Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

quote:

A simple example may be this: say you earn $100,000 a year, but only really need to live off $30,000 a year, you can invest $70,000 per year at a 7% return, and a crude calculation approximates retirement (ie, yearly returns of $30,000) in... 6.1 years.
Keep in mind this assumes that you'll continue living off of the same amount of money after FI that you have been before FI. An easy way to break this assumption in your favor is to simply move to a lower cost-of-living area once you have enough money. That's what I plan to do; all the good, high-paying software engineering jobs are in expensive metro areas (NYC, SF Bay, Seattle, etc.), so that's where I'll be when working a regular job, but I'm fine with moving to somewhere cheaper if it means endless free time. :)

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

baquerd posted:

I think I understand you now, but I'm not sure if I agree. You'd need an unprecedented stock market depression to really hurt your net compounding early on in your life. It's the later stage compounding towards retirement age that is the crucial point where a poorly diversified portfolio can wreck your retirement plans.
We're talking about early retirement, though. A lot of people (well, the ones with high-paying jobs anyway) aim to be financially independent in, like, a decade from when they start saving.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Ignoranceisbliss88 posted:

Question is, what the hell do you do with your time once you're retired at 30. Countless studies point out that working into your later years can keep you mentally sharp and even extend your life. Everyone thinks it'd be great to not have to go to work, but careers can be major motivators for people in life.
Most people (basically everyone that I've read about) that aim for early financial independence don't just want to sit on their butt and play games or watch TV all day. The point of FI is that it frees you from the obligation of a regular (corporate) job so that you can do whatever else you want. This often seems to be part-time work, volunteer work, temporary gigs, working on that one business/startup you always wanted to, developing talents, hobbies like gardening, spending time with your family, staying in good shape, etc.

Here's a schedule that one guy posted of his current life on the financial independence subreddit:



Chadzok posted:

Just to be clear, I am not highly paid in my full-time job. Actually, I make the exact current Australian median wage. I've pursued my side gig as a way of accelerating my own income in order to become financially independent sooner. So I don't just think this concept is for highly paid people. I'm aware you didn't say that, but I just want lurkers to be clear.
Agreed.

edit2: To add another example, Mr. Money Mustache has stated that he's actually busier since he 'retired'. The major difference now is that

a) All his work is stuff he really wants to do, not whatever his employer assigns to him, and
b) Almost all of what he does has no fixed schedule, so if he wants to sleep in one morning or dick around for a day, it's no biggie.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jul 18, 2013

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

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.
Yeah, screw spending time with your family!

Seriously though, it does bug me that I can only spend an hour or so (and that can be optimistic) every day directly interacting with my son, because, well, other stuff has to get done. I'd kill for a few more hours each day of that time. If spending time with your family is boring and mundane to you, you're either a terrible father/husband/mother/wife, or your family sucks.

quote:

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.
Or...it's not? We don't even have a tv subscription here, and while my son does watch Backyardigans videos sometimes, this is usually because otherwise he'll get in our way when doing chores.

quote:

My point is that retirement can be dull and that many people get satisfaction out of the struggle to move up in their careers and may not even realize it.
It's dull if you make it dull, sure. The thing is, the kind of people who exert enough control over their lives and have enough foresight to retire very early are definitely not the sort to sit on their butts watching sports all day. If they were, they wouldn't have been able to muster the effort and self-discipline to retire quickly in the first place!

quote:

A lot of people find that the last half of their career is more satisfying than the first half because of added responsibility or time to find their niche. I think many of the people who buy into this concept are young and underemployed or just unhappy in their career and want it to go away. Maybe they should consider switching fields instead of leaving the workforce altogether.
It seems like most people who reach FI continue working in some form, they just get to be really picky. In fact, Jacob (from ERE, the 'original' well-known Early Retirement blog) un-retired because he got a job that was just that interesting to him (IIRC it was in finance).

quote:

That said, it is a cool concept and I'm not trying to criticize anyone who's really all about it. I'm just cautioning people that not having large overarching goals, which for many revolve around their careers, can leave an empty space in your life. I know personally that if someone offered me 75k a year for life under the condition I never entered the workforce again, I wouldn't do it. I want to really go out there and test myself and see what I can make happen.
Luckily, people who reach early retirement are under no such condition. See above.

