I am fascinated by carpentry and wanted to buy a cnc machine a few years ago. I watch a lot of youtube on cnc wood work and Japanese carpentry. One of the things on my bucket list is to build a wooden house from hardwood. Sometimes I lose a significant amount of my sleep time just flipping through pictures and designs on pinterest.
I think I’ll do college classes and if possible still do 1-2 days actuarying… but all that early retirement saving money is going into 529s so it won’t be anytime soon 
1 Like
I love visiting Lynchburg. I live a couple hours away.
1 Like
I have been thinking about agro-tourism at some point. In Africa there normally is an untouched side of the farm that has wild life and if you wait for water drinking time it can be a good show. You could also offer hunting packages. Get some of the people in the gun thread to come.and do a bit of shooting.
You could have self-service chalets but they work better if the visitors have a healthy understanding that wild animals are wild. You would think that’s obvious but the number of times people get into trouble with antelope bulls is unbelievable. Also people always feed the monkeys or baboons then the baboons/monkeys start demanding to be fed. Elephants love oranges and you try to tell people please don’t carry oranges here because the elephants smell them from far away and they will destroy everything looking for those oranges but people still bring them. And African elephants are huge, with mature bulls that have grown to.maturity being taller than where the roof starts for a single story house.
The other thing that’s a problem is you always need a predator otherwise the ecosystem gets out of whack. Now if you have lions you can put them in.an enclosure or let them roam. If you let them roam you then need to manage the outhouse tightly because lions are not dumb. After a while some can begin to see people as easy prey. Under no circumstances should you let a leopard roam around. They are extremely dangerous. In my book the most dangerous predator out there. I know a few places with wild dogs or cheetahs.
Anyway I have concepts of a plan at the moment.
1 Like
Ive been 5 years away from FIRE retiring for a good 10 years now, I’m starting to have my doubts I’ll ever make it
What do you want to do in retirement?
I want to feel helpful.
I’ve been making up numbers my entire life, some are challenged, some are accepted, all of them sort of meant nothing.
I’ve been making pretty excel pictures from mounds of data that told a story. But that story was forgotten within minutes.
I always thought I had a knack for not solving the health care cost crisis, but certainly mitigating it. No one has listened for almost a decade. My one accomplishment was having case manager nurses negotiate a bigger discount from a provider - toward the end of the month, if the case manager was managing some patient, they’d be talking with the provider and get enough details that my team could put together some numbers, we knew the discounts from history of that provider+network, and we’d negotiate a payment within a day to that provider for the entire claim encounter. Well, the network didn’t like that we did this and put a halt to it quick.
1 Like
Consider moving to p&c? When i helped my employer adequately reserve auto insurance, i helped them provide auto insurance in a responsible way. And auto insurance is actually a good thing to exist. I felt the same about pricing general liability. Reserving asbestos was a little depressing, but when my employer paid people whose houses burned down in wild fires, i felt like helping to keep the company solvent was a good thing.
I dunno, maybe I’m just good at fooling myself. But i felt like i was a tiny cog in a big machine that made the world a better place.
2 Likes
I’ve been generally screaming into the void for nearly 20 years on making healthcare better. I’ve done a few things I’m proud of, like increasing hospice utilization for cancer patients. I’ve done a lot of things that didn’t work, or got stuck doing things I didn’t think were helpful. People are listening, I think, but dollars speak loudly and there’s a hell of a lot of money to be made doing things other than improving care.
3 Likes
I’m more than 5 years away but aiming for FIRE. My age range is broadly about 52-59. I have some hopes that a leaner FIRE by 51-52 would be possible, but you never know with life. I’d be quite surprised if I can’t retire by 60.
But I expect it will be hard to find the correct age to quit while hopefully making the best money I’ve ever made, or at least a good salary.
