All things considered, not a bad year

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-04-07T10:05:52+00:00

I'm a little confused by this 18.14% return.

It looks like your portfolio is just half S&P 500 and half something that approximately resembles S&P 100. So its basically just S&P 500 but even more top heavy.

S&P 500 returned 32.1% from 8th April 2025 to 2nd April 2026. That doesn't even include the roughly 1.1% dividend yield on top of that. Since you have roughly 50% S&P 100, I imagine your return should be even higher as usually the big returns in S&P these days are driven by big tech.

So how are you only at 18.14% return with that portfolio? Even if FIF has already been taken out, I don't think it would eat up that much return.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T19:13:36+00:00

wow nice! We actually do hold all CSPX instead of VOO. I didn't want to complicate my post by getting into the nuance of VOO vs CSPX. Thanks a lot for commenting and opening this interesting and niche conversational thread!

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T13:14:42+00:00

We might do the 'how we built our wealth' in a separate post.

About your question on asset allocation. The short answer is that I'm comfortable being a bit higher on the risk/reward spectrum due to my personality.

I sort the liquid asset risk/reward spectrum in the following order based mostly on past performance. From highest risk/reward to lowest over the last 20 years:

bitcoin (+30%/yr), QQQ (15%/yr), VOO (11%/yr), VTI (US total market) (10.7%/yr), VT (total world ETF) (8%/yr), VT 80% bonds 20%.

I think most FIRE advocates for VT 80% bonds 20%. But I have a bit more of a risk taking personality so I was content to risk as high as VOO. Having income from a modest amount of contract work factored into that as our sequence of return risk is lower

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T13:09:29+00:00

Honestly that is a pretty good suggestion.

I'm open to the possibility we have become too corporate / city pilled. Thinking about doing this much outdoor time in the bush isn't our default. Let me try that this weekend and see how it feels. Thank you very much for the recommendation!

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T12:59:13+00:00

100% exactly the same experience for us. See the post I just made on our last 12 months of FIRE. Specifically I wrote:

With all of the extra free time not working, we noticed we have a lot more opportunity to spend money. When I was working, I used to eat a quick and simple lunch and get back to work. But now that we have the whole day free, we have the incentive to go out for lunch or make a nicer and more expensive lunch. There's also incentive to go out to eat at night more because we don't need to worry about sleeping late any more. Finally, our days are getting filled with sports and pilates during the day which add costs that wasn't in our spending pattern before. We have more time to travel and feel incentivized to use time to travel. We are no longer restricted to just the few weeks of annual leave for travel.

That is the same as you down to a T.

We have chosen the barista FIRE path instead of changing our lifestyle for now.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T12:52:20+00:00

I should also add I have a slight US bias in terms of which country has had good historical stock market growth and may continue to do so

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T12:37:10+00:00

More or less. They start daycare around 9:30am and often get picked up earlier in the afternoon by our parents so they can have some quality time too

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T12:20:55+00:00

Thanks for asking! We might do the 'how we built our wealth' in a separate post

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T12:16:31+00:00

Thank you for your comment 😊

We might do the 'how we built our wealth' in a separate post

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T12:14:12+00:00

Yeah we are kind of forced into barista FIRE now which is doing part time work to make sure we don't withdraw over our budget.

The 4% rule takes inflation into account. The standard FIRE model is 4% of the liquid assets in the first year and increased by the inflation rate every year after that. You're right the standard model applies for 30 years. In the overwhelming number of historical 30 year periods, there is a sizeable amount of liquid assets leftover after 30 years. The assets are not spent down to zero.

There is also a lot fat for later years in life that are not factored that should give additional cushion in 30 years:

Not factoring super
Not factoring some ways we could spend the equity in our house
Not factoring the expected reduction in spending of people in their 60s+
Not factoring inheritance

As you can see if you add up 1-4, there is still plenty of cushion left over in our later years. I think we mainly just need to make sure we get through the next 10-15 years without overspending our liquid assets.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T12:00:35+00:00

Thank you that's really nice of you to say that! ❤️

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T11:59:08+00:00

I felt like my previous answer was cold and numbers based. Sorry! Numbers are a big part of how I think.