quote:

I'm about to enter a very demanding but potentially lucrative field. I hope to work for 15-20 years while saving a significant amount of money, and then "retire" someplace very nice and get into teaching history (a passion of mine). At that stage I hope to have the financial independence that I'm not really working for the money (though any actuary can tell you of its importance) and a calmer more relaxed career that still keeps me "in the game" and not sitting around at home.
That's great, and this illustrates why people have started using the term financial independence rather than early retirement; the word retirement is just so loaded that it always spawns a bunch of discussion either about how retiring would be so boring, or that if you do anything for money after 'retiring' it doesn't count anymore, no matter how much you enjoyed the task or how little you needed the money.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

zmcnulty posted:

If that's your goal, have you put any effort into getting a better job (e.g. same salary, less hours or more salary, same hours)? Rather than cutting back on everything in the hopes that frugal living will one day pay off.
I'm definitely working on getting a better job that pays more to accelerate our journey to financial independence. Realistically my current job doesn't really require more time than a normal professional job, though. I work overtime only occasionally. I'm also interested in the idea of doing some side gigs, right now I'm working on some education/training towards that goal.

Cutting way back on income to spend more time with him wouldn't really work for me, mentally. Without either a large buffer of money or a high income, I would always feel on edge and insecure, worrying about future financial pitfalls (kind of like what moana mentioned). I think I inherited this trait from my dad, he's always been a safe/paranoid one.

For the most part, frugal living doesn't bother me. I like eating out and I like gadgets, but mostly doing without the former isn't too bad and I've come to acknowledge that most of the gadgets I get I don't make a ton of use of, so I've been paring down to 'core' purchases, and approaching them more intelligently (e.g. going for used when possible).

edit: The reason people who want FI often seem to focus so much on frugal living in online discussions, I think, is because of a few things:

1. It's more directly under your control. Getting a better job can be subject to the whims of the market and specific employers, but cutting out cable TV or starting a garden in your backyard is totally up to you.

2. It applies more broadly to people. How to get a better job/more income often comes down to the specific traits of your career or your skills and aptitude. Cutting out certain expenses (e.g. going from a 2 car household to a 1 car household) tend to be things that a large proportion of the population can do.

3. In order to be financially independent quickly, you have to be willing to live a relatively frugal lifestyle even after you've amassed a thick wad of cash.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Jul 18, 2013

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Harry posted:

He's a little too flippant with the healthcare costs I think. Once he gets in his 50s even those high deductible plans are going to be 1-2000 a month,

quote:

I picked the best insurance plan I could find: one called United One that lets me pay my own little doctor bills (I usually visit once every five years or so, whether I need it or not) but limits my out-of-pocket expenses with a very manageable $10,000 deductible and 20% copay up to a $12k limit, in the very unlikely event that one of us gets extremely sick and needs multiple-day hospital care. Guess how much this was for our giant family of four?

$239.10 per month

If that one is too risky for me, I can go to a Cadillac health insurance plan called Humana One that has only a $7500 deductible and a 0% copay. But surely that would be, like, Infinity dollars per month for a family of four? Nope. Here is my quote for that program:

$318.52 per month

And finally, let’s fast forward to age 63 when our real child (and the imaginary one) is all grown up and moved out, and my wife and I still want coverage to get us through to Medicare eligibility at age 65. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get health insurance when you are 63 years old, isn’t it? Nope:

$367 per month … and all of these prices are the TOTAL for all people, not the per-person price.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/21/i-can-never-retire-because-of-health-insurance-waaah-waaah/

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Harry posted:

That only enforces my point. He has a low rate because he and his wife are in their mid to upper 30s. When I run a husband and wife in my zip code born in 1950, lowest service is $580 a month. Born in 1960, lowest service is $380. And then consider that the average rate inflation expected by the industry is 12% a year.
How does admitting that plans will run from around $350-$600 only 'enforce' (reinforce?) your point that those plans will be one to two thousand dollars? I too believe that when my numbers are off by a factor of 3, that only reinforces them.

