Financial Independence Free at last... |
- Free at last...
- Put in my RE notice yesterday
- My boss offered me an open-ended pay increase today. He gave me the weekend to think it over. Looking for some advice, please.
- What are your expenses for those that live in Bay Area?
- Daily FI discussion thread - June 30, 2018
- Teach/Coach or Stay the course to FI...Advice Needed!
- FIRE to live a lavish lifestyle?
- Asset protection
- Burning out big time. Pay off remaining debt or start investing heavily now?
- Reached $18.5K goal! Now paralyzed by IRA decision (Roth or Traditional)
- What % withdrawal rate in retirement for somebody with no kids?
- Check-up: Not sure if I'll make it to the FIRE
- Bad Retirement Rules....
- Woe is a new car
| Posted: 30 Jun 2018 05:19 AM PDT Yesterday, I turned in my keys, my phone, my badge and my computer. I took off my pants, my shirt, my... just kidding. I am 56, have a personal net worth 30x my expenses. I own a house and share all financial choices with my wife. She will continue to work her PT job which she loves. She earns enough to cover all our expenses, gets medical for our family, and has her own savings. We have two kids whom we plan to send to college in a few years. I loved my job until I didn't. It was the best, but eventually it became putting on a monkey suit to show up in a box. I could write a lot about burn out and bad bosses. The last month at work was the best - a victory lap with lots of opportunities to revisit the best of times with lots of amazing co-workers. It actually made me sad to leave (a little). I am looking forward to taking back my brain and my body. I want to stop waking up thinking about work. I want to walk and hike and swim and bike instead of looking at a screen. I think it is going to take a while to slow down, but eventually I aspire to be able to read a book again. In June 2015, I discovered the MMM blog and forum and was an instant convert. I consumed FIRE blogs and loved jlcollinsnh, livingafi and GCC. Over the next 6 months, I converted my wife and began saving as never before. We watched our savings increase by 50% in 3 years. This morning, I am so grateful for the opportunity to start a new path. I am not a very good writer, but I will try to throw out an update from time to time. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jun 2018 07:19 AM PDT I gave my boss my retirement letter yesterday. I'll either be done in 2 weeks... or 2.5 months. Explanation. Our company is skewing "old" when it comes to the age of employees. For the last two years, each April the company has offered a "Voluntary Separation Package" (VSP) to employees age 60 and up, consisting of 2 weeks pay per year worked and 18 months of paid COBRA. They are then replace with younger, and more importantly, cheaper employees. I'm 50, so I don't qualify. But, I am the only person at the company who does my job. I develop, maintain, and support an business critical software application used by hundreds of employees. This application has to be updated on a biweekly basis to stay current. I've essentially been on call for the last 7 years straight, having to take calls and handle issues even when on vacation, because the company didn't want to hire or training a backup. I know no employee is indispensable, but the company is going to be is serious disarray if I leave in 2 weeks. So, in my retirement letter, I did offer a one-time, 2 month deferral of my retirement, in exchange for the same VSP exit package offered to older workers. There's been no response to that offer. TL;DR: I put in my 2 weeks notice but I am attempting to extort a severance package in exchange for staying 2 more months. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jun 2018 07:29 PM PDT So I'll preface this with I'm not trying to boast or brag, but I'm including actual numbers below to try to get the best advice possible from you far brighter, more experienced folks. This afternoon my boss sat me down and informed me that his superiors wanted to award me with a pay increase for my hard work, and to help persuade me to not seek employment elsewhere. They kind of left it up to my boss as to what to suggest to HR as far as compensation increase, and he basically passed the buck on to me, so to speak. During our conversation he threw out "....,you know in my career, each time I moved to a new company I'd say I got at least a 20% bump in pay...." So, come Monday I need to have a good idea of what I want to suggest for my own pay increase. Our small company (less than 10 employees) rolls up under a large, publicly traded company, so while we have quite a different pay structure and work environment, we still live under the roof of their HR/benefits packages. Here's some details on my current situation: - 33 years old. - SINK. - US resident, no state taxes where I live. - Annual salary: ~$135,000. - Annual bonus: around 25% of salary, but could be as low as 15%, and as high as 200%+, if we have a really good year. - 401k: I max it out every year, but company match is 3% of salary only (no match on any 401k funds coming from my bonus). - Been with the company 1.5 years. 