthly Savings: ₱ 88,430.53

Based on the figures above, the following are my FI Numbers and a few other checkpoints. It feels almost unreachable at this point, but “retiring” comfortably by 50 years old with 27M doesn’t seem too bad given these numbers.

My next step in the coming weeks is identifying my essential expenses and figuring out my fixed FIRE goal at least for 2022, then adjust periodically — maybe quarterly, bi-annually, or annually. Whatever makes me the most comfortable and least anxious.

It’s exciting to finally see when I would realistically be able to retire, so I’m excited to focus on these metrics a little more to finally set the right FI Number for me.

Link to Savings Rates & More

Portfolio — ₱472,497.95

• ₱188,524.55 Cash - 39.90%
• ₱139,181.35 Investments - 29.46%
• ₱104,661.52 Retirement - 22.15%
• ₱40,130.53 Real Estate - 8.49%

FI Rate = 3.26% [Portfolio/FI Number]

Here in the Philippines, it’s not quite common to get out of college with a huge amount of debt. Not to say that this doesn’t exist in our society. I was one of the privileged in the middle class to have had the luxury of a relatively good university education and no institutional debts (i.e. direct debts for loans and credit cards).

I, however, was given a double edged sword, when I got my first supplementary credit card in 2015. It gave me the flexibility to subscribe to streaming services, the ease of quick payments for Grab & Uber, as well as the quick snap of a finger to purchase flights around the country to either travel for leisure or my volunteer work. Life was luxurious, but the debt was piling up. My promise was always to pay off these credit card debts that I transacted in my grandmother’s account. I couldn’t break that promise.

Long story short, I had quite the battle with my relationship with my I had and didn’t have. I was struggling to understand how to manage the privilege properly, to ensure that I was gonna have a sense of independence in the future. By the end of December 2019, I reached a total of ₱314,964.67. This included all of the different expenses I had in the last 4 years. I was only able to pay off ₱156,090.31 in the same period bringing me to a total of ₱158,874.36. In addition to my current additional debt, I am at an outstanding debt of ₱183,508.36*.

• As of 2020–11–22, Debt Update: ₱145,830.35
• As of 2021–05–27, Debt Update: ₱53,455.83
• As of 2021–07–10, Debt Update: ₱0.00 Fully Paid!

When I finally began my active quest to a financially healthy life, I came across several articles and videos pertaining to the concept of FIRE — financial independence, retire early. Several of these believers had extreme practices about it, which included actual retirement at a young age, but we know that people who retire actually still do productive things. FIRE enables us to live a life of financial freedom, choosing to do what we actually want and not being dictated by money (or the lack of).

This account aims to tell my story more than to educate about the concept of FIRE, because I want to have sense of accountability towards my goal of FIRE by age 28. Today I am approximately 24.5 years old.

Here are my current strategies to achieve FIRE:

• Maintaining proper budgeting and expense tracking. I use the app YNAB to help me do this, because it taught how to budget with only money that I already have.
• I’m saving up for an emergency fund of 3 months first, then later add 3 additional months as I meet target. I computed my expenses to include essentials, insurance, and savings to ensure that even when I end up without a job, I can sustain the same financial activity for a given period. My 3 months reserves will total ₱70,000.00. I will reach ₱21,000.00 by end of July paycheck. I keep this in a high interest savings account (CIMB at 3.00% p.a. — whereas other banks range between 0.50–1.25% p.a.; I made a mistake of opening CIMB before GSave, so I can’t integrate to receive the 4.00% p.a. rate)
• As of 2020–11–09, E-fund Update: ₱32,000
• As of 2021–05–27, moved from E-fund to True Expenses: ₱117,981.50
• As of 2021–07–10, True Expenses: ₱113,385.75 (Bought my new glasses).
• I purchased 2 insurance policies. 1 strictly for life, the other with an investment component. I pay a total of ₱5,555.00 a month for both for a period of 10 years. I’m 7 months down, and 9.5 years to go. (Switched to semi-annual for 1 plan bringing down monthly cost to ₱5,373.33)
• I played around GCash’s investment feature through ATRAM. I only have about ₱1,300.00 and gained about ₱8.50 in interest. (Scrapped and moved to Seedbox + PERA)
• I opened up a COL Financial investment account for only ₱1,000.00 also to get familiar with the stock market, index and trade funds. I already earned ₱2.50 out of it. (Scrapped and moved to Seedbox + PERA)
• Because my debt isn’t actually institutional, I’m not pressured to pay due to rising interest expense. I pay between the range of ₱5,000.00-₱8,000.00 on a monthly basis, but aim to go more aggressive with it as my income increases.

And here are my next set of goals to reach FIRE faster:

• Explore other ways to diversify revenue streams. (Added GoTrade into my investment mix.)
• Reach ₱70,000.00 emergency fund by July 2021. (Goal met)
• Explore retirement and mid to long term investment accounts: BPI/ BDO PERA, SSS PESO, Pagibig MP2, etc. Begin contributions when emergency fund is full. (PERA active, MP2 active, PESO application submitted yet to be activated)
• Attain debt free status by November 30, 2022. (Moving forward to November 30, 2021); Attained on July 10, 2021

I may or may not have forgotten to add what the trips on the side meant. This was another concept I learned while looking into FIRE movement — mini-retirement. This concept directly addresses the issue of what to do next now that I already retired? Most people who do retire choose to do things that they love, things they wish they did at a younger age. The idea is to bring retirement age spread across your prime years. In stays true to the essence of FIRE, because I still only choose to work when I want to and get to do things I want to do without the limitations of time and money constraints.