Additionally, part of financial independence is usually living in a low cost-of-living area. People aiming for FI are generally willing to move somewhere where costs are cheap, and healthcare is one of those costs; apparently your area is expensive for that, so it'd be something to keep in mind and factor in.

Lastly, yeah runaway medical inflation is a problem, but I think it's one mostly orthogonal to financial independence. 12% obviously can't be sustained forever, another decade and that would have healthcare costs at over half of GDP.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Sundae posted:

I'd like to point out that he refers to a $10,000 deductible + 20% copay up to 12K limit (meaning $22,000 in a year) as "very manageable" in spite of $22,000 being more than the full annual budgets his example people use. Furthermore, he refers to a $7500 deductible as a Cadillac plan in spite of that being horrible insurance as well. If you're going to predict retirement health cost requirements, you have to assume worst-case scenarios, not best-case (never using the worst, cheapest catastrophic insurance you can find). You have to assume that health care utilization will occur on a yearly basis, and possibly on a more than yearly basis as you get older.
In order to be financially independent, you have to have a huge bank to begin with, so $22,000, while not trivial, isn't an enormous hit either. Planning to hit that every year for thirty years seems like kind of a ridiculous worst-case scenario to plan for to me, equivalent to "well what if you get struck by lightning??". What percentage of physically fit people who don't have dangerous/very physically demanding jobs end up in this situation? Additionally, if you got hit with something that bad off and you were employed, wouldn't you likely lose your job anyway?

quote:

Furthermore, he still didn't address pre-existing conditions or the fact that they tend to add orders of magnitude to the costs of insurance. I wasn't kidding with my quote on what I was paying when I was self-employed.
I thought Obamacare removed the ability to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions?

Basically yeah, if you ended up with some horrible chronic and expensive condition, then worst case scenario, you or your spouse may need to go back to work.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jul 18, 2013

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Harry posted:

Should be reinforce, phone doesn't know best. Anyway, these were flyby quotes from a website for only 2 people. Even under some dream scenario where you're only paying $380 a month at age 60, you will still be incuring a ton of medical costs from medication and any doctors visit.
Old people can have lots of medications, so this is certainly possible, but then again if you only have a few years left until medicare + social security kicks in, you can afford to dip into your principal. After that point, you're in the same position as other retirees, except that you've probably saved up way way more than almost all of them:

quote:

According to a 2012 study, the amount of money singles in their late 60s have saved for retirement is overwhelmingly less than that of married couples. The study found that the median married household had saved up nearly 10 times more for retirement in 2008 than the median single-person household, or $111,600 compared with $12,500.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/02/retirement-planning-single-retirees-save-less_n_3194912.html

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

moana posted:

I disagree - health issues seem like the biggest possibility for loving up plans for financial independence, so it makes sense to scrutinize that area to see if there's any way to avoid undue risk. I always want to hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Sure, but which worst? Like, nobody would seriously plan for, "But what if my spouse gets MS, all of my kids turn out to be special needs, I get hit by a car once every five years, and the US erupts into violent civil war??" You need to draw the line at some level of probability.

quote:

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.
One is much more likely, sure. I brought up lightning striking because we were talking about the possibility of spending your max out-of-pocket expenses for health care for every year for thirty years straight. To me, that's unlikely enough as to not warrant special consideration.

quote:

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.
I am married with one (and probably more in the future) kid(s). While I definitely plan to buy my kids braces, I'm also thinking I'll probably do some kind of financial independence-lite where I work as a programming tutor or something. I'm ok with regular work, I just don't like a structured 40 hours+. Personally my and my wife's family are all so spread out we can't really pick somewhere to live close to family as a whole, we'd have to pick one particular family, and even then there's a good chance they'd up and move on us at some point, so moving to somewhere cheaper (it wouldn't be middle of nowhere, though) feels fine to me.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

zmcnulty posted:

I had a longer post typed up but I guess it boils down to a single question: how do you reconcile living life to its fullest with frugality?

