Surprise! It’s a $750k Net Worth Update!

What… the hell. I will be happy about reaching a $750k net worth later. The shock is overriding everything else right now.

Usually, I notice way ahead of time when I’m about to hit a new net worth milestone and start writing up blurbs to add to a future article. This one snuck up on me, big time. I am writing this in my Airbnb in Romania after spending the day exploring Calea Victoriei. It only occurred to me to write this after I casually checked this week’s stock market performance and got bodyslammed by the S&P 500 being up almost two percent. Two percent of my index fund investments, as of August 4^th, is roughly $14,000. In just two zany days, I reached a $750k net worth for the first time ever.

I figured this $750k milestone would be a long time coming with how dramatically I’ve changed my life this year. I got laid off in January, left Los Angeles in April, spent 2.5 months exploring the United States, and spent the last 1.5 months slow traveling in Europe. I’m not bleeding cash doing all this, but I’m also not bringing any wages in, either. This $750k net worth is fully from my index fund investment growth. No supplemental pay went into its making.

The $750k Milestone Reference

I am now FoggFI, and I fear no one understands that reference. It’s from Around The World in 80 Days—we’ve established I like nineteenth century literature, right?—which is a story about a rich man, you know, traveling around the world in eighty days. Since it takes place in the 1800s, you don’t have planes yet to dramatically shorten the travel times; what you do have are trains and ferries on somewhat reliable schedules, and the main character sets out to prove you can circumnavigate the globe with these advancements in less than 3 months’ time.

It is so freaking cool and has an awesome surprise twist at the very end, on top of exploring the literal world as the British understood it in the 1870s.

Anyway: said rich man, Phileas Fogg, is this milestone’s namesake. He bets half of his entire fortune that he can manage it; he needs the other half to actually fund the trip. Over a hundred and fifty years later, here I am! On my own international trip, and only requiring 4% of my fortune to pull it off. And yet again, my life is unwittingly foreshadowed by my own writing. The big note on FoggFI from the milestones article is about how it’s enough to travel the freaking world:

This is enough to fund $30,000 in annual expenses or a one-year trip around the world. Ain’t no 80 day limitations for you.

$30k is my 2026 budget for a trip around Europe, or the epicenter of the Old World. I am clearly still working, specifically on a spiritual level as the Fates from Greek mythology. Mind your business when you next see me with a thread and spindle.

$750k Net Worth Possibilities

I have three-fourths the amount needed to become a millionaire. That is another fact I am still processing. What do you MEAN, I hit that net worth with zero contributions and after I’ve started depleting my cash reserves? We can perhaps discuss my ingrained belief that my plans will never actually pan out, much less perform better than expected, at a later date. I’ve got graphs to chart in the interim. This includes calculations on how much time it will take to reach a million dollars at this $750k net worth level.

Potential investment performance scenarios	Time to a million bucks
7% YoY growth, spending $30k per year	10.5 years
10% YoY growth, spending $30k per year	6 years

Fascinatingly enough, dropping my withdrawal rate to $25k does not significantly lower that 6-year estimate to reach millionaire status. I need to drop my annual spend to $20k to get the estimate down to 5 years. Which I really don’t need to do, assuming the averages hold steady. As we’ve gone over before.

It’s also very cool to see my new safe spending scenarios have hit a growth spurt.

This is based on safe withdrawal rates and the latest research by Bill Bengen. With a $750k net worth, here’s what I can reasonably spend without ever running out of money:

Potential percentage withdrawals of total portfolio value	My spending budget
SAFEMAX of 4.68%	$2,925 a month, $35,100 a year
Original SAFEMAX of 4.15%	$2,594 a month, $31,125 a year
The widely accepted 4% rule	$2,500 a month, $30,000 a year
A more conservative 3.8%	$2,375 a month, $28,500 a year
A very conservative 3.6%	$2,250 a month, $27,000 a year

Even the most ridiculously conservative option of the above is more than what I projected at the $600k mark. The 4.15% amount also gives me more money than what I earned working full-time for $15 an hour. That said, I am not interested in maximizing the amount of money I can spend this year. My early retirement friends and acquaintances have a tendency I also share with them, which is paranoia against financial catastrophe. If I max out my spending, I could very well be shooting myself in the foot if we’re hit with a new Great Depression.

The other option: if I keep my spending to $30k a year—which I already know will keep me comfortable and content—I’ll have that much more wiggle room should shit hit the fan. Since one of these two options gives me what I want, while also offering more financial safety, the choice is easy to make.

$750k Net Worth in Real Estate

At first I wrote “I think the last time I spoke in-depth about my desire to own a home one day was in a 2020 article”. I can’t find whatever the heck I was thinking of, except for this quick blurb in my second ever published article:

Think through and name what your ideal life consists of. Mine is settling down in my dream home after publishing a book and traveling the world, in that order.

There are other random mentions of “home in the mountains” scattered throughout other links on this site. Basically, I have been daydreaming about a big awesome mountain home since I was a kid sharing a bedroom with three siblings. I’ve had a list on my computer called “dream house list” since early high school, which is a long bullet list of everything I want my dream home to have.

