Grand Experiment 2014 - Simulated Retirement

Unfortunately, the simulation is only of the income and expense portion. Work continues. What I hope to achieve is to determine whether my passive and portfolio income will be able to support my current lifestyle. Work related expenses will not be taken into consideration. Moreover, this would only serve as a rough guide for me.

The expenses I would have to pay would be my half of our shared expense,half of our shared wants, my personal needs and my personal wants. All active income will be purely put towards investing and saving purposes.

Given my lack of need to spend, I am quite confident that I would be able to achieve this. That's not to say that it would be easy as my passive income is still not where I would want it to be to achieve a real early retirement. Travel would be my number one expense in the future and with current levels of income, I would only be able to make one big trip a year with a bare essentials daily budget.

To make things easier and more realistic, I am giving myself a 15k emergency fund as my passive income will not be consistent. Some months would have more income while some would not have any at all.

I plan to start this experiment in the year 2014 because that would be about the time my home would be ready thus providing a more realistic picture.

I will be providing my expenditures every end of the month starting from this month so as to get the habit of logging it down started. As I am currently still uncomfortable with releasing the amount of passive income I have, I will only be posting whether it will be a positive or negative month.

This is just an experiment for now. Hope to turn it into reality with a more buffed up and meaty passive income in the near future. Let's see how the next year turns out.

Here is how it's going to work:

• Start with a $15,000 fund on Jan 1 2014
• All active income will be channeled to savings and investments.
• All expenses and passive income will be logged down.
• All expenses will be drawn from the $15,000 and all passive income will be pumped into it.
• Any excess flow of Passive income not used will be put into investments so as to let it grow.
• No borrowing of funds from anyone or anywhere else other than the $15k
• Experiment is a success if I end 2014 with more than $15k left in the funds.
• Experiment is a failure should I exhaust my funds anytime in the year 2014 or have less than $15k at the end of 2014 - Means income is less than expense.