401k jumps to 6% match after 5 years. My goal is to retire by 40 (in 7 years). Option A: my initial reaction/thought was to ask for a dollar for dollar 401k match going forward since my current match is so low. So instead of them only matching around 4k a year, they'd be matching 18.5k, or 'a 14.5k tax advantaged, annual pay increase'. This option would guarantee that all additional funds would go straight into investments, but that money couldn't be touched until 'normal' retirement age. So if I retire at 40 that's at least 20 years until I could/should touch it. I feel like this option has a really high probability of success, and might even make me look more frugal/forward-thinking to my boss and his boss. Option B: ask for a set % or $ pay increase. Perhaps starting with the 20% my boss mentioned (~$27k increase). After taxes that's a little under $20k. I don't know how likely this option would be, but it does seem like they're worried about me leaving for a competing company. I'd say a 10% salary increase would be easy to achieve. 15% maybe a 75% chance of happening. 20% is more like 50/50. Option C: ask for higher bonus/guaranteed bonuses going forward. My boss mentioned this idea, but I definitely wouldn't consider it. I'd rather have a higher salary, and let our performance dictate the bonuses. Option D: anything else. Basically it's an open-ended, choose your destiny situation, and I'm sure there's something I haven't considered yet. That's the jist of it. Hoping you all might have some ideas for the best way to approach this, or how you might handle this situation if you were in my shoes? Thanks in advance!! [link] [comments]  |
| What are your expenses for those that live in Bay Area? Posted: 30 Jun 2018 11:01 AM PDT If you live in the Bay Area, what are your expenses? Do you feel like you can FIRE on it? Family Size / Expenses / Income / Lifestyle (Extravagant / Frugal) [link] [comments]  |
| Daily FI discussion thread - June 30, 2018 Posted: 30 Jun 2018 04:09 AM PDT Please use this thread to have discussions which you don't feel warrant a new post to the sub. While the Rules for posting questions on the basics of personal finance/investing topics are relaxed a little bit here, the rules against memes/spam/self-promotion/excessive rudeness/politics still apply! Have a look at the FAQ for this subreddit before posting to see if your question is frequently asked. Since this post does tend to get busy, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| Teach/Coach or Stay the course to FI...Advice Needed! Posted: 30 Jun 2018 04:06 PM PDT Me 48 yo Wife 46 yo Combined income: 120k 401k combined: 750k Total Pension per month (when each reach age 65) is $1350 Social Security likely at age 62 for each guessing 1400 for me 1000 for her total: $2400 per month House Paid OFF/ 50K in home equity debt used to purchase additional land Total Net Worth: $1,150,000 I currently work for a company that has a nice 401k match of 6 % dollar for dollar and then they add 3% more so if I put 10% of my pay and they add their 9% a total of 19% goes in My decison is I am a basketball guy who played in college and have continued to play because I love the game and the exercise....it is just a great all around hobby for me. Coaching is another part of basketball that I have developed a passion for and as my playing career is slowing down, the coaching part keeps going. I coached boys high school Junior varsity for around 10 years and now currenty coach Junior Varsity girls for last 7 years. I spend a lot of time with practice, games, and research because I am good at it and I enjoy the relationships with parents and also the kids and fellow coaches. I see this as something that is good in retirement to keep me active and engaged while maintaining contacts with people who I enjoy being around. The thing is I want to be Varsity Coach and to do that it is necessary to teach school in my area. I most likely will not move to coach, but never say never. The pay cut is the problem for me. I currently make around 70k and with teaching/coaching it would be 40k. Losing 30k per year is a huge deal for me. My wife doesn't think its a good idea to change careers. Her job is fairly stable but every 2 years or so it is reduction in force time and we both get nervous. I was looking at it like if I changed careers I would just let my 401k and pension stay put and hopefully keep growing until at least age 62 and I would reduce my lifestyle to live off 30k less per year. We vacation a lot and this would affect it somewhat. I would teach special education and coach basketball vs a job that is shift work (chemical plant) that I have been at for 25 years. I have 7 weeks vacation and the work is not stressfull nor do I hate it. It gets boring but I get 14 days off per month plus the 7 weeks vacation so I cant complain about time off. I know I would love the coaching varsity but not so sure about teaching special education....but the toll of working shift work (7 nights/7 days 12 hours per shift) is something that wears on a person physically though. Sorry so long and thanks if you took time to read.....Any advice or feedback on the career change or retiere early progress will be appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| FIRE to live a lavish lifestyle? Posted: 30 Jun 2018 02:00 PM PDT This is more of a curiosity than a personal desire or goal but hopefully it generates some interesting responses. Have any of you lived extremely frugally with the FIRE mentality to then RE and live more expensively when you walk away from the work force? For example: Driving a 10 year old Toyota for 15+ years, in order to save, invest, to the point where you can RE then go buy or lease a Ferrari or live close to the beach? Most of what we see in these posts is minimizing expenses as much as possible to and through RE. This allows you to live off of less and retire sooner etc., but I'd be curious to see someone who purposefully designed their FIRE plan to spend more in retirement, and shared what their experience was like with specifics. Not necessarily looking for numeric figures here, would just like to hear some unique experiences. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Jun 2018 01:56 PM PDT Just out of curiosity how would one go about protecting ones rental property and other assets from bankruptcy and lawsuits? [link] [comments]  |
