Reflecting On Financial Independence as a Dad

About two weeks ago, my life changed forever. My beautiful daughter was born and I’m now officially a dad!

I’ve been enjoying every free moment I was able to get with her so far, which is why I’ve been a bit quiet over the past few weeks.

Please don’t forget that none of this is investment advice, just my personal opinion based on my own experience as an investor.

Becoming a Dad

I can’t tell you how happy I feel, she’s by far the best thing that ever happened to me and my wife.

She’s a little angel, we’re extremely lucky. She smiles a lot, which is very rare at such a young age, drinks breast milk like a champ and cries very little – usually only when she’s hungry.

We just can’t stop looking at her and we’re very grateful to have her in our lives.

I teared up several times when holding her in my arms and thinking about the fact that I’m her dad, who will always care for her and protect her for the rest of my life.

It’s a crazy feeling, I’ve never experienced anything like this before.

Financial Independence – How Close Are We?

Now that I’ve become a dad, I’m once again grateful for how my wife and I set up our lives, which is where our savings and investments come into play:

We have low living expenses, which enable us to save around 70% of our monthly income. Obviously that savings rate might change with the extra expenses for diapers and stuff, but even if we’re able to stay above 50% that’s still a major win in my book.

We also know exactly where our money is going, so we try not to waste it on things we don’t need or that we simply don’t feel are worth the price in our eyes.

Those monthly savings enabled us to build enough F-you money early on and to be more relaxed when it comes to work, so that we don’t have to accept jobs we don’t like just for monetary reasons.

But it gets better.

We now have enough in investments and cash reserves that we would be able to continue our current standard of living for 18 years without needing to earn a single extra euro!

This number is assuming our current standard of living and expenses, but still!

Just in case you’re interested, here’s our current portfolio allocation:

• 60% in ETFs
• 15% in P2P lending
• 10% in crypto as a speculative bet
• 15% in cash reserves split between euros and dollars

We started working towards financial independence in early 2017, after listening to Mr. Money Mustache on the Tim Ferriss Podcast. While we’re not officially financially independent yet when looking at the numbers, we’re both so grateful that we started this journey in the first place almost six years ago and that we can now feel so relaxed about our financial situation as a family.

Our goal is to be able to spend as much time as we want together as a family with our daughter and to never have to miss out on anything important because of work as she grows up – I’m positive we should be able to achieve that!

Raising Our Daughter In 4 Languages

One thing that might prove to be a challenge however, is raising our daughter in four different languages.

1. We live in Austria, a German speaking country so she needs to know German.
2. My mother tongue is Italian, and half of my family is from Italy, while the other half is from Austria.
3. Meanwhile, my wife is from Hungary, so she needs to learn Hungarian
4. And lastly, my wife and I speak English with each other at home.

So yeah, that’s going to be interesting. But I’m sure we’ll figure it out!

Feeling Grateful

I hope you guys didn’t mind the more personal post today. Somehow, it just wouldn’t have felt right to just mention such a life changing event as a side tangent in a monthly update.

I still tried to tie it together with how our investments fit into all of this as honestly, our personal why for saving money & investing has never been stronger than it is right now.

It’s exactly for moments like these, to be free to live our lives exactly the way we choose. To have plenty of time to spend as a family with our newborn daughter and to see her grow up instead of working over-time trying to climb some career ladder to make enough money.

At the moment, we have enough for 18 years worth of our current living expenses and a beautiful, healthy baby girl, which I believe is well worth celebrating.

Also, I’ll now get back to working on my Interactive Brokers vs. Degiro comparison, I should have that out in a few days. Sorry about the delay!

Thank you guys so much for being here and for following me on my journey.

Thank you for all of your support, your kind comments and emails, for every time you used one of my links on purpose, for every like button you clicked on YouTube, I could go on and on. Seriously, thank you.

I couldn’t be more grateful for how my life turned out.