I feel like a lot of the great experiences in my life thus far, and most of those I have planned, require a lot of money and... there aren't any substitutes. I fully agree that consumer culture buying new iPads/whatever is really dumb, and I shy away myself, however doing something awesome like visiting Antarctica is often expensive. Where do you draw the line?

Also, assuming I'll live to 45/65/85 or whatever seems sort of dangerous. Am I the only one that sometimes feels like I'll drop dead at 35?
1. Similar to what tuyop said, living to the fullest != spending to the fullest. There are often creative ways to experience something that cost less than the standard route. At the risk of aping MMM too much, he visited Hawaii for a fraction of the cost of most people by helping to build someone's guest apartment there, before his family arrived (in exchange, they got to stay there).

Now, many people would consider that work, because, well, it is. However, a key component of financial independence isn't so much that you end up avoiding work altogether (as you've no doubt noticed, being frugal in an area involves more work than the equivalent $$$ form), but rather the monolithic grind of a regular job. Splitting your labor into many forms that you only do for a short or temporary period means that you get to approach each one as an experience, rather than just another day at the office, not to mention you get to pick and choose which work to do.

This leads me into my next point: living frugally involves a fundamental change of mindset away from avoiding effort, especially physical effort. Modern society, especially American society, has conditioned us to always minimize effort (see: people spending 10 minutes looking for a close parking spot to save 3 minutes of walking). Changing this mindset, so you can do things like bike to most errands instead of driving, is difficult, and I'm still going through it. But it's definitely refreshing, and, uh, doable? It can be done!

2. A good question to ask yourself here is, "Does doing X actually make me happier? Are there cheaper things I could do that would make me just as happy?" Sometimes the answers are "Yes" and "No", respectively, but I'd wager that most people could still be just as happy finding alternatives to most fancy vacations and the like. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

3. Spending money generally has a person in a consumption mode. I'd argue that you can be just as happy, if not happier, being in a producer or participant mode. For example, watching a professional soccer game is consuming, playing in a soccer league is participating, helping to run a soccer league in some form (reffing, coaching, etc.) is producing. Of course, the latter can be labeled as the dreaded work, but it's likely that you can find some hobby where you actually like to produce.

edit: It really comes down to priorities. If going on an overseas vacation every year with your family is really just that important to you, then maybe financial independence isn't for you (or you just have to save a lot longer before you reach it).

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

quote:

I'd like to point out that he refers to a $10,000 deductible + 20% copay up to 12K limit (meaning $22,000 in a year) as "very manageable" in spite of $22,000 being more than the full annual budgets his example people use. Furthermore, he refers to a $7500 deductible as a Cadillac plan in spite of that being horrible insurance as well. If you're going to predict retirement health cost requirements, you have to assume worst-case scenarios, not best-case (never using the worst, cheapest catastrophic insurance you can find). You have to assume that health care utilization will occur on a yearly basis, and possibly on a more than yearly basis as you get older.
Sorry, looks like I misinterpreted "that health care utilization" as referring specifically to what you talk about in the first sentence, since you were talking about worst-case scenarios in italics. I blame the ambiguity of English.

Anyway, I think it doesn't concern most people aiming for FI because most of them plan on being capable of living off their investments, but still doing some work some of the time, such that they are able to continually save and increase their stash year after year. But if you're planning on literally never working for any significant amount of money ever again, yes you'd have to be more conservative in how much you save before quitting your job.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Rekinom posted:

So, is the general consensus that the biggest expenses in early retirement are home costs (mortgage/rent plus utilities) and healthcare?
I think most people going for FI plan to own their homes outright? Like, it you have a lot of money saved up, that's one major expense you can knock out. Sure, you'll still have to cover property taxes and maintenance/repairs, but that is obviously still going to be far less than mortgage or rent, especially if you pick up some handiness to work on your home yourself instead of hiring people.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
It does seem like rental property has a good balance of stability and financial gains. The downside is that compared to passive forms of investing it can involve a fair amount of work/headache, particularly if you end up with bad tenants. But yeah diversification is the name of the game.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
It seems like a big part of financial independence for most people is living is a place with a reasonable cost-of-living. In particular, that makes it much easier to own your house outright, which eliminates what is most people's largest expense: rent/mortgage. Of course, you still have to pay property tax and for maintenance & repairs, but at least the latter can be alleviated by becoming handy (it seems that a DIY attitude is common among FI'ers).