I gotta say, it is thorough. I mention good plumbing, appliances, insulation, acreage, storage, other buildings on the property, balconies, climbing vines, stained glass windows, and “A SLIDE NEXT TO THE STAIRCASE” as a contribution from my 15-year-old self. (Which, for the record, I am still emphatically down for.) To this end, I looked up current listings in my preferred area of the US for $750k that fit enough of my list until I get to renovating. The results I got back are below, so they may speak for themselves.

I am especially enchanted with having enough to purchase a house on over a hundred acres. (There’s a Winnie the Pooh joke in there somewhere.)

Buying a home in America won’t be anytime soon with the current fascist state. But gosh, is it nice to see my finances can easily make a long-held dream come true.

$750k Net Worth Additional Spending

Here’s the most fun section of these net worth updates! This is what I can now purchase with my new $750k net worth:

• If I spend $40,000 a year, I can cover the next 18 years without earning a dime in income or investment growth. $30,000 a year, or my current budget, covers the next 25 years.
• A 20% down payment on a $3.75 million house, or – as noted above – my dream homes in my dream locations. I can pay a mortgage for over a million dollars more than I could have two years ago.
• 375 vacations costing $2k each. If I take one vacation a month, I can keep this up for the next 31 years.
• Car-wise, $750k is getting into absurdist territory. Kyle Sulkar on YouTube lets me know this is enough for a Porsche 991.2 GT3, a Ferrari 458 Italia, or a Lamborghini LP-700 Aventador. I can also afford what is dubbed the world’s most dangerous car: the TVR Cebera Speed 12. Vroom, vroom.
• $75,000 in growth every year, based on historical average rate of return with index funds
• 750,000 trees planted with #teamtrees
• All the college fees for 19 students for one year
• All the adoption fees for 500 foster children
• Europe doesn’t have a Chipotle, so I’m using a Boston Chipotle for a price comp. At the one near Boston Wharf, a regular chips and guac costs $4.90. $750,000 gets me over 153,000 orders. I can eat this during every meal for the next 140 years, or once a day for the next four centuries.

Reaching a $750k Net Worth in 2026

They say money doesn’t buy happiness, and it doesn’t; much like a hammer doesn’t buy happiness, either. A hammer is a tool you can wield to build what makes you happy, just as money is a tool for the same. With the amount of money I currently have, I have the tool needed for building the life I wanted.

I decided last year that I’d be comfortable with an annual spend of $30k. I reached that number by looking at how much I’ve spent over the last several years and adjusting for travel. The amount of money I have paid in rent, over the past eight years, averages out to almost $1,700 a month. Thanks to cost of living differences, I felt confident I could lower that amount to $1,000 a month, again averaged out. So far, so good on that front: I’ve been booking far enough in advance (i.e. several months out) that I’ll be staying at Airbnbs for mostly under that monthly $1k ceiling.

The Political Reasons for Traveling in 2026

This is essential for staying out of the United States while it embraces fascism all the tighter. At some point, I expect to get criticism for deciding to leave the country instead of staying and fighting against authoritarianism. I have three specific reasons for choosing to leave instead of staying to fight. The first reason was strongly reinforced during my extended road trip across the United States: America has idolized authoritarian ideals since its colonial days, and to reverse these ideals will take decades of concentrated work by a populace near-incapable of it.

Second, there are too few people actually willing to fight. The majority of folks who say they’re fighting back are offering lip service only. There is no significant shift in their day-to-day life that suggests genuine action; I have friends who do make a notable shift, so the comparisons between them and the majority are damning against the majority.

I’m seeing the average person still going about work and errands as they did fifteen years ago. I hope the case is I’m somehow blind to widespread unrest. But I am just not seeing the tension or determination in the myriad of towns, cities, and parks I visited. What I did see includes long army convoys on the highways, and armed troops on Beale Street in Memphis. I also saw people ignoring all of this like it was perfectly normal. Until and unless resistance becomes more righteously common, I’m not going to remain surrounded by people thinking this is tolerable.

Third, I am simply not interested in becoming a hero. It makes perfect sense to me why one of the first steps in the Hero’s Journey is “Refusal of the Call”.

I sincerely doubt I’ll have supernatural aid anytime soon, so the buck stops here.

I needed to strategize and fight against an abusive environment throughout my childhood. Now that the abusive environment is blatantly at the federal level of US government, I am opting out the best I can. This still opens the door for me to offer shelter to friends and loved ones in the future, so they will have somewhere soft to land once the situation becomes unbearable. Until then, I will squeeze in as much travel as I can until I get their SOS.

My financial means allow me to put my money where my mouth is. If I didn’t have EU citizenship, I’d rework my travel plans to stay in other regions the other 9 months of the year. It’s a very nice perk to this small fortune I now have.

And that’s about as much steam I can blow about hitting the $750k net worth milestone. Here’s to the next chapter of my life being named the same as the final chapter of Fogg’s story: IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT PHILEAS FOGG GAINED NOTHING BY HIS TOUR AROUND THE WORLD, UNLESS IT WERE HAPPINESS.

Cover image credit: ME! This was taken at one of the casinos in Biloxi, MS.