Chasing the Fionist Dream

Welcome to what should have been our Q4 Fionist quarterly update, but… things got messy, so this post will actually cover four months – a trimester, if you will. In this post, we will let you know how the last part of 2023 was for us, both on our FI journey and in life in general, and where we are holding in terms of the goals we set for ourselves on Rosh Hashana. We’ll try to get back on the quarterly bandwagon in 2024. 🙂

Personal goals update:

• We finally wrote our will! This has been on our to-do list for a while now but the current war and a recent death in the family reminded us how fragile life is. Now that it’s done, we hope to never need it for many decades to come.
  
  
• As you know, we love to travel and had planned on visiting Bulgaria in October. And course, it didn’t happen. We ended up recouping our flight and accommodations expenses and used it for a much-needed family trip to Eilat instead.
  
  
• Finn took his camera out and got back into making little people scenes. What do you think of this hunter scene he took in Eilat?
  
  

FI goals update:

• We were hoping to have raised the amount we invest monthly during this period since our youngest started public school, but it didn’t happen. After October 7th, we decided to to pause our personal investment contributions for a month and used that money to support various war-related fundraisers and struggling small businesses instead. Since then, we have used the money we would have otherwise spent on daycare to increase our monthly donations and top up various slush funds. We plan to increase our savings rate in 2024.
  
  
• Due to the above, we saved and invested 25% of our net income during this four month period. Our real savings rate (calculated including employer and employee pension and keren hishtalmut deposits – we’ll delve into how to calculate this in a future post) stood at 45%. We hope to report a savings rate of over 50% in our next periodic update.
  
  
• We are at 26% of our financial independence number.
  
  
• We earned 750 shekels from surveys during this four-month period.
  
  
• During this period, we made around 1,200 shekels net per month in passive income from dividends and interest. Look how nicely our passive income has been growing since we started our FI journey. 🙂 We are moving ever closer to our goal of 1,500 shekels per month of passive income by Rosh Hashana next year. At this point, we reinvest all of our passive income. In the future, we want to be able to live off of it if we choose.

Other noteworthy highlights:

• Our son is out of diapers and started public nursery school. Hurray for the baby stage being over! We now save about 100 shekels a month on diapers that we’re not buying and 2,000 shekels for the daycare we’re not paying. He’s such a big boy and we’re so proud of him.
  
  
• Our daughter is a dolphin. She is a fantastic swimmer and loves doing flips, handstands, and other tricks in the pool.
  
  
• We have over 500 followers on Facebook! (Make sure to follow us if you are not already.)
  
  
• Our Fionist Expense Tracker has become popular! That post was viewed over 5,400 times to date and our tool has been downloaded over 1,700 times. 💪
  

Thank you for following us on our Fionist journey. Your support means the world to us. Make sure to look out for our next update in the months to come. 🙂

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