So, the wife and I are currently looking at Corvallis, OR as a place to eventually achieve FI or semi-FI*. Things in its favor:

- Good for biking. Corvallis has the highest rate of bike commuting in the country (9.3%, for reference Portland is around 6% I think).
- Good bus service (I think?). At least, the city voted to make it fareless via a fee on water bills, so I'm assuming strong public support indicates that the public transportation is decent.
- Large, relatively strong/prestigious state school nearby, Oregon State University. This is nice because the wife and I are both interested in tutoring (french horn and piano for her, programming for me) as a side gig, and a large student populace gives us a potential client base. Of course there are other advantages to having a large college around too.
- Good public grade schools. Test scores at least seem to be pretty high. I know test scores aren't everything but they seem to be a decent indicator. We have a toddler right now and will probably have one or two more, so this is important to us.
- Reasonable cost of living. In particular, housing costs are about 120% of the national median, according to various cost of living calculators, which isn't bad at all. Most places that are even lower tend to be less than desirable to live in.
- Pretty nice climate. Average Highs/lows for the middle of summer are around 82/52, for the middle of winter 47/34. Fairly rainy (and thus green) at around 44 inches of precipitation a year, but not absurdly so. We're in the Seattle area right now and my wife loves the climate and hates when we travel to drier places.
- About an hour and a half from a major metropolitan center (and thus, airport), Portland. Of course, being even closer would be nice, but an hour and a half isn't that bad.

Basically, Corvallis does good to great on a variety of metrics that we're interested in, and the linchpin is that it does it without being really expensive to live in, and in particular, to buy a house in. Of course, we tend to change our minds about life plans two or three times a year, so who knows if this is where we'll actually end up. I'm hoping to eventually get an online-only software development job so that even prior to FI we can move somewhere and live there a bit before cutting out permanent full-time work.

Does anyone else have any particular cities they're thinking would be good for financial independence?

* For me, semi-FI would basically entail owning a house outright, living frugally in general, and doing things like becoming handy and having a garden to reduce expenses further, such that expenses were low enough to live off of consistent part-time work, or occasional full-time work, while still continually increasing our savings.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
I'm more than a few years off from this being actually possible, so I haven't drilled down to detailed numbers, but I'd guess something like this:

I'm thinking around 200-250k for a modest house (3br/2ba). For income, would probably target around 30k/year, so at the standard 4% withdrawal rate, that'd be 750,000 in funds passively invested. If I used a more active method of getting income from investments, like rental houses, could probably reduce that to between 400 and 600 grand.

Obviously that's a lot of money, which is why I'd be ok with being semi-financially independent, which to me means just means greatly reducing expenses to where you can pretty easily get by with side gigs/part-time work instead of a full-time occupation. Would be aiming to achieve that by owning my own home + baller frugality/DIY muscles. I'd also probably keep up on doing some kind of development-as-a-hobby so that I'd be able to get back into a career if need be (in addition to the potential for contract work).

This question inspired me to come up with a hypothetical budget. Disclaimer: I made up all of these numbers. In practice, I'd move somewhere and live for a while with a regular job before quitting to make sure I'd be able to hew to a given budget before jumping in to FI.

pre:
Item	                Cost per month
Property Tax	        200
House Maintenance	100
Utilities	        200
Internet	        60
Phones	                90
Car Insurance	        80
Gas	                60
Car Maintenance	        100
Groceries	        300
Kid 1	                100
Kid 2	                100
Misc. Household	        150
Husband allowance	100
Wife allowance	        100
Travel	                300
Healthcare	        400
	 
