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I'd love to "retire" early but of course I'd still keep working on different things that would likely make me some income. I really just don't want to have to worry about keeping a job for a job's sake. I feel like I'm doing well right now - I have 100k saved in retirement savings and my mortgage is 250k on a house worth 450k. My main priority is building my savings so that I have enough to pay off the house in full by drawing down on those reserves, although at only 2.75% (tax-deductible) interest, I think it's best to keep that debt around, both as a hedge against inflation and also because drat, 2.75%. If anyone disagrees, I'd be interested to know why. Using the chart in the "shockingly simple math" article, I'm on track to retire in 10 years. That sounds great to me  But it also doesn't take into account major life changes like having kids - what if I have a special needs child? What if my spouse becomes disabled and I need to support them? I'd hate to "retire" at 40 and at 50 have to get back into the workplace if something bad happened to a family member. How can you even begin to account for such things?
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Jul 18, 2013 02:23
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For someone planning to become pregnant in the next couple of years, though, that kind of insurance is a majorly bad idea. Hrm.Ignoranceisbliss88 posted:That's a pretty boring and mundane existence if you ask me. Hours gardening and "family time" everyday; Maybe if your 60 years old, but not at 35. I also imagine that much of that family time is just watching tv together, and "blogging" is surfing the internet for porn/fantasy football w/e. Also, if you think teaching is a relaxing job I've got news for you!
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Jul 18, 2013 15:47
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No Wave posted:Okay - are you trying to say that financial independence doesn't work? Because it does, for many people. I'm not far away from being financially independent, and I could probably quit my day job tomorrow and be totally okay taking care of myself and my significant other with savings and scaling up my side income that I do for fun. But I don't want to expect the best case and end up royally screwed if something happens. I want to have a buffer, and where I get concerned is figuring out how big that buffer has to be. If I ended up having a child with special needs that needs tons of medical care and special schooling, I don't want to have to try to rejoin the workforce after 5-10 years of "unemployment" because my $500k nest egg won't carry my family through. I think it makes sense to consider these kinds of scenarios just in case. That's one of the reasons I wouldn't consider 'retiring' before I had kids, because there's so much risk that goes along with it. To consider the possibility that your kid is born with special needs is not at all the same as to assume lightning will strike you. It seems like a lot of people who talk about their ER nest egg being easy to calculate are young single males who either don't want kids or aren't thinking about the problems they could have later on in life. That MMM guy not buying his daughter braces? Yeah, I'm not going to do that to my kids. Moving to a different state for tax/healthcare reasons? Are you loving kidding me? My friends and family are here, I'm not moving to bumfuck, Ohio so I can live cheaply. To me these are ridiculous solutions. I hope that this thread can help me find a nest egg figure to shoot for realistically so I have an excellent buffer that protects against the worst case scenario, not just a figure that lets me retire as quickly as possible.
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Jul 18, 2013 22:55
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How exactly did you decide on a target number, No Wave, if you don't mind me asking?
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Jul 19, 2013 02:23
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So once I own my house outright and need $40k for expenses, I would need to save... ONE MILLION DOLLARS! (muahahaha!) The issue is the earlier you retire, the more years you'll need that income. So 25 might not cut it for some (most) of us.
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Jul 19, 2013 20:03
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Chadzok posted:Investment Question
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Jul 21, 2013 22:34
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I lived in NYC on a teacher's salary so you should be able to live on half your pay easily
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Oct 18, 2013 05:24
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tuyop posted:But there are people like me out there!
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Jan 25, 2014 03:04
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SpclKen posted:The most reliable way I see is having rental properties, but that is a job in itself and takes so much capital to do it without debt. I just can't see myself being able to generate 50k annually in investment returns without a liquid investment account of 2 million. is there anyone in the thread who is planning on having 3 or 4 kids and planning on having FI in your early 40's? - having my mortgage paid off by then - setting up a ton of passive income sources from now until then and hoping one takes off. Here's the thing: fifteen years from now is a lot of time. If you can build something that can pay you a reasonable salary ($30-40k) with minimal effort, then you can do it. Such as setting up a successful blog. Starting a writing career. Doing a fun hobby in a way that turns a profit. I am trying to start one new project every year so that I have fifteen or so chances to have one of them take off. So far so good, of course I need to pinpoint specific stuff to continue working on but I figure the shotgun approach isn't bad initially.
