Financial Independence Weekly “Help Me FIRE!” thread. Post your detailed information for highly specific advice. - December 07, 2020 |
- Weekly “Help Me FIRE!” thread. Post your detailed information for highly specific advice. - December 07, 2020
- Daily FI discussion thread - December 07, 2020
- [UPDATE] $500k the boring way
- [Milestone] My path to $750K NW as a 27F non-engineer
- Health Insurance
- Those that have made it, what are you best at? Making $, Reducing your expenses, or Investing your $.
- Weekly FI Monday Milestone thread - December 07, 2020
- If you can work remotely from anywhere in the world. Where would you choose to live?
| Posted: 06 Dec 2020 10:08 PM PST Need help applying broader FIRE principles to your own situation? We're here for you! Post your detailed personal "case study" and ask as many questions as you like, or help others who've done the same. Not sure if your questions pertain? Post them anyway…you might be surprised. It'll be helpful to use our suggested format. Simply copy/paste/fill in/etc. But since everybody's situation is different, feel free to tailor your layout to your needs. -Introduce yourself -Age / Industry / Location -General goals -Target FIRE Age / Amount / Withdrawal Rate / Location -Educational background and plans -Career situation and plans -Current and future income breakdown, including one-time events -Budget breakdown -Asset breakdown, including home, cars, etc. -Debt breakdown -Health concerns -Family: current situation / future plans / special needs / elderly parents -Other info -Questions? [link] [comments]  |
| Daily FI discussion thread - December 07, 2020 Posted: 07 Dec 2020 12:10 AM PST 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]  |
| Posted: 07 Dec 2020 07:37 AM PST This is an update of my previous post, "$250k the boring way" and my original post, "$100k the boring way". I'll recap as best I can but all the details are in those if you're interested. Summary Reached $500k (now $600k, sorry I'm lazy) net worth from a starting point less than -$100k in about 8 years mostly through consistent saving. Net worth chart included below. All salary numbers are gross. Quick Recap that keeps getting longer am I getting old My wife and I are both 32 and live in the Pacific Northwest. We met when we were 24 and I estimate at the time that we had a combined net worth of close to -$120k. I'm an engineer (EE) and my wife is a public school employee. On our journey to $250k net worth we:
Updates Second half of 2019: Nothing really happened financially but we did take a family vacay to NZ and Fiji for 2 weeks. Somehow made it work taking a 1.5 year old halfway across the world and can't say enough about how much I would recommend both places. Can't say it was always relaxing but I would do it again. Also found out we were going to be having another baby. In the last update my job had just added on-call pay. I ended up with about $5k of this bringing me to $121k total compensation. 2020: Our son was born in early March right as the pandemic was lifting off. I still haven't decided if this was a great time to have a baby or a horrible time. Financially, our timing was (purposely) a lot better with the school schedule and combined with a new maternity leave policy at my wife's job, she didn't have to take any unpaid leave this time around. At my job, I got another 5% merit raise plus COLA increase bringing me to my current base salary of $126k. Looks like I'm on track for another $5k of on-call pay on top of that. My company went all remote so I haven't been back to the office since the day my wife went into labor. I'm liking the work from home situation a lot and expect that I will be WFH at least 2 days a week once the office is open again. We refinanced our house in the spring from a 30yr 4.5% down to a 20yr 3.25% loan which increased our monthly payment but saves us an estimated $120k over the life of the loan, so that's nice. I'm actually working on another refi right now to get down to 20yr 2.875% to save an additional $30k. I imagine I'll call it good here but hey you never know. This fall when school resumed, we made the decision to drop my wife down to part-time. This has been our plan from the beginning: work 5 years to qualify for the Teacher Loan Forgiveness program and then go to just 3 days a week in order to have more time for family but still accrue full years towards the pension. On that note, we applied for the Teacher Loan Forgiveness program in June as soon as my wife's 5th year had ended. Our application was rejected by our servicer Nelnet 3 times before being sent on to the Dept. of Education in September. It was a very slow and frustrating process but ultimately was worth the hard work, as we found out just last week that it was approved and $17.5k was instantly removed from our balance. I got a lot of questions on this program last time - all the details can be found here. We have just $10k of loans left now that we will let sit there until they start accruing interest again or are forgiven by the new administration. Chart Here is our financial journey summed up in one line. It's definitely starting to look like more of a curve now. The inflection points that used to stand out just kind of look like noise now, so here are the relevant dates in list form:
Current Finances