Sum	                2440
Yearly Sum	        29280
I guess that looks good? I think I made the monthly numbers slightly-to-moderately conservative, from a frugal perspective anyway. Some of them are things where the majority of months will have little to no expenditures (travel, car maintenance), but then some will have very large expenditures (flying to see family, replacing tires). Of course, there's always the risk of an unplanned financial emergency that blows the budget to smithereens. Luckily some of my interests are of the income-generating sort (or can be made to be), so I don't think I'll ever be completely without some source of active income.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Jul 31, 2013

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

shrike82 posted:

No offense but your breakdown looks pretty ludicrous considering that you're budgeting $200 a month for raising 2 kids, and $400 for healthcare.
1. That's for raising 2 kids aside from whatever kid-related costs are covered in other areas. Over the last 6 months for our one kid we're actually slightly under that at $588, although that number is volatile month-to-month and doesn't include babysitting (right now we have a regular babysitter to give my wife a chance to practice her music, which we wouldn't need during FI since I'd be home much more). My mom loves buying stuff for her grandkids, so we rely on that some.

2. The idea with health insurance would be to get a high deductible plan with low premiums. Of course, this would involve tapping into savings if a major healthcare event came up, but hopefully we'd be saving money in months where we didn't need any healthcare (or only got preventative checkups, which are now free). For this purpose, $400/month doesn't seem off, especially since my wife gets her healthcare through the VA at essentially the same cost as if she had decent insurance, so any plan we got wouldn't have to cover her. For reference, MMM got a $237/month plan for his family of 3: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/11/01/our-new-237-per-month-health-insurance-plan/

Vomik posted:

$1m post-tax cash is the estimate to "make it" if you define make it as a family of 4 with no one working at all.
Yup. In any case, I know it's possible to be even leaner (I think Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme was making it on 14k for him and his wife?), but I have doubts as to just how cheap I can go. Also Corvallis isn't actually cheap relative to the national average overall (cost of living calculators seem to have it around 110%-130% of average), it's just cheap for what I consider a desirable area.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

shrike82 posted:

How old are your kids right now?
You should set aside money for their education (college most of all).
That budget represents a kind of baseline. I don't plan to ever just do zero work; I just want fewer total hours, more flexible hours, and more variety and control when it comes to the kind of work I'm doing. Really I think I'll be able to provide enough money to exceed that budget's needs and give us more room for saving for college, eating out occasionally, more travel, etc. but those are things we don't need to survive.

Worst-case scenario, our kids would have to rely on grants, scholarships, part-time/summer work, and student loans to go to a state school, OR we'd have to dip farther into savings to support them (along with potentially picking up jobs again). Best-case scenario, I pass on my coding skills to my kids and by the time they graduate high school they barely even need college :smug:. Average-case, we've saved up enough extra money to mostly support them in school, with them partly relying on grants, scholarships, and part-time work (this is the situation I was in in college, although the money that didn't come from my parents was mostly 'fun money').

Interestingly, we may not even need to save up for their schooling if we're in Oregon, and paying more of your kids' education is correlated with worse academic performance. The last one doesn't really surprise me, I seemed to be more on top of things when I was working part-time.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

DanManIt posted:

That's the real question. A lot of the fi gurus seem to think it is reasonable but I'm not quite so sure.
1. Sure, an economic apocalypse could happen, but is it likely enough to explicitly prepare for? Even the great recession, as awful as it was, really did not change the economy tremendously, and that was the worst economic event since the great depression.

2. Even if the economy tanks again and you don't have enough to retire/hit FI when you planned, you still have a big wad of cash, and the ability to easily live on relatively little. Not much of a downside, really.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

ripped0ff posted:

Just a note on this, the "Great Recession" was hardly the worst economic event since the Great Depression.
What else was there? Do you mean outside the US? I was referring to just the US.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

unprofessional posted:

Anybody else keep significant other out of the loop as far as savings are concerned? I don't have any ulterior motives, but I just know my wife, and if she knew we had the amount I save up available, she'd want to use it. I never know how to feel about this. I just want to make sure we can actually retire.
I think hiding financial information from your spouse is probably bad. I am not sure if it is worse than losing all your money to frivolous purchases.