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Feb 2, 2014 05:53
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I'd like to see the math as I'm also shooting for 45 as a nice target retirement date. Although I just told my boss during my quarterly review that his wife dresses too sexy to be in the office, so maybe retirement will come a bit earlier 
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Mar 4, 2014 20:24
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Has anybody read the Four Hour Workweek? I'm halfway through and can't tell if I want to finish it or toss it in a furnace. His approach to FI appears to be "Hire India to live for you and sell workout supplements online"
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May 30, 2014 15:46
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No Wave posted:Your concept of common sense is probably very different from most peoples'. If the book communicates the underlying attitudes of someone who makes $20k a month in side income (you), I take that as high praise. “Being able to quit things that don't work is integral to being a winner” “Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic.” “Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.” “Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.” “Don’t follow a model that doesn’t work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.” "Focus on being productive instead of busy.” “If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it's simply a poor use of resources.” “If you let pride stop you, you will hate life.” I don't even know what half of this is. The other half is boring rehashed motivational posters and common sense. Oh, poisonous people don't deserve my time? Wow, I didn't know that! Tim Ferris is a dolt who's made a shitton of money preying on people who want to be rich without working hard by pretending he doesn't work hard for his money. It's almost as bad as Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Not quite, but almost.
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May 30, 2014 20:23
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Folly posted:Hey, moana, what happened to the romantic lit writers thread? I can't find it. No Wave, if his writing helps you, more power to you. He comes off as a slimeball to me, and people who are not me, and his book made me want to throw it across the room. It reminded me of that guy in Mystery Men that was always saying poo poo like "If you only work to live, you will always live to work." Just over and over and over, and talking about how much he doesn't work, which is just stupid. No Wave posted:If they're so obvious, why do I see them violated almost all the time? I actually liked reading The Millionaire Fastlane, despite the lolbertarian slant and victim blaming, because it gave me a really useful framework for assessing the passivity of different kinds of business systems and figuring out which side of the system (scale or magnitude) I could leverage most easily. Like, in one of his chapters he breaks down the following five types of systems and rates their passivity: 1. Rental Systems 2. Computer/Software Systems 3. Content Systems 4. Distribution Systems 5. Human Resource Systems That was actually a useful new framework of looking at things, and it helped me decide what I needed to do as a next step in my publishing business. If Tim Ferriss' book is the first time you're coming across the concept of "make sure your product fills a demand" then sure, it might help you. It would help you more to read The Lean Startup, since that book actually gives you a systematic process for figuring out whether your product fills demand, and gives you real ideas for how to assess demand, and has lists of questions you should be asking yourself in order to move forward and make decisions. Aphorisms are useless without a process to back it up. The Four Hour Workweek is half aphorisms, half bragging, and it's made Tim Ferriss much more money than his actual businesses ever did. I think that's sleazy as gently caress, and I just plain don't like the guy.
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May 30, 2014 21:24
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No Wave posted:I totally disagree that aphorisms are useless without a process. quote:I wish you'd just started outright that you just didn't like him as a person so that I wouldn't have wasted everyone's time talking about ideas.
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May 30, 2014 21:45
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Vilgan posted:I essentially use (increase in net worth due to my saving) / (How much I earned less taxes, including employer match) LOL I tried doing (change in net worth)/income and got a savings rate of 125%. Real estate appreciation for the win! Okay, this is pretty silly, forget trying to figure out my savings number. I'll just keep on keeping on trying not to spend more than I make.
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Nov 28, 2014 20:07
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Yeah, improvements in working conditions were largely due to union strikes, it wasn't top-down legal implementation that gave us a 40 hour work week or decent working conditions.
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Mar 5, 2015 23:13
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Profit sharing plans or defined benefit plans? Anyone have any opinions or experience with these?
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Sep 10, 2015 00:37
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Sorry, as a self-employed person running my own business. I'm looking into trying to shelter more money from taxes this year.