Thoughts Salary I mentioned in my last update that I was closing in on the salary cap in my current position. At the end of this upcoming January I will get like a 1% raise and be maxed in my band. Unfortunately to go higher means I would likely need to take on a supervisory role, and I'm not sure yet if that's something I want. I've been doing all the required trainings for that just in case but I really like the position I'm in now so no rush I think. Now What Student loans are what initially set me down this path of aggressively saving and investing. For 8 years now they have weighed on me, sometimes heavily (and that's even with knowing that our career choices meant we would be okay and get them paid off eventually). The loan forgiveness was something we carefully planned for. It's definitely a weird feeling to be essentially student debt-free after pouring so much time, money and energy into dealing with them. Luckily I can fill this void with a very long to-do list. Near term, I need to put a priority on making a will for us and making sure all of the stuff related to that is in order. Along those same lines I'd like to get some extra life insurance going besides just the basic coverage we get from work automatically. Still haven't put a lot of thought into our strategy for saving for college. We are likely buying a minivan (please give me all your minivan tips and recommendations) in the next couple months. Longer term, we have started talking about what a home upgrade might look like for us. The End My third update (at least to me) seems even more boring than ever. Having a new baby and navigating the pandemic at the same time meant that in the past 9 months I really haven't had much time or energy to think about saving, spending, or retirement so it all just sort of happened on its own. Before preparing to make this update I hadn't logged in to categorize our transactions since June which is crazy for me. I basically stopped coming to this sub vs being a daily reader. I'm most definitely in "the boring middle" now. In the last update I had said "The financial peace of mind is extremely valuable to us as we navigate the wonderful and scary world of parenting". Well since then, we doubled down on the parenting and added a global pandemic on top. We are extremely fortunate to still have our jobs and our health, and I don't take that for granted. To not really "worry" about money during this time is a luxury to be sure, but one that we worked hard for. Thanks for reading, everyone. Back to saving now. See you at the $1M update! [link] [comments]  |
| [Milestone] My path to $750K NW as a 27F non-engineer Posted: 07 Dec 2020 02:51 PM PST Hi all - I was very hesitant about making this post because (a) it felt braggy, and (b) I'm wary of having too much personal info, even if anonymous, out there on the internet. But what pushed me do it was seeing yet another casually sexist comment on /r/personalfinance about girlfriends taking your money. I'm tired of generalizations (especially in places where the demographics skew male, like finance subreddits) about women being obstacles to a man's FI journey at best, or high-maintenance gold-diggers at worst. So I feel obligated to be a visible example of a FI-minded woman, and to add another female voice to the FI conversation. TL,DR:
Summary table of income and net worth over time Note that the years aren't totally representative of my actual annual incomes because job transitions and promotions have tended to happen in the middle of year. My story
On investing
Reflecting / looking ahead
If folks have other questions, happy to answer them. I've mostly lurked on this community but appreciate the helpful info & discussion I've read here, so happy to try to contribute in turn. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Dec 2020 07:21 PM PST We are a 50F and 48 M year old couple who are both engineers with a 9 year old. We are rapidly approaching the point at which we could consider different choices in life than working 40-50 hours per week. The thing that I find most intimidating us about leaving our jobs is health insurance. I've always had health insurance from an employer. What are the best things we could do to manage our health insurance needs ? We can likely handle the risk of a higher deductible policy. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Dec 2020 08:43 PM PST Those are the three key aspects of your journey to FI. On a one to ten, how did you accumulate your FI? For me, I made a very good salary at a big fortune 1000 company. I was pretty good at reducing my expenses ... held onto cars for 10 years, drank cheap beer, etc. However, I think I'm excellent at investing, using the right instruments (401K, IRA Roths, etc), researching safe investments, etc. Making $ -- 7 Reducing Expenses -- 6 Investing $ -- 9 [link] [comments]  |
| Weekly FI Monday Milestone thread - December 07, 2020 Posted: 07 Dec 2020 12:10 AM PST Please use this thread to post your milestones, humblebrags and status updates 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! 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]  |
| If you can work remotely from anywhere in the world. Where would you choose to live? Posted: 07 Dec 2020 02:34 PM PST Got inspired by the post about remote work in the us. So if you can work from anywhere in the world. What place would you choose? A place that is good for working towards fire and have a good quality of life. My picks would be Chiang mai Thailand, Cebu In the Philippines, Lisbon Portugal, Tallinn Estonia. Somewhere in Mexico might be good or eastern europe. [link] [comments]  |
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