How Does Your Sankey Look Like?

How Does Your Sankey Look Like

How Does Your Sankey Look Like?

Hey guys, have you heard of a Sankey?   A Sankey is defined by Sankeymatic as a diagram that depicts flows of any kind, where the width of each flow pictured is based on its quantity.

Basically, a Sankey can be used to visualize your budget, and get an idea of where your money is going. If you frequent Reddit, especially the R/FinancialIndependence you would have noticed a lot of sankeys floating around.

So, how does ours look a like?  Well because we love this tool so much, we did 2 sankeys.  Our current sankey and our future sankey once we pay off our mortgage 3 years from now.

Current Sankey:

Current Sankey

You can see that we spend only 15% of our income and the rest goes to taxes, mortgage paydown, investing and giving. Making $400K has not changed our frugal lifestyle at all, we have managed to avoid lifestyle inflation.

Future Sankey

You can also use the sankey to visualize the future. For example, 3 years from now in 2020, once we pay off our mortgage (VISION2020), this is how our Sankey will look like.

sankey 2020

The 2020 Sankey looks so good. We will be 39 years old then, almost 40. Our mortgage and daycare costs will be eliminated by then.

Thankfully Mr99to1percent works from home, so we won’t need any after school care. Our investment and Giving will double from $115K to $228k!!!

When we tell our friends, we look forward to being 40, they look at us like we are crazy!

They don’t get it because most of them like to complain about how they are getting old.  They have stopped celebrating their birthdays, and some, especially the single ones, even lie about their age.  They have been 29 for the past 7 years😊.

But for us, we look forward to being 40.  Even 45 years old looks so good, because by then we would have achieved not just financial independence but probably financial freedom too.

At that time, we could do whatever we want. We could FIRE (Financially Independent, Retire Early) or we could quit our 9-5 and work on our side gigs full time. Or we could quit everything and open a school which is a lifelong dream of ours.

If we add a second kid (which we hope to do within the next couple of years), it will add 1 additional year before we can achieve FI/FF.

However, we also plan to continue hustling and increasing our income, thus, we might actually achieve FI/FF earlier than planed.

We strive to make our present better than our past, and our future better than our present.  Our 30’s are way better than our 20’s, our 40’s will be better than our 30’s, our 50’s better than our 40’s, and so on…

That’s what keeps us motivated, and visualizing that future Sankey just keeps us going.

You can make your own Sankey at Sankeymatic. It’s pretty easy to do, it only took us 15 min to do both of our sankeys.

How about you guys? Care to share your current and future sankeys? What keeps you motivated? And when do you plan to reach FI and FF?  Please share with us. Sharing is caring.

On that note, here are a few other personal finance bloggers who have shared their Sankeys:

1. JumpStartFromScratch – Sankey Diagram
2. GetRichSlowly – Visualize your budget flows with a Sankey diagram
3. OthelaFehu – Monthly Budget with SanKey
4. BigLawInvestor – How to Visualize Your Money
5. AtypicalLife – Visualize Your Budget With Prowess Using A Sankey Diagram
6. 99to1percent – How Does Your Sankey Look Like?
7. TheFrugalGene – Visualizing Your Money with Mr. Hankey

Thanks for reading.  Please feel free to comment, share and subscribe! We love ya and wanna get to know ya!

Do you want an easier way to manage/track your finances/investments? The Personal Capital app can help.  Do you want to start blogging? Bluehost can get you started.  Make sure to also check out other resources that we recommend such as books that have helped us get where we are.

Do you want to learn more about us? If so, you can also read these other posts:

1. About us
2. How We Increased Our Annual Income From $0 to $160K to $400K+
3. How we live on 15% of our income
4. Joining the Million Dollar Club/Challenge and So Can You
5. How To Pay Off A Mortgage In 5 Years
6. Our Biggest Money Fight and 9 Lessons Learned
7. Our 6 Financial Mistakes and 15 Lessons Learned
8. How I Paid Off My $40,000 Student Loans Before Graduating
9. The resumes that bring in $400,000+/year (Samples Provided)