| Burning out big time. Pay off remaining debt or start investing heavily now? Posted: 30 Jun 2018 12:47 PM PDT Hi. Apologies for the lengthy post. There's a lot to get off my chest. In the last two years I've paid off around $65,000 of debt. That includes a car, bigger payments on a second car, some student loans, and a ton of credit card debt. I've got $40,000 in debt remaining. That's $9,500 left on the second car and the rest are student loans. The interest rate on the car is 5% (although the remaining interest is $700 if I pay the minimum). The interest rate on the student loans varies based on group but for the biggest loans it's around 3 to 4 percent. I currently have $9,000 in cash, $2,000 in a brokerage account, and another $10,000 or so i can get from exercising some stock options. (That's $10,000 after taxes and fees). So around $21,000 in money I can access today, with another $35,000 in stock options/RSUs that are going to vest over the next two years. My car payment is $300 and my student loan payment is $360. My other expenses are very low since I currently live with my parents. When I include transportation to work, phone, gas, some food, etc, my monthly expenses come out to around $1100 to $1200 a month. Let's say $1400 to include some spending on fun. My post-tax income is currently around $65,000 a year not including the stock options / RSUs that are going to vest over the next two years. The problem is that I'm becoming severely burned out at work and in life in general. I attribute this to the amount of debt I've paid off over the last two years and the amount of money I wasted before coming across this sub and Mr Money Mustache and leanfire and etc. I'm struggling between deciding if I should keep on pursuing debt repayment vs investing heavily now. If I use $20,000 of my savings to pay off the second car and a large chunk of my student loans, my remaining monthly expenses would be more than covered by the remaining $1,000 in my bank account until I get another check from work. Should I do that? And then keep on heavily repaying debt until I'm debt free? Or should I instead resort to paying minimums on all remaining debt...and just sock away a shit ton of money into investments? If I invest all the money that would otherwise go to servicing the debt, in a year from now I could potentially have $100,000 saved. And then in another year, close to $200,000 saved. Whereas if I pay off half of my remaining debt now and then pay off the rest of the debt over the next 4-5 months, it'll take me much longer to get to $200,000 saved. I'd also be paying a much higher tax rate on the stock options I'd be exercising for debt repayment, unless I hold on to them for a year and exercise/sell them then. That makes me think I should just start investing my direct income heavily and then in 3 years when all my stock has vested and when I can sell it at the capital gains tax rate instead of the income tax rate, it could pay off my remaining debt for me. Normally I wouldn't be in a rush to save up that much money, but since I'm single and since my expenses are low and since I'd like to get my own place soon I reckon that it makes more sense to start building up investments now and take advantage of the strong economy while I'm still living with my parents. My ultimate goal is to have enough money coming in off of investments that I'm free to do whatever I want, even if it means working on my own software at home or starting some other random business. I want to be my own person. I'm getting physically sick and tired of going into the office and working on meaningless stuff. Should I just stick with the original plan of paying off my debt, saving up an emergency fund, saving up 25% for a starter house, and THEN invest? Or is the market hot enough that I'd be missing out on a ripe opportunity to really grow my net worth faster? [link] [comments]  |
| Reached $18.5K goal! Now paralyzed by IRA decision (Roth or Traditional) Posted: 30 Jun 2018 10:25 AM PDT My wife is a Resident and I own a couple of business and manage the house including watching the children a majority of the time. We set a goal to max out her 403B and we topped it off last pay check! I am super excited about this, my other goal was to set up an IRA for myself. I only expect to make 15-25K this year but I still want to max out the $5,500. I have read Reddit's IRA FAQ sheet and done some research and read many competing pieces of advice on the subject. I was at vanguard yesterday setting up an IRA (I already a regular investment account there) and I ended up not being able to make the decision between Roth and Traditional. Most of our income will be taxed at 12% this year with the possibility of some at 22%. I will never hold a full time traditional job but my wife maintains that she doesn't want to retire early; although she may work part time while the kids are young and again when she gets older. In the back of my mind I am thinking that it doesn't really matter I just need to pick one and make sure I invest. [link] [comments]  |