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Sep 12, 2015 16:02
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moana posted:Profit sharing plans or defined benefit plans? Anyone have any opinions or experience with these? Scwhab has a decent FAQ here: http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab...nefit_plan_faqs Basically, for those of you making a consistent $250k/year (possibly less, since I'm guessing they estimate spending rates to be higher than FIRE folks would have), this kind of plan is great as long as you plan on keeping working for at least 5 years. I wanted to share what I've learned since my payroll company is pushing their plan HARD at me. I was only looking to try and shelter money for this year and next, since I plan on taking time off to be with my family after that. This can actually get you into lots of trouble with the IRS, as they expect you to be using retirement plans until, you know, retirement age. The company selling to me wouldn't even give me the fund prospectus and are handwaving away any fees associated with the investments. Of course, anytime someone gives you a ton of "consultations" for free, you know you're being sold something, but it's hard to find good info on this. So if you're planning on FIRE in the next few years, it's probably not a great idea, but if you have 5+ years of work ahead of you with CONSISTENT high earnings, it's a great way to put aside a ton more money tax-free. Use Schwab or something similar, be very wary of companies trying to sell you on their plan with few details.
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Sep 29, 2015 04:52
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Any thoughts on the new Can I Retire Yet post about withdrawal strategies? http://www.caniretireyet.com/new-research-the-best-retirement-withdrawal-strategies/ 2016 is going to be the year I get prepared to take a few years off for semi-retirement, so I'm interested in what the best withdrawal plans are. In this article, Darrow's models show that his CAPE strategy is the most favored: quote:"CAPE Median Strategy — If the CAPE is greater than its long-term median (a kind of average), then we assume that stocks are highly valued, and the strategy withdraws entirely from stocks. If the CAPE is below its long-term median, the strategy withdraws entirely from bonds*."
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Dec 29, 2015 03:03
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Alhireth-Hotep posted:Yeah, forget about his CAPE thing, why exactly does the rebalancing strategy do so much worse than equal withdrawals? That seems highly suspect to me.
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Dec 29, 2015 04:21
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asur posted:Why would it be out of line? Stocks return more than bonds over the long term so a withdrawal strategy that attempts to rebalance will withdraw more from stocks than bonds and thus lower the expected portfolio value. I wonder if it's because he started with a 50/50 split which is so bond-heavy that there's no way you could sell enough bonds to make your portfolio risky enough to fail. The CAPE strategy then works because it sells more bonds than any of the other strategies. If he started at an 80/20 or 90/10 stock/bond split, would that make the CAPE success rate lower than rebalancing? Now that I'm thinking about it, he's also doing a shorter retirement simulation than what I have in mind, which might alter the success rates. Sorry, posted without thinking enough about it before - these are really important variables that I wasn't taking into consideration.
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Dec 29, 2015 07:40
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Desuwa posted:Paying down a mortgage is an investment with essentially zero risk, so even if the expected returns are lower right now it's never going to be wrong to do it ("wrong" being taking on more risk when less risky assets have the same expected returns). I recently bought my house cash and then did a cash-out mortgage, so this isn't just theoretical posturing from me. I fully believe that in this lending environment, you should be maxing out your market investments, not paying down a low interest loan.
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Mar 6, 2016 19:12
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sweet_jones posted:What I think would be really cool to read about are folks who take sabbaticals or "mini-retirements" to try out the lifestyle they have planned for.
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Jan 10, 2017 01:07
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Blinky2099 posted:Do you both have the option to jump right back into your occupation even with a few years off? In an ideal world, I'd make friends with enough parents that I can start teaching math again to small groups as a homeschooling parent when my kid gets to be a few years older. I'd love to develop a nontraditional curriculum that teaches math using games and puzzles. Most elementary school teachers (heck, most teachers in general) are not "math people" and I'd like to think I could do a lot better than how it's taught in schools (see Lockhart's Lament). I hated teaching the curriculum when I was a public high school teacher.
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Jan 10, 2017 04:36
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waaaahhh, I only get to live in a 1.5M house and take three vacations a year and go out on fancy dates twice a month, why is my life so AVERAGE
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Mar 25, 2017 16:28
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Guest2553 posted:Wow that samurai guy sure seems like a gigantic shithead between that "500k isn't rich u guys" and "taxes are soooo unfair why does the government discriminate against captains of industry". Fuuuuuuuuuck yoooouuuuuu.
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Mar 27, 2017 18:00
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When does it make sense to STOP putting money into retirement accounts? I've quit working and am down to probably 30-40k in passive income which will decrease sharply in the next few years. Would you keep contributing to HSAs/IRAs at this point? Right now we have a bunch of cash reserves (like $100k) and I'm not sure what makes the most sense or what I should be taking into account when deciding where this passive income should go. It doesn't make sense to shove that into an IRA if I'm just going to be pulling money out of my brokerage account, right?