If your wife acknowledges her poor spending habits, maybe you could get away with, "Let me handle the finances honey"? In other words, she still wouldn't see the information, but it would be by an agreement?

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
If she has full access to the savings accounts, and you're not lying, I don't see a problem; if she ever wanted to check, she could. Initially I thought Walked was putting the money away in accounts she didn't know about.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
I failed out my first year of college, wasting my time and my parents' money. When I went back, my parents would pay for my college, but only after each semester, and only if I got decent grades. So I had to save up enough for one semesters' worth of tuition, and if I dicked around again the cost would be on me (I didn't). I think I may do something similar with my own kids. Pay their way, assuming they get good grades and make progress towards a degree.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
You both should learn to code, then you can become, respectively, a wildlife biology app consultant and a ranch hand app consultant.

But yeah fast FI practically requires being both high income and low spending. I'd look into alternate means of revenue. For example, just look at the OP; he manages to save bank just going off his side gig. Since you don't have kids you probably have enough free time to seriously look into this kind of thing.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Interesting article from MMM about healthcare that I can tie back to a discussion we were having earlier. tl;dr MMM's old plan is going away, as per Obamacare the new max deductible for plans will soon be $5,000 for an individual, not $10,000 like his current plan, so his monthly premium is going up from $237 to $460. $460 is more than I budgeted for monthly healthcare back when I made a hypothetical FI budget (I budgeted $400). Then, some goons felt I was being overly optimistic with my number.

So, I'm a naive idiot, right? But wait! Also thanks to Obamacare, are some generous subsidies based on your current income level. For the plan MMM was talking about, they look like this:



So at the $50,000 income level, looks like you'd be paying about $2,300 in premiums annually or ~192/month. That's not bad at all! Of course, the exact number for my family would be different; this particular plan is specific to Colorado for one thing, not to mention it's not going to stay the same forever, I will probably have at least one more kid than MMM does, etc.

But, I think this is definitely good news for people targeting FI overall. I imagine most of us probably are going for modest incomes matched with modest expenses, so we'll benefit from the subsidies.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Nov 18, 2013

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
I agree with tuyop: just keep track of your annual expenses and multiply by 2. That's how much you need to save.

You can potentially fudge it a bit and save some time by pledging to live more frugally after you quit your job, but that's risky; it's always easy to say you'll forgo expenses in advance of actually doing so.

quote:

One semi-big issue here is that a lot of my salary is going to be bonus-based (likely I'll make around 40% of my salary in bonus), so it's a little bit hard to tell how much I'll have to spend
I'm confused about what this means. Are you saying that when your bonus is bigger, you're suddenly compelled to start spending more?

Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Nov 25, 2013

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
This has been making the rounds, even saw it pop up on Google News' Spotlight for a bit: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-retire-early-35-years-early-2014-01-17

Yet another article about MMM, yet more internet comments that make you want to pound your brain in.

quote:

If this guy and his family want to live like the Amish, then that's his choice. It's not for me. You can keep your horse, buggy and bicycle. Where I live in MN, you've got 5 months of cold buggy and bike riding.
Living frugally and using a bike is literally like being Amish.

quote:

I can retire if I want and produce 25k. I'm 40, but i would like to give my 2 Maltese dogs a better life, so I work
Ok this one is more just kinda out there. I guess his two dogs really need a luxurious lifestyle?

quote:

"One secret to their success? They live on very little for a family of three: about $25,000 a year. They own a car, but mostly bike. Dining out is an occasional luxury. And shopping for stuff? That’s best avoided. But their philosophy goes beyond mere scrimping, says Mr. Money Mustache. It’s about enjoying life with less."

The above paragraph is the definition of lazy
Laziness = not spending lots of money, got it.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

SlightlyMadman posted:

He's just a bit of a hypocrite now, because while he seems to have started out completely honestly and legitimately, he's basically come out of retirement to work his new job as a super famous blogger who makes an undisclosed but presumably huge amount of money by blogging about how you don't need to make money.
The whole point of financial independence isn't that you do zero work, it's that any work you do is chosen without the implicit coercion of "I have to do this or I won't be able to afford rent." Besides, writing roughly one blog post a week doesn't exactly strike me as a time-consuming endeavor. He probably spends what, a few hours a week actually writing?