What is your thinking regarding an appropriate FIRE ratio of Assets of Beginning of FIRE to monthly spend?
asking for a friend
The popular “4% rule” is pretty popular and highly successful for a 30-year retirement which is a reasonable expectation if you’re retiring at age 65. I would personally scale to a lower figure if you’re retiring early.
Most implementations of the 4% allow for the retiree to start at 4% and scale up withdrawals with inflation.
One factor that can allow you to start with a higher withdrawal percentage is if you have the desire and flexibility to monitor your investment performance and scale back withdrawals if you experience poor investment and inflation results in the early years of retirement.
Will You Have Enough to Retire? The 4% Rule May Help (Within Limits)
that’s a very good link IMO. while not new to me, it was clearly written and easy to follow
1 Like
I’m vaguely looking at the 4% rule that Macroman posted, but right now my focus is just on accurately tracking my income/expenses.
Over the past few months I put together a full balance sheet including every asset, going so far as to average (Realtor.com, Zillow.com) and subtract my mortgage to show net worth with and without the home value, also with and without retirement accounts.
The new project beginning this month is to track every expenditure, which is 95%+ made up of credit card bills and a few ETFs like mortgage/taxes.
That’s really my focus for now, is tracking my spending over the years, as we have a kid, etc. Without that I can’t get more accurate on projections for my FIRE number or age. That’s why I have about a 9-year confidence interval for my retirement date!
3 Likes
Yeah, I’m trying to get an idea of what other people’s opinions are on that second part I bolded.
I am going to restate (keeping the meaning completely unchanged) the 4% rule as “DP’s Rule of 300” which is to say 4% per year is the same as 1/25th of your assets per year which is the exact same as 1/300th of your assets per month.
So instead of 300 if you were retiring at, say age 60, would you be happier with 325? Or 350? or 400?
And in any of these cases, I think that the number should definitely be a function of the tax status of the assets themselves. In other words, post tax dollars should be thought of as more valuable than pre-tax (IRA/401k/403B) dollars.
scaling lower seems required if you are looking beyond the 30 yr projection. I don’t know what the right figure should be bc i don’t think it will apply to me like it would for someone retiring mid-50s or younger.
since my “early” retirement will be past 60 (but short of SSFRA) i’m more likely to bridge with higher than 4% until i hit SSFRA. Like 5% give or take a little. i know that once I hit SSFRA I can reset and start lower than 3% based on the plan I have.
1 Like
There is a chart in this article showing success rates (success = not going broke) for varying withdrawal rates, for varying durations. The 4% rule is 97% successful for 30 years, for 40 years you need to go to 3.75%, 3.5% is pretty safe out to 60 years.
You’re less than a decade from SS, so yes. You’d have to do the math on when you might take SS and how much it will be, and going much higher than 4% could really add SoR risk. And you’d want to factor in how much you’d be withdrawing after SS kicks in, if it’s not <4% then this doesn’t work. If you want to go above 4% now and hold risk of ruin constant, you’ll need to go below 4% later.
2 Likes
It seems pointless to spend more when you’re old and more meaningful to enjoy it in your youth
And I’ve seen research indicating people spend less as they age (lower appetite, lower mobility, yada yada)
If anything your expenses drop in retirement; 300x expense is more than enough for a comfortable enjoyable retirement unless you spent your working years depriving yourself
Retire as early as you can, you won’t regret it. Almost every old person has the same deathbed advice/sentiment - work less, take care of your teeth, and spend time with your family and loved one
1 Like
I am 90% with ya.
The 9.5% (I know, not mathing today) I want to be able to have $ for my daughters and their families to not worry about $. Ex: If they cannot afford to go to an island when I want to, I will ABSOLUTELY pay for them to go. Also giving my grandkids $ for college.
I was fortunate enough to have had my college paid for. When my dad sold his business (none of us wanted it) part of the deal was income to him, my brothers, and me for college. But I went to college on all scholarships. It was when word processing JUST came out. I applied to any scholarship by copy-pasta-ing. So all the $ that my dad gave me went to Yahoo stocks.
1 Like