I noticed something about myself this week. I have no identity. I have no idea who I am and what I want to do with my life. I have no idea where I want to take this life towards. I used to think I did, but since graduating all those dreams are slowly heading down the drain.

Wait a minute, I'm not saying that I don't think they're possible anymore, but I'm just not quite sure whether those are really what I want in my life — at least at this point in my life. Today, I'm trying to figure out what I want to do at least in the next five years.

I want to have some financial stability and savings to have a really good young adult life transitioning to full on adulthood. I want to live life to the fullest, so that means I balance what I earn, save, and spend to make sure life is not boring. I want to learn and learn and learn. I want to learn a language. I want to earn a masters degree. I want to be close to family and friends.

I want all of that, but I have no idea how to make that all happen. If I go back home to the Philippines, I'm not sure what kind of job I would want and if that job would pay enough to reach my goals. Main issue? Transportation is hell back home and it will eat both time and money. Possible solution is to rent a place near work, then visit home once a week or so. Even so, I'm still not sure if I can find a company that values its people in all the right aspects of the word — a worthy job description, spaces and place to grow, financial compensation, and other benefits.

Every day I keep thinking, whether applying for another role in my organization is a good idea. I still think it's a pretty good experience, so I'm still doing that to get the learning experience of the journey of the application process. This is one of the deciding factors of where I'm going next for the following year. Do I leave Sweden? I mean I have to anyway to fix my work permit and all that. Is it worth it to leave and wait and go through all the bureaucracy of both the Swedish and Philippines governments? Do I move to another country and start from scratch again?

All I can do right now is to make sure I reach an ideal state in my life, where I'm healthy, responsible, and disciplined. I'm going through a bunch of self experiments on that, so let's see where that goes. Life is crazy, but I guess I'll try to go along some waves and go against others. Good luck to me.

Some people see me as quite a structured person who has gotten things a bit figured out, but I’m like anyone else at this stage in life where you just don’t understand how things work.

I decided to take a one year opportunity abroad. This is the first time I’m away from family and friends for more than my longest trip alone of two weeks. The first few weeks were extremely full of conferences, planning, and team building. I had no time to process my new found independence. Six weeks into this new adventures, as I was eating my home cooked croquetas in the backyard, everything sinked in. I’m practically alone, thousands of kilometers away from most of the people I know. (I’m lucky enough to have one of my best friends, Ely, around here to keep me sane. Hi Ely!)

This situation gave so much more time to myself with the ever bugging questions: Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? Where the heck am I going? Let me tell you about the things that have been keeping me quite busy and maintaining my sanity the past three months. These have been around the themes of productivity and personal development.

I started (trying) to read books.

I’ve had quite a bad reading habit every since life began. As much as I wanted to learn new things, I just couldn’t grasp the discipline to read long form literature. Ask my friends from grade school and high school and you would know how much I relied on our class nerds, Cliff Notes, and Spark Notes to survive. Today is different story. I’m trying to build a habit of reading more, so I’m selecting books that I know I would somehow enjoy just from the summaries and titles. The following are the books that I have read, are currently reading, or about to read.

Read

1. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
2. The Motivation Hacker by Nick Winter

Currently Reading

1. Quiet by Susan Cain
2. Start With Why by Simon Sinek

I'm not one to describe what I felt or learned from what I have read, so for now I'm going to stick to just listing them down or I probably won’t even get to finish writing this article. (Points for future improvement!)

I’m back on Duolingo.

I came to a part of the land of the Vikings and the Norse gods wanting to learn a new language as part of learning their culture, so for a few weeks I was learning Swedish. I reached about Level 9. Completing nine topics, and reaching maximum crowns of five on three of them. I stopped and reflected whether I was going to use this in the future. I had an answer. It was no. I'm happy to say that I’m not upset about this answer. It was quite fun learning some new words, so I don’t get lost in the metro or the groceries. I know my meats, my fruits, my veggies, and beer, so I said I’m good. I will learn the rest as I go.

After this second hiatus from Duolingo, after almost a year away from it before coming to Sweden, I realized that I really wanted to learn another new language. I thought about what language I should learn. I wanted something that would generally be more useful for me, quite easy to learn, and gives access to more people around the world.

I figured it out! Back in high school, I learned Spanish for four years. I never learned to speak or fully understand it, but knowing Filipino, you pretty much know a lot of random vocabulary in the language as well. This fits the criterion of easy to learn. Having been in an international conference recently, a lot of the people around me were from Latin America. And what language did they speak? Spanish, of course. Another criterion met for giving access to understanding more people in the world.

I can't really tell how this would be extremely useful to me in the future, but having a wider range of places and people that this language can provide is far better for me than a language that is isolated in small set of countries in the world, so Spanish it is!

My Duolingo progress on my Spanish course is also on Level 9 like Swedish, but I have covered 28 topics, 14 of which I have reached 2 crowns. I think this will be a good run. 87 more topics to go, how long do you think this will take me?

I watch a lot of Youtube.

I spend a lot of my free time watching videos on YouTube, but they have all mostly been about productivity and personal development as well. There are several Youtubers that talk about topics on scheduling, personal finance, creating good habits, morning routines, and so on. Other than that there are TED or TEDx talks that fills you up about inspiring things and more. I would say this takes up 70% of my YouTube time. The rest are of the usual Try Guys, Buzzfeed, ant videos, dance videos, and other random things.

I feel like my brain is still quite scattered about life and even in writing. I hope to structure both as time progresses, so hopefully this space allows me to do that. I'm not sure what I have to do to make that happen, so if you have any ideas on what routines I should follow, people to copy, books to read, blogs to view, and what not. Please send me a message and help a fellow lost boy out.