2 Commas = £1,000,000

Today, as I have done pretty much every Saturday morning since October 2007, I again sat down and updated my wealth and progress to FIRE (financially independent retired early).  This morning was however a little different as when I usually look at the wealth column of my spreadsheet after entering the data I see 6 figures and a single comma.  Today, for the first time, I saw a second comma indicating that my wealth had passed the £1,000,000 mark.

Click to enlarge, Wealth spreadsheet snapshot

This number means I am now 98.9% of the way to FIRE.

Click to enlarge, RIT path trodden to Financial Independence

This was always a psychological number for me given the amount of sheer determination (in the end it took me 8.5 years to achieve it) I knew I would have to sustain to achieve it.  I’m sure it’s also a psychological number for many others and also a number that many will never see.  Given its significance I thought I’d be jumping for joy and popping the champagne corks.  In the real world I’m doing neither with the word to describe my current feelings actually being nonchalant.  This is because it just seems fake and I actually feel a little cheated.  I wanted to cross this mark with a blaze of hard graft, frugality and investing savvy.  Instead the majority of the final leg simply came from the devaluation of the pound because of the Brexit vote.

I guess one positive of it all is that I’ll at least remember what was happening at the time I became a millionaire.  Oh and of course a second big positive is that with a fair wind I could actually be financially independent in just a few short weeks...