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May 7, 2017 20:13
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EugeneJ posted:Wouldn't everyone be happier if they worked from ages 20-30 and saved up 10 years worth of expenses, stopped working from ages 30-40, worked again from ages 40-50 and saved up 10 years worth of expenses, then retired early at age 50? Honestly, I agree with whoever said that leisure isn't the ideal state for a FIRE-minded person. If you have enough ambition to work and save to get to FI, you probably will end up making money somehow, even just with your hobbies, or cutting your expenses because you have the time and resources to do so. As an example: I'm making a bunch of applesauce today with free apples from our neighbors' tree since I helped them make their sauce yesterday. And I took a free basket weaving class which is going to probably end up being a bunch of Christmas presents for family, since it's a super fun hobby I want to get better at. Semi-retiring is pretty loving sweet.
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Sep 18, 2017 20:29
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I'm also digesting the mortgage post. Now that I'm post FIRE and not able to take the interest as a deduction, it might make sense to pay our mortgage off quickly over the next few years. It's such a low rate though that I think it might be better to switch to 100% equities sooner and just use the mortgage as a bond replacement, especially since the glidepath analyses seem to favor getting to 100% equities within 5-8 years after retirement. Great series of posts, I hope everyone in here reads them.
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Oct 18, 2017 23:01
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BRB, going to go buy a luxury yacht with this year's withdrawals 
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Oct 21, 2017 23:15
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"Dwight Eisenhower" posted:
And yes, I had a paid off house and took out a mortgage for as much as I could at sub 3.5% rates. It made mathematical sense. If that doesn't outweigh the emotional impact of being mortgage free, then fine, but be honest about it with yourself.
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Jan 5, 2018 08:32
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You can play around with FIREcalc, there are lots of advanced options including extra income sources that you can use. That's basically what I'm doing now, just working part time after a few year hiatus and letting my investments coast. I think it's called "CoastFI" by the community if you want to search using that term. Do you anticipate any big life events (marriage, kids) in the future? That can shake things up a lot and it might be good to be conservative if you're uncertain about that sort of thing.
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Oct 29, 2018 00:59
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baquerd posted:One more year syndrome definitely comes up, but ultimately anyone who can claim to be financially independent is going to be either potentially deluded or fairly familiar with their yearly spending amounts and savings necessary to maintain that spending level.
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Feb 25, 2019 20:43
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Boola posted:There's quite a few fire bloggers that travel the world full time as a couple for 40k a year or less and don't do it on the super cheap. I've lived in a few different countries and while it was fun in my 20s, it's not at all attractive to consider in my 30s. This is another thing to consider if your FIRE plans hinge on you moving to a LCOL area that you have never lived in - if your priorities change in a decade (which they almost always do), your plans might not hold up. I think a lot of bloggers hold it up as some glamorous lifestyle, but the truth is that being an expat sucks in a lot of ways that get glossed over with pretty photos of beaches and waterfalls.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:18
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Infinotize posted:eat loving normal food, jesus
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Feb 26, 2019 20:18
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silicone thrills posted:I constantly worry that I will either get super fat or super buff when I FIRE depending on the day. Like I'm all "WOO ILL HAVE TIME TO WORK OUT AND SNOWBOARD MORE!" and then i'm like "I CAN WALK TO THE CAFE AND GET A DONUT WHENEVER!!!!"
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Feb 26, 2019 20:46
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The biggest issue we have now post FIRE is spending discretionary money, I feel bad about it and I really shouldn't. So we budgeted $350 each fun money (about how much is still coming in from book royalties, so it makes me less anxious) and we're tracking it on a shared Google sheet. After a few months, I really like being able to look back and see the things I spent money on and remember them and be grateful.
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Apr 7, 2019 23:23
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TraderStav posted:Is it a fear of drawing too much out of your stash, or just a different mindset of not wanting to spend?
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Apr 8, 2019 07:24
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Wang posted:Does anyone have a good suggestion for a company to use for student loan consolidation? I have a grip of federal student loans with varying interest rates I'd like to merge into one fixed rate. Don't trust google to give me an unbiased suggestion so coming to goons.
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Apr 15, 2019 20:46
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