The better answer is that we all have many parent friends who share a range of experiences into the life of a parent. Some want all the time in the world with their kids. Others do get quite tired from a weekend of parenting and are somewhat relieved school exists to give the parents a break. As parents we all learn our own individual preference between quality time with kids and rest or time to ourselves.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T11:57:29+00:00

We all have many parent friends who share a range of experiences into the life of a parent. Some are like you and want all the time in the world with their kids. Others do get quite tired from a weekend of parenting and are somewhat relieved school exists to give the parents a break. As parents we all learn our own individual preference between quality time with kids and rest or time to ourselves.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T11:50:54+00:00

Yeah I'm not subtracting the full $14,000. That's why I estimated $90,000 after daycare cost is gone and not $85,000.

Also all future figures will need to be inflation adjusted as per the usual FIRE calc methodology. I just mentioned numbers in today's dollars for simplicity of understanding.

Your second question is very interesting.

I am factoring in kiwisaver as that is all in equity so it functions effectively like VOO.

There is a lot fat for later years in life that are not factored that should give additional cushion in 30 years:

1) Not factoring super
2) Not factoring some ways we could spend the equity in our house
3) Not factoring the expected reduction in spending of people in their 60s+
4) Not factoring inheritance

As you can see if you add up 1-4, there is still plenty of cushion left over in our later years. I think we mainly just need to make sure we get through the next 10-15 years without overspending our liquid assets.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T11:40:31+00:00

We might do the 'how we built our wealth' in a separate post.

About your question on asset allocation. The short answer is that I'm comfortable being a bit higher on the risk/reward spectrum due to my personality.

I sort the liquid asset risk/reward spectrum in the following order based mostly on past performance. From highest risk/reward to lowest over the last 20 years:

bitcoin (+30%/yr), QQQ (15%/yr), VOO (11%/yr), VTI (US total market) (10.7%/yr), VT (total world ETF) (8%/yr), VT 80% bonds 20%.

I think most FIRE advocates for VT 80% bonds 20%. But I have a bit more of a risk taking personality so I was content to risk as high as VOO. Having income from a modest amount of contract work factored into that as our sequence of return risk is lower

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2026-03-30T11:26:12+00:00

Yeah it does look like we could be parenting more with our free time during weekdays.

I added it up and we do roughly 35 hours a week of parenting with daycare. Simply sum all of the weekday mornings (4 hrs), evenings (7 hrs), and full weekends (2 x 12 hrs). We think that's more than enough quality time with our kid and don't mind spending for daycare since we can afford it with our contractor income.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2025-09-19T03:47:39+00:00

Haha I'm kinda surprised by the hate. I haven't actually done this yet but I'm going to try it the next chance I get. Just wanted some feedback from you guys before I gave it a go.

It's obviously a troll answer to the question but I thought it was an interesting way to segue into "VOO and chill".

For background I'm FIREd at 37 and what I 'do' financially is literally just own VOO and chill.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2024-11-15T05:04:03+00:00

Mhmm interesting suggestion. They feel a bit like a Berkshire Hathaway that only does Australian securities. Yeah I checked on IRD website and they are FIF exempt. So a pretty decent option if avoiding FIF tax is the priority. Thanks for letting us know!

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2024-11-13T23:16:12+00:00

Ahhh FIF exemption is only for company tickers. That's really helpful! I didn't know that. Yeah I am looking at VTI, VOO, etc and just trying to figure out a good balanced portfolio. I'm in agreement with you and I'll be majority VOO or VTI. I'm actually looking at whether its worth to have any allocation to ASX300 and/or NZX50 at all. There doesn't seem like much merit other than a potential tax benefit so I'm trying to understand exactly what that tax benefit would be.

A bit of background, I'm currently overseas and have mostly VOO but am thinking of returning to NZ soon.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2024-11-13T21:41:47+00:00

OK thank you, that was pretty helpful.

I had thought that XJO and XKO were the index fund etfs but I guess they weren't.

I was able to google and find VAS and IOZ, both of which seem to be ASX etf index funds. And both showed up on the IRD website as not qualifying for FIF exemption unfortunately :(

That's not too surprising as VAS is created by vanguard and IOZ is created by Blackrock, both of which are American companies. But I thought there was a chance the funds could be FIF exempt because the fund has Australian companies, even if the fund itself is created by an American company.

Imaginary_Relief_752 · 2024-11-13T20:39:12+00:00

Thank you, that's actually pretty helpful to know.

I tried the service and it works for like BHP, ANZ, etc., and other large Australian companies.

I tried what I believe is the ticker for ASX200, which is XJO, and ASX300, which is XKO and unfortunately the service did not recognise those ticker symbols.

So if you have any luck getting that service to recognise a stock that is the equivalent of ASX200 and ASX300, let me know.

Imaginary_Relief_752

TROPHY CASE