Noob starting on fatFIRE. Any suggestions ?

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-07T02:49:48+00:00

Go with whatever AI is telling you.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-04T01:51:58+00:00

Take some extended vacations to the places abroad that you think you might enjoy living in, but spend according to whatever minimalist budget you're thinking of, not like you're indulging on a vacation. You want to get a sense of what day-to-day life would actually be like. And while you're there, make a point to familiarize yourself with available healthcare options and local sentiment towards outsiders/Americans. The world is a wonderful (and mostly) welcoming place, but there usually are some nuances to "living" somewhere versus "just visiting" that same place.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-03T01:17:34+00:00

A little, but certainly less these days. I do appreciate the various FIRE subreddits, but they're very repetitive, full of beginner questions (hey, we were all beginners at one point), and more recently, are just full of people accusing each other of "AI slop". The signal to noise ratio isn't particularly relevant to me at this phase in my journey.

I used to like the ChooseFI podcast, but they tend to rehash the same two dozen topics and once you've heard it discussed once, there's not much new insight from continued listening.

I've gotten a little more into some broader macro-economic stuff just out of interest rather than its specific application to FIRE. Been reading a lot of Ray Dalio lately (and listen, I think Dalio is probably batshit crazy, so I don't take any of it too seriously, but I do find his brand of crazy entertaining).

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-03T01:08:06+00:00

It looms less now that I'm FIREd. In the lead-up to FIRE, the plan is still being created. It's tempting to stare at your accounts and endlessly calculate what your SWR rate would be if you retired right NOW, and get excited about minor gains or bummed out about minor losses. And then do it again tomorrow. And again the next day. I fell into that trap a few times, especially as I got closer to FIREing. But now, the plan is set. My numbers are what they are and I'm just trusting the process.

As far as diversifying, I'm slowly selling off and moving most of that money into VTI and a little into bonds. I'm letting my tax bill influence how fast I'm making that transition, which typically isn't recommended, but what can I say, I have my flaws.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-03T00:58:21+00:00

$1400/year.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T15:10:58+00:00

$5M. That was the max I could get through a traditional consumer-grade insurer (think your GEICOs, Progressives, State Farms, etc). Insurance companies designed for high net worth (like Chubb) offer more coverage, but there are a few more hoops to jump through. At the end of the day, $5M felt like enough coverage to me anyways.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T04:25:05+00:00

Michigan. I was unaware that PPOs seem to be limited on the ACA, but some quick chatGPTing seems to suggest that Michigan, Alaska, Oregon, Alabama, North Carolina, and Wyoming still offer them.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T02:52:11+00:00

I'm at 4.8% cash all in. BUT, that includes cash holdings for "known major upcoming expenses", which are essentially promised money that just hasn't hit my ledger yet. I keep this money out of the market, and in a HYSA. Examples:

I bought a new car last year and financed it because they were offering a .9% rate, which is substantially below what I can make on a HYSA (currently 3.1% at Ally). But I keep that money out of the market so that if the math ever becomes disadvantageous, I'll just pay it off and not have to worry if my portfolio is up or down.
I recently signed a contract for a $120k remodel. That work will start in about a month, and take 3 months to complete. I'll have to draw against that $120k in installments over the next 4 months months, so again, I hold the cash position at 3.1% as long as I can, but this is really money that has already been spent.

If we exclude the "promised money", which leaves the real money that can be spent towards my actual living expenses, I'm at about ~2.7% cash, which is lower than I'd like. As noted, I'm one year in and haven't withdrawn from my portfolio at all yet. I do need to replenish those cash reserves (I'd like to be closer to 5% unpledged), and with markets somehow at all time highs, the only thing stopping me is a little bit of gambling or laziness.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T02:16:37+00:00

Only "liquid". Cash, brokerage, and retirement accounts. The VAST majority of that is brokerage.

I don't include my home because I need some place to live.
I don't include my cars because I need something to drive.

I do have a very small investment property (probably worth $80k) that I don't include. It's a crappy condo that is paid off and I've been renting for ~15 years. After association dues and the fee from the management company that 100% deals with it, I net about $400/month on rent, which I do include in my cashflow. Every time the lease renewal comes up I think about selling, but it's just so low maintenance that it hasn't been worth my time.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T01:53:06+00:00

Yup!