| What % withdrawal rate in retirement for somebody with no kids? Posted: 30 Jun 2018 12:20 PM PDT I have no kids / will never have kids. I know 3-4% is the recommended rate to preserve your nestegg, but I want to deplete the nestegg since I will have nobody to leave my money to. Would a 5-6% withdrawal rate be better for somebody like this? [link] [comments]  |
| Check-up: Not sure if I'll make it to the FIRE Posted: 30 Jun 2018 06:10 AM PDT Hi all, I've lurked on this sub for a while and figured I'd come in for a general inspection, not unlike one of those 50 point auto checks. Anyways, here are the details and the juicy bits: Male | Late 20s | about to be married | US cit. working abroad | just joined a new company for a 2-year contract Assets Car: 15k CPO car entirely paid for, but sitting in a garage in the states Savings: 10k brokerage; 300k liquid (it's technically 220k at the moment, but I'm waiting for the 80k signing bonus to come through on the first paycheck) Retirement: 11K vanguard (two years of uninvested ROTH IRA that I finally got to investing after a bit of goading from /PF); 10K trust from previous employer (It's passively managed, but I haven't looked at it for a year, so I'm not sure how that's doing) Now, the job itself is pretty straightforward, but it requires extensive travel, grueling hours, and quite a bit of number crunching in excel, so perhaps you can guess what I do. I just joined the company this month, but I'm already having second thoughts and am considering going back to school for a masters or PhD. Thoughts on an MBA for FIRE? I am cuffed with a 60k penalty for quitting before the contract end; my employer is well-connected, so there might be serious potential ramifications if I pulled an up-and-leave maneuver, but I don't mind not coming back to this industry. Pay: Base - 100K Base Performance bonus - Up to 50% of base Profit sharing - Up to 100% of base I get nada for retirement, and the other fringe benefits are mediocre; the firms partners are firm believers of the theory of lump-sum revelation, which I guess I can't argue against too much, other than it might lead to wasteful tax situations. Now, the problem is that I'm afraid that these next two years will just be busy work, and I won't be gaining any additional transferable skills. In other words, I'm afraid that I'm just wasting time for a moderate, but not guaranteed level of income. I'm also not sure what I'd want to do afterwards, which is why I'm considering going back to school. But if I do go back to school, then the penalty makes it more expensive (I'm budgeting 200k for school) and I feel like I'm just falling further behind on the journey to FIRE. The last option is entrepreneurship, which I know I can put in the time and effort, but I don't have any ideas on what to do; all of the work I've done requires large organizations and would be super capital-intensive to even get started. tl;dr: Feels like I've lost my way, and am just floating. I want to know how to stabilize my footing and get back on the path to FIRE. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jun 2018 06:36 PM PDT Let the scathing reviews begin: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/1-million-to-retire_us_5b33ce37e4b0cb56051e850d [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Jun 2018 04:52 PM PDT I fought with myself, back and forth for the last week or so. A friend of mine died in a car accident, fell asleep at the wheel. I was a bit in shock from the idea, and driven to the thought that "wow, that lane keep assist on the car I have been resisting for the last year might be a good idea, a life saver." My parents were worried and agreed wholeheartedly. After much internal struggle and dealer coercing, I find myself with a brand new 2018 Honda Accord Touring 2.0T in my driveway. After taxes and warranty, it will have set me back $40k (paid $33k plus taxes, 7-year bumper-to-bumper warranty, etc.). I'm sick to my stomach. Brief background, I'm 30 years old, single, and before the car saved was getting up to around 70% savings rate, debt free except for the mortgage… and the car now). I've been working on selling and ditching stuff so I can downsize to a smaller house closer to work. Now, I've read that 70% of people have buyer's remorse when buying a car, and I'm most definitely in that category. I think it has been mostly due to how much I strive to live within my means. I'm working down the single FIRE path, nose to the grindstone, maxing out retirement accounts, and I slipped up hard. My old car has 216k miles on it and is looking pretty ugly, but it's still chugging right along. On the other hand, I drive 1.5hrs/day (I know, not very Mustachian/Fi-like, but I like my job for now and there's almost no housing around). And I get tired at work and on the drive home at times. It's possible that my fears are justified. Plus, I'll probably have to replace my car within the next 3-5 years anyways. The anxiety over adding on a few extra years to my working career is crushing. I need help. What do I do? If I sell it back now I'm probably out about $10k in my guesstimation, maybe a bit more. If I hold on to it I'd probably grow to enjoy it and drive it for a while. Help me Internet Strangers, you're my only hope! TLDR: I bought a brand new car and I can't believe I did it. Do I stay the course or sell it back at a loss? Some other course of action? [link] [comments]  |
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