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Ok which one of you goons made that? That has to be a troll. "He is so lazy he makes his own food and rides a bike instead of eating out and driving a car" :psyduck:

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

No Wave posted:

(note that MMM admits that he's not even very frugal anymore. If you want that, go to ERE)
Except Jacob's not even retired anymore, right? Like, he actually took a full-time job in some kind of financial position.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Nocheez posted:

Why can't you be financially independent and still have a job? My boss "retired" 20 years ago but went back to the work force because he loves to work (and his friends were all still at work all week anyways). He can walk away at any time, and to me that is the definition of financial independence.
Financial independence: not having to work for money.
Early retirement: actually not working for money.

There's some gray area though in between not working at all and working a normal full-time job where some might classify it as "semi-retired".

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Most people in the US aren't born into inescapable poverty though, and yet most Americans still live paycheck to paycheck. What is with the whole "lol the US is a third-world country" thing going around SA these days? Yes the US has crappier social services compared to western Europe and things suck more for the poor here, but goons seem to be intent on exaggerating the problems until it sounds like the US is some North Korea-level hellhole.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Also note that from a financial perspective, while being single is mostly worse than being DINKs, it's way, way better than having a family on one income. If I didn't have a family at all, becoming FI at my current level of income would be trivial.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Jan 25, 2014

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Reading about Roth IRAs, they seem like a bad idea if you're aiming for financial independence, because income after you take some form of early retirement will almost certainly be much less than when you're making maximum bank in preparation for financial independence. What do you guys think?

edit:

Wikipedia posted:

With a Traditional IRA, one always has an option to convert to a Roth IRA; whereas a Roth IRA cannot be converted back into a Traditional IRA. One can choose an optimal (lowest tax rate) time to convert over one's life. Because you have a right, but not an obligation, to convert, this is like an option in finance. As with options in finance, this flexibility, which allows one to hedge future uncertainty, adds some additional value to the Traditional IRA.
This makes it sound like the optimal path is to invest in a traditional IRA and then convert it once you're in a low tax bracket. I feel like I'm missing something here because it seems like everyone is always about Roth IRAs.

Cicero fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jan 31, 2014

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Or a rental property or two. Obviously that's not completely passive income, and it's a big headache if you get crappy tenants, but it's more stable than stock returns.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
I had a 'realization' the other day that I want a second opinion on. I had previously been thinking that I'd want to wait to buy a house when the market is weak, because of course then home prices are lower. Sounds logical enough, right? Except then I realized, wait, most of my money while saving for a house will be in stocks...which move roughly in tandem with the housing market.

So if I wait until the housing market tanks, it may well be that the stock market tanks too, nullifying any housing price advantage, or possibly leaving me even worse off than if I had bought during a normal or strong market. Does that make sense?

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Don't forget to budget for a new SUV when you have a kid.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
Just realized who he reminds me of, in terms of writing style: Maddox.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.
So I've been reading about Roth conversions, and since I recently changed jobs, it sounds like it could be a good idea to convert my prior 401k to a trad IRA (the 401k is already with Vanguard so this should be super simple), then convert that at some point to a Roth IRA.

From what I understand, the conversion from 401k to trad IRA can happen at any time with no penalty or tax hit. Then converting parts of the trad IRA to a Roth IRA will incur a tax hit of whatever income tax bracket I'm in at the time, with the conversion itself contributing/counting as income. And then five years after each Roth conversion, I can withdraw from the principal I put in tax-free. Does that all sound right?

edit: this post has a good summary - http://www.madfientist.com/retire-even-earlier/

Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Apr 20, 2014

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

poopinmymouth posted:

I really like the MMM blog even though it basically ignores systematic problems, but I'm in the core demographic so I just ignore his privilege and take the good advice.
I think MMM is aware of systemic problems (IIRC he mentioned being in favor of UHC once), it's just that there'd be no pointing to discussing them on a blog about becoming financially independent. It's a how-to blog, not a political one.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply