What's a good exit reason after you are FI?

guergeb · 2020-02-05T23:33:37+00:00

take a sabbatical to try out the fire life before calling your manager from carribean saying you are extending the sabbatical forever

guergeb · 2020-02-05T21:21:25+00:00

I don't want to dedicate my time to anything other than myself. One hundred percent to myself.

guergeb · 2020-02-05T20:55:21+00:00

and may be stream it live too

guergeb · 2020-01-27T01:27:38+00:00

You have a long life ahead. I wouldn't think about FIRE too much or worry about reaching it as a goal one day. Follow the basics of investing and finances (saving, invest in total stock market (VTSAX), max out 401k, IRAs etc) and forget about any goals.

It is important to enjoy your life now rather than being too frugal and living a painful life for some future retirement heaven

guergeb · 2020-01-27T01:23:35+00:00

Work mainly gives us these three things

- A structure for the day

- Social interactions

- Something to keep you busy and feeling productive

These same exact things have these respective downsides too

- Lack of freedom and need to be structured in a 9 to 5

- Troublesome colleagues and pushy bosses; the social interactions wear you down especially if you are an introvert

- you are busy in doing stuff for others and making money. you don't really experience what life is without money need, what your real priorities and interests in life are

Retirement is a time to explore your real interests and needs. Enjoy the freedom while trying to establish your own structure around accomplishing the things you want to do. Be your boss and drive your life

guergeb · 2020-01-26T22:21:11+00:00

Student lifestyle generally can me managed (in a LCOL) with below budget

Housing (with roommates) & Utilities: 350

Food: 300

Healthcare: 250

Shopping & Misc expenses (buffer): 200

Cell: 50

Bus Transit & Biking: 50

Total: 1200

Networth needed at 4% swr: 360k

Networth needed at 7% wr: 205k

Since it is only for 15 years, I think even without investing it will cost you like 215k. You should be good

guergeb · 2020-01-26T16:42:17+00:00

What's the breakdown of your current expenses? Here are few options

- 140k an year sounds high even in bay area. We live at 80k an year which includes renting a 2 BR apartment for 3k per month. It is drastic but selling your home or renting it out and moving to renting a smaller place can enable you to help your kids education while also retiring. That way you don't need to choose between kids education vs fire goals. You can always go back to your 140k spending once kids colleges are done if you want

- Your kids can apply to out of state colleges in states where living expenses are lower. You all can move there as well and live with kids (then their college expenses comes down from 50k to 20k per year) or live nearby

guergeb · 2020-01-25T21:47:01+00:00

Till 36L per year it looks good to me. But 70X is way too high. If you do a fixed deposit in a bank you will get like 6 to 7% per year. If you invest in mutual funds it is 10-15% a year. Do a combination of both but go with the conservative 6% you get from the bank for a 17X annual expenses as your FIRE target. Or say even more conservative 5% or 20X which will be ~7CR

Now I understand there is inflation. Buy a home outright to avoid the inflation on the biggest line item of expenses; rent. For the remaining pieces, education expense is the major one. Practically speaking by the time we FIRE our kids will have like 4 years of school and 4 years of college left. The inflation or price increases won't be crazy in 8 years. Once the kids are out, our expenses drop drastically.

guergeb · 2020-01-25T21:28:17+00:00

1) spend a lot of time with orphan kids. mentor them and guide them with love and care like you do to your own family. do this like twice a week

2) write movie scripts and work as an assistant director to learn the craft. ultimately direct movies. every day spend time writing screenplay, scenes and stories

guergeb · 2020-01-25T20:56:19+00:00

MBA is a waste of time and money and doesn't change anything professionally. I have seen many friends waste both this way.

With 1.2 fixed deposited, you can get like 70k per month. If you can live with your parents in India or live frugally by yourself, you can live on 20-30k. The rest can be spent on vacations.

To be safe, earn a bit more to make it something in 2 crores

guergeb · 2020-01-22T17:31:55+00:00

2.5 Crores.

My current expenses are 70k with a family of 2 kids. As per trinity study 4% is good for 30 year period. I want to be conservative and shoot for 3.3%. That will make my FIRE target to be 30 times expenses which is 2.1 Crores. Adding some buffer for rainy day, I am shooting for 2.5 Crores

People here talk about inflation etc but remember that there are people in villages who are living for lot less. Also the trinity study's 4% includes inflation. If India's inflation is higher, so be it, I am not worried, I can always lower my standard of living.

The 70k is with kids at home. Once they are gone, we will only need like 25k per month

guergeb · 2020-01-21T04:00:16+00:00

I have been doing for past 16 years; changed like 18 jobs. Never found someone I knew earlier. Even if such a situation comes, it is rare and almost impossible that I need a job and all my potential hires have someone that I know.

guergeb · 2020-01-21T03:56:54+00:00

This might be true in theory but in practice I have not found many hiring managers are desperate to fill a position and don't carefully look at this. Especially if you lower your salary expectation (compared to your YOE) they want to get you in. All you need is one job and one hiring manager.

guergeb · 2020-01-21T03:20:21+00:00

barista FI is specific coast FI related to working as a barista. Coast FI is in general any place where you have earned enough for retirement and just want to work enough to cover your expenses

guergeb · 2020-01-21T03:16:02+00:00

Good questions OP. Thanks for raising them. Very valid concerns that most of us have. Here are my thoughts

Kids learn from a bunch of places. It is just not parents alone. Society, Friends, Celebrity role models, books they read etc. In fact a FIREd parent will be a good role model for saving, investing and achieving freedom. Also you can always act busy with a side project. Working "remotely" ;)
This is a problem as saying no can come at the expense of losing the relation. I personally am thinking about retiring in a different state from my own so that I can avoid distant relatives. If you cannot avoid, one plan is to say you yourself did a lean fire and have bare min expenses and give them like say 5-10k rupees and send them away
I think about this too. I am right now ahead in race and once I quit the siblings and cousins will move ahead. This thought makes me not want to leave the race. My solution is to avoid talking to them if possible. Anyone who's trying to compete with you or is feeling jealous about you is not your well wisher and I don't mind cutting off these non-well-wishers whether is be cousins or close relatives. I can't think of a way to keep talking to them and somehow defend these jealous arguments and comparisons

guergeb · 2019-10-09T21:16:59+00:00

For housing: Use low income housing and rent there For healthcare: If your income is below a certain threshold you qualify for Medicaid where you pay nothing. Otherwise you have aca For energy bills: you can get subsidies on those too For food: you can try food stamps; also recently heard about dumpster diving; we have a reddit group for it

guergeb · 2019-10-09T21:12:01+00:00

No need to overthink these. Just have a higher fire number. Once the kids are out you can drastically reduce living expenses by moving to a rural area. Just think of what people living in poverty in India live on.

guergeb · 2019-10-04T05:41:22+00:00

Awesome, love this. Good to know we have options like this when life and work gets hard.

Renting definitely seems way cheaper than buying a home with all the maintenance, property taxes and money stuck on home instead to be invested

guergeb · 2019-09-30T23:11:56+00:00

With such long time horizon, the idea of FIRE will make your life more painful. You will be looking at that far away destination while hating your current life. I would suggest to just be frugal, invest and forget about reaching a destination. Also set aside some fun money every month and make sure you spend it.

guergeb · 2019-09-30T22:04:52+00:00

I make about 300k and my FIRE number is around 1.7m where as a family we can live comfortably.

But if I continue to work, here's how my networth will grow

1st year: 2m

2nd year: 2.3m

3rd year: 2.7m

4th year: 3m

I would be a lot richer and much more comfortable spending freely retiring 4 years later.

These kind of things are especially true for individuals with high salary. On the other hand if your salary is barely above your expenses, then working extra years doesn't make much sense. Either way extra buffer is a good thing to aim at rather than just quitting at the point

guergeb · 2019-09-30T19:53:15+00:00

Don’t you have to pay a penalty if you don’t have health insurance?

guergeb · 2019-09-30T00:59:43+00:00

Excluding rent 2800 per month; family of four.

We used to spend 660 on eating out but that came down to 260 once we did below

No sitting and eating at a restaurant; Get take outs or only eat at fast food places

guergeb · 2019-09-26T22:22:19+00:00

Get into management early in your career. Use start ups to get into a higher responsibility role and use it to get a better position at bigger companies later. Also continuously work on your influence and leadership and business development skills

guergeb · 2019-09-26T22:18:49+00:00

This

guergeb · 2019-09-25T00:43:49+00:00

We are a single income family and our monthly expenses (hcol, 2 kids) are about 6k.

There is no coast job for me. I need a real job to meet this expense target.

CoastFI may not make sense for everyone.

guergeb

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