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FIRE Movement, Financial Independence, Net Worth; not so personal finance discussion

RJMacready73

Simps for Amouranth
so basically skip enjoying yourself and traveling when you're young only to retire when your older and live frugally?? gotcha...
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
One thing about these retire young plans is it assumes the person is willing to live alone or with a partner who shares the same values and earning power. And by the looks of it, having kids are not part of the plan.
 

AJUMP23

Gold Member
so basically skip enjoying yourself and traveling when you're young only to retire when your older and live frugally?? gotcha...
That is not it at all. What you need to ask is what type of life do you want as you get older. You can set yourself up early in life for financial freedom late in life with some financial discipline. If you make good choices when you are young, and do not spend everything you earn partying and drinking or just on stuff you want but don't really need. Get some of it, but not all of it. Live well within our means, not at the edge.
 
One thing about these retire young plans is it assumes the person is willing to live alone or with a partner who shares the same values and earning power. And by the looks of it, having kids are not part of the plan.
? This depends on taxation salary, etc.

There are multikid FIRE families with youtube channels.

Also if a couple together makes near a million dollars. They could live frugally for like 5-6 years and savings would create a perpetual motion investment vehicle.

Also depends on how old you are when you start. If you start at 20, even 10-15 year of compounding can take place and there should still be some level of fertility.
 
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Maiden Voyage

Gold™ Member
For those who don't think it is possible to retire early and have a good quality of life, here's my situation at present:
- I live in a low cost of living area​
- My wife and I are in our 30s​
- My wife and I have a combined income now that puts us in the upper class, according to Pew, but both grew up in poverty; note that we only reached this level within the past few years​
- We own our home & it's paid off entirely​
- Our monthly expenses are $5.6k ($67.6k/year)​
- If we retired today, our cost of comfortable living goes down to $3.6k/mo ($2k lower because non-401k savings & investment stops)​
- Absolute barebones cost per month would be $2.6k/mo (removing vacation, new car payments, Apple One sub, gifts, & eating out); IE being poor again​
- The only debt we have now is on a car loan that's 0% APR for the life of the loan​
It took years to get here and our combined income was roughly $50k when we first started dating. We both had student loan debt and our net worth was 5 figures in the red back then. It took years to dig out of that and begin to increase our net worth into the green.​
After paying off our debts, being able to save/set-aside money allowed us to have a 20% downpayment + moving costs (new furniture, etc.) AND pay off our entire mortgage on our first home purchase in less than 2.5 years.​
...And we took vacation every year while doing this. We celebrated the mortgage being done with by going to Iceland for 2 weeks the same month we made our last mortgage payment. This year due to an insane bonus payout, we are doing 2 large vacations for the first time (2 weeks in Utah and 1 week in Florida). Our quality of life is quite high, even compared to some of peers who make the same as us, because of how we prioritize our finances.​
Those "sacrifices" were absolutely worth it those first years together. Had we not adjusted our ways of handling money and understanding what actually mattered to us, we would never go on vacation and we'd likely still be working dead-end, low paying jobs, living paycheck-to-paycheck.​
And early retirement? If we have no major changes to our lives, we should be able to retire in 2032 at the latest. The returns on our investments will outpace our cost of living + inflation beginning then. We could stop saving/investing entirely today and still comfortably retire at 60. Our figures & projections are incredibly conservative so we may end up being able to retire much earlier. Our target nest egg has a 94% chance of surviving more than 50 years using Monte Carlo simulation.​
And yes, if we have a kid, this will absolutely change the value equation. It's a good reason to save as much as we can now, before we decide on kids, so that money has time to grow & compound.​

Knowledge is power. Know what you're making and where/why that money goes to where it goes. Know what actually brings value to your life and what that cost is to you. Know yourself well enough to make your plan something you can adhere to.
 
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