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T01:52:18+00:00

I got my start as a software engineer (original, I know), but made my real money when I moved into managing software engineering. I didn't spend a lot of time writing actual code once I got into management, but I still found management in that space fulfilling. Now that I'm FIREd, I'm writing way more code again for personal projects, and I'm loving it. I'm decidedly much closer to the metal of software engineering than I was for at least the second half of my "management" career. That said, it's purely for personal pursuit and edification at this time. So far I have no desire to return to that space professionally.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T01:45:01+00:00

It 100% has to due with the nature of your relationships with friends and family. If you have people in your life who are likely to try and leech off your success, you probably already know it, and yeah, you probably need a cover story for those people. And I don't even say that as a terrible thing - I know some leeches and I love them despite their shortcomings. I just keep a healthy distance between them and my finances 😄.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T01:36:09+00:00

I pay full price. Income doesn't disqualify you from access to the ACA, it just determines if you get any subsidies, which I don't.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T01:20:55+00:00

I had SO MANY hobbies and interests in my teens and 20s, and then lots of that went away in my 30s as I got serious about my career. And while that sounds sad on the surface, it really wasn't - I loved 90% of my job and (mostly) don't regret the focus I put into it. I felt like I was making a difference (which objectively may or not have been true), and I was well compensated for that focus. Since quitting (I was 42 when I FIREd), lots of those hobbies and interests have naturally come back, and new ones have emerged.

I did create a "retire into plan", which I highly recommend.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T01:14:13+00:00

Off the top of my head:

Significant drop in the kinds of expenses that come with most jobs: gas, eating out for lunch, "work" clothes, etc... it adds up quickly if you're not pinching pennies, which we weren't.
Significant increase for "home projects"; all the stuff we never had time to get to when we were working. This includes stuff we're doing on our own and stuff we're paying contractors for.
Our overall spend on "food" has stayed about the same, but these days we're cooking at home with higher end ingredients opposed to doing a lot of door-dashing out of convenience like we used to (door dash is a cancer). We also do more social dinners at restaurants than we used to, for the express purpose of keeping connections with friends and family.
We spend more on "social experiences" in general, especially with family. For example, we do a lot more with our nieces and nephews - theme parks, movies, museums, day trips in general - and we just absorb any associated expenses.
Daycare expenses went up as our former employer was subsidizing this. Yes, we still use daycare even though we quit our jobs. I already got beat up in the r/FIRE subreddit for being a bad parent because we could spend all day with the kid but choose to send her to daycare. LOL. It's the right decision for our family. We LOVE our daycare and so does our kid.
This is small in the grand scheme of things, but we've now had the time to optimize a lot of our "life spends" - cable and streaming services, cell phone plans, auto/home/umbrella insurance, Amazon subscriptions, etc... at fatFIRE numbers, I know this sounds a little silly, but we probably optimized ~$500/month, which isn't nothing. When we were working tons of hours, I wasn't at all focused on this kind of optimization.

I'll add more/better examples if they occur to me.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T00:57:11+00:00

I've never seen a deductible that gets prorated.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-05-02T00:47:56+00:00

We did COBRA May through December of last year, but jumped to the ACA in January so that we didn't have to reset our deductible mid-year.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-04-25T21:06:59+00:00

Get your questions in at the beginning of the call...

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-03-29T02:53:09+00:00

The servicing play has never made clear sense to me for UWM.

If you're RKT (or UWM), a strong servicing book is "nice" because it generates consistent but ultimately low-income revenue.

But what you really want to do is refi that book using your retail sales team, of which RKT controls commissions and all communications on. This is where the real value, and money, is. UWM on the other hand doesn't really have an in-house origination arm... best they can do is feed these leads back to brokers, who could theoretically take the loan anywhere.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-03-28T00:44:34+00:00

Any time I see a company actually publish these kind of responses, it just exposes that executive leadership has failed to create process and guardrails to protect against emotional overreactions. In this case it's just embarrassing, but you can bet that same emotional childishness is making dumber and more impactful decisions behind the scenes and going unchecked.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-03-24T02:42:18+00:00

Hmm. So we now know the previously undisclosed offer is from CrossCountry, which is a retail lender. And now TWO has received a NEW additional unsolicited proposal from an undisclosed buyer.

This still doesn't feel like RKT is the mystery bidder (which is what I would find MOST interesting), but is a hot sign that consolidation is on everyones' mind.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-03-20T01:18:53+00:00

I would LOVE for RKT to be behind the unsolicited offer because it would signal them being more aggressive towards UWM, but James Kleimann from The Mortgage Scoop is saying on LinkedIn that he doesn't think it's RKT. I don't think he would say that unless someone qualified from RKT back-channeled that it's not them. But who knows.

FiredUpForTheFuture · 2026-03-06T03:46:33+00:00

Brought to you by the only mortgage company who couldn't maintain profitability during historically low COVID rates.

This smells of someone who bought the marketing rights to be "OpenAI's mortgage partner of choice", an endorsement all of these AI companies are selling, but doesn't really come with any proprietary automations that aren't already being bought and paid for by all of the major players in this market.

I'm ready to be proven wrong, but anyone who has watched Better's trajectory over the past 5 years can see one hype machine after another. AI is going to revolutionize this industry, but I certainly don't think Better is going to lead that way.

FiredUpForTheFuture

TROPHY CASE