New design for the site! I changed the site generator from Jekyll to Hugo, and also found a nice theme to use. The styling looks much better than the previous one, plus there’s some nice quality of life features like search, dark mode, etc. On the backend, Hugo is much simpler to run locally, and deployment builds are much faster than with Jekyll.
Finance-wise, it looks like the market dropped a bit, and on top of that the yen also lost quite a bit of value against the dollar, so that explains the ~5% drop in assets compared to last month. It makes me feel a little bit powerless when short-term market fluctuations have a much larger impact than my savings behavior, but at the same time it’s freeing knowing that it’s largely outside of my control and that I can focus my attention on other things and the growth will take care of itself (or if it doesn’t, there are much larger problems than early retirement to worry about!).
This month, I did another weekend trip to Kyushu. Used 30k BA miles (transferred from CapitalOne Venture card) for roundtrip flights for 2 people, plus two IHG free night certificates + 55k points for two nights. Cash price for the flights and hotels would have been about $1,380, so pretty good savings by using points.
That’s pretty much all there is to report for this month. Here’s a summary of my financial position at this point:
| Description | 02/23 |
|---|---|
| Total Expenses | $2,717.26 |
| Gross Income | $4,839.02 |
| Taxes | $698.32 |
| Net Income | $4,140.70 |
| Savings | $1,423.44 |
| Savings Rate | 34.4% |
| Net Worth | $420,641.17 |
Projected time to FI (assuming 6% growth and 4% withdrawal rate): 5 years, 11 months.