Same here. I know my expenses will go down (and therefore my savings rate will skyrocket) after we pay for college and stop spending ~$50k/yr on home improvement projects, but I haven’t tracked it all closely enough to know exactly how much. Plus I’ve got equity with my company which is not public, so the value of that could be zero, could be an amount that’s almost life-changing. And, of course, I can’t predict what the S&P will do in the coming years. So I’m trying not to over-index too much until I start to get pretty close to The Number.
I also often think of The Slightly Lower Number… my wife and I are targeting something like $3M plus no debt. But if we get to $2.5M with no debt, we have options. My wife has some health issues, so at that point maybe she stops working or goes part-time. Coast FIRE, more or less, I suppose.
I expect to travel a lot, especially the first couple years after quitting.
But I’m about to spend maybe $40k on a porch, next year it’ll be $30k for window work, then a new driveway, one bath to go. I know the cost will never go to zero for maintenance and what-not but in the first four years here we’ve spent $200k and it won’t stay this high forever. If anyone cares at all about their budget, I cannot stress enough that buying a 3,200 sq ft century home is unwise.
I haven’t looked too much at healthcare. Much of my money will come from after-tax brokerage dollars. So as far as the IRS is concerned my income will be very low and I’ll get ACA subsidies (assuming such things still exist). At the very least there is the OOP max. Conservatively you can just budget for that and if you come in lower, great. I’ll probably plan for spending like 75% of that, if we do hit the MOOP then we might have to take one less vacation or whatever.
Yeahhhh I love old Victorian homes but I decided a long time ago that the reno and maintenance were not at all worth it (to me). So I just enjoy touring them instead
I’d do it again, we knew when we bought the place it would delay retirement by a couple of years or so. The costs are high, but the benefit of being close to everything is amazing. And some day, maybe 2-3 years from now, I’ll have conquered all of the major projects, and then it won’t be too bad.
We almost bought a new house on the west side of town, but it would take about 15 minutes to get to downtown. Not a ton but I knew it was just far enough that we would only go on the weekend. Living here, I’m downtown like every other day.
Back from Scotland!
Bletchley Park was really good, as was the Scotch Whiskey Tasting+Dinner Experience in Edinburgh.
Falkirk Wheel was interesting, Kelpies was a quick diversion.
Scotland had gorgeous scenery as we drove around four days although after a while it all started to look the same a bit. No sightings at Loch Ness. We took some bus/boat tours through London & Edinburgh (nice train ride getting there) as I didn’t realize that my friend couldn’t walk a ton so I did have to modify the trip - and my expectations - a bit. I had been to London before though.
We also played bridge in the evening four times and won three times.
Also in early April I drove 2,700 to visit 19 different friends from college and high school over the course of a week.
The downside of a retirement is when I do any work, I make much much much much less than I did as an actuary. The good part of it is that I work as much or as little as I want, and it is just to help me minimize the nest egg withdrawals early on. Some of these opportunities for me are good to get out of my chair/house and move around and be active, something I need.
I wish I had some connections that needed an independent contractor or part-time person to do their Excel spreadsheet work from them, but I don’t. Most jobs are full-time and I quit precisely to avoid that scenario, so be it. I might make more efforts to ramp up my tutoring opportunities too.
What kind of work are you doing? What you describe sounds pretty appealing, I’ve considered working here and there as well when I decide to hang up my slide rule. Like you, ideally I’d like to do some Excel modeling type of work if I could get it, but I’m also considering signing up to build low-cost housing for lower income residents in my city. Which doesn’t pay, I actually have to pay to do it, but whatever.
Maybe I could just be a low-cost handyman for the low-income residents, I don’t know.
It is great though that you are lovingly looking after it rather than tearing it down. I seem to recall you live in a relatively inexpensive city for housing as the purchase of such a house would be impossible in most large Canadian cities for all but the very rich.
My city is in the sweet spot. Homes are expensive enough that people will buy old homes and fix them, in more rural parts of the state old homes are often just going to ruin. But not so expensive that the land value makes it such that developers tear down old homes to put in four new homes on the lot.
We haven’t solved affordable housing but it’s not too bad. And while there are a lot of single family homes, there are also a fair number of apartments. Just enough density to make for a good 15 minute city.
And yes, there is a saying amongst the century house crowd. We don’t own the house, we are just looking after it for a while.
Since September I have done a bunch of UberEats delivery and Instacart. I kind of enjoy it, but I’m probably only making minimum wage plus. I turn away a bunch of offers and cherry pick the best ones. I probably do that 2-4 hrs a day. It gets me out of the house, some activity.
I usually do a few thousand in tutoring, either from my basement computer or the library 1.5 miles away. I’ve already brought in $9,500 this year but there are 3,800 deductible miles on my car.
I did spend a solid week doing it. Imagine every meal is a visit with a friend. A lot of my friends are in Michigan which is where I was for college, and these people don’t have their entire life to hang out with me, they all have to work I also had lunch with NerdAlert.
One thing I thought about is it would be kind of fun is rather than build housing, is work with the city to develop community spaces in some of the vacant lots. Something everyone can use and enjoy and build a sense of community. The land is practically free for some of the small lots, but could easily be turned into a garden area of some sort.
Long term maintenance becomes the main question - the land can be free, I’d think I could find a supply of materials cheap, but then who takes care of the mowing each summer? Ideally this could become self sustaining by community volunteers or something.
I’d be into that. I’m not sure about the whole city, generally speaking they already do a really good job. We have lots of parks, and a few years ago they built a nice splash park that’s free to anyone.
They recently bought a lot near me to turn into some kind of community space but I’m not sure exactly what.
Lawrence, KS is a real outlier here. It’s a weird place.
Posted back in April 2021 our (dual) net worth was $300k. I likely wasn’t including our home equity at the time.
Finally put together a balance sheet of all our finances recently. If including the home equity, we hit $1M in November. A bit under $700k without the home. Just ticked back under $1M for this month though.
I also had lunch with NerdAlert.