Back in 2016, I fired my financial advisor and moved all of our assets to Vanguard.
It took just shy of 2 years of intensive reading of books and blogs (and not a little bit of chutzpah) to toughen up and assume accountability for our retirement portfolio.
9 years later, we have reached a unique and exciting milestone in our Vanguard account: more of the funds in the account are due to investing returns than to saving. Put another way, less half the portfolio's value derived from money we earned and saved.
Our investments have more than doubled in those nine years. It's worth noting that during that time, we accelerated toward our goals at an unexpectedly more rapid rate than we'd anticipated, such that we took some risk off the table and tilted our assets to a more conservative allocation.
There's a comfort to reaching this position.
We have hit our number, such that if I lost my job tomorrow, we could live comfortably at a conservative 3.5% withdrawal rate off of our liquid assets.
I spent twice as much on two weeks of travel this summer travel compared to the prior year's budget for three weeks of travel, and it didn't gnaw at me the way prior high spend adventures have.
I buy rich people food, and I don't sweat the extra cost.
I'm just not as worried about running out of money. It's a nice contrast to the first 15 years of my career.