Those that have been on their FIRE journey for a little while know the feeling of reaching a big milestone and celebrating like it is an amazing achievement – BUT we don’t tell anyone! Yes that’s right some of the great life milestones and you “CAN’T” tell anyone. 

This week we just hit our aspirational FI number with the recent market increases and another investment that went very well this year. Trish and I went out for Japanese and a nice bottle of wine. We joked things are looking up as earlier in the day after walk with our dog, enjoying a bit of cake while basking in the sun at our favourite coffee shop – we swung by an op shop and I founds some nice $200 pair of leather shoes for $15. They made a nice clacking sound on the pavement that somehow amused us – the simple things!

I’m very thankful we can celebrate together. This celebration was like many others such as paying off the mortgage, reaching the first $1M net worth or making X amount dividends this year. We don’t tell people. Money is private in our society and we don’t want to make people feel bad. Luckily Cam does have a few trusted FIRE friends/mentors where we do disclose strategy and numbers. 

In our twenties with a mortgage we had a goal on smashing the mortgage. We had friends ask during some house upgrade discussions, when we were going to upgrade the brown holland blinds (they weren’t great!) – we accidentally joked once we paid of the mortgage. Probably about 3 years later we had new blinds and literally our friends’ jaw dropped when they visited and they asked have you paid off your mortgage! We humbly confessed (we didn’t want to lie) and you could see they were shocked and didn’t say much. We didn’t want our friends to feel bad but unfortunately that can be the result of sharing.

How do you celebrate your FIRE milestones? We would love to hear.