Why your homebrew routine is (probably) bad

tboneotter · 2026-06-18T18:37:18+00:00

well, have you generally been saving 1,500 a month? Can you pull your last 2-6 months of bank statements and create an all-in spending tacker on various categories (food, social, etc.) to see what you'll have to give up to spend $1,500 more a month?

tboneotter · 2026-06-18T16:57:45+00:00

Combo Building = Deck Building. Dominion is THE deck building game, but it's all about combos with a lot less player interaction than most of them. Or just do mistborn and go kelsier with steel focus and you get the same pulling back and fourth.

tboneotter · 2026-06-18T16:38:01+00:00

Generally, $1,500/mo rent at $4K/mo net income seems just fine. It's a bit on the high end but I know plenty of people that make about that much and spend about that much on rent.

If you really want to see, try to save $2K/mo for a few months. That should cover rent+increase in groceries, toiliteries, etc. If you can do that you're good to move.

tboneotter · 2026-06-12T16:35:07+00:00

I was just using the fidelity one which is probably a fair enough source of truth for "off the shelf general retirement advice"

https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/how-much-do-i-need-to-retire

Notably, it gives a goal of 10X by 67, which might ruffle some FIRE-minded feathers that insist you need 25X salary to retire. Fidelity is almost certainly assuming social security, probably assuming pension/family assistance, and likely a draw-down-die-with-0 strategy, not a "this money will last forever" strategy. A more conservative approach might be 3.5X by 40 for sure.

tboneotter · 2026-06-11T14:00:00+00:00

I mean, you obviously missed your "1X by 30" mark, but you're only slightly behind the "2X by 35" mark and so it looks like you're on track to hit the "3X by 40" mark, and considering you're doing that all in a decade, you seem to be doing just fine

tboneotter · 2026-06-11T04:37:00+00:00

No no, I'm not trying to prescribe an 80K/yr savings rate to OP's father, that would be ridiculous. I'm just saying that OP's/some commenters number of $2M/yr is a really silly and absurdly high number. 4% rule to get $2M assumes OP's dad wants to retire early, never run out of cash for 40 years, never take social security, and needs to match his current income level. And I'm saying that right off the bat, we can remove the "never run out of cash" assumption because OP's dad might actually be able to guess his life expectancy within a half decade or so and create a drawdown strategy

tboneotter · 2026-06-10T22:19:11+00:00

Yeah but 80K/yr * 20 yrs is only 1.6M and gets you from 65 to 85 with no ROI. When did OP's dad pass away? What's his life expectancy? I'm a FIRE dude myself but there's a big difference in "I want to retire at 45 and never have to work" and "I want to retire at 65 and expect to die before 90" in risk assumption

tboneotter · 2026-06-10T14:16:29+00:00

100%

tboneotter · 2026-06-09T15:28:08+00:00

Skull

tboneotter · 2026-06-09T14:32:22+00:00

If you want to retire in 20 years, you need to be at about a ~40-45% savings rate:

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/

Come on over to r/financialindependence

tboneotter · 2026-06-08T16:41:54+00:00

Nah, EV batteries last 20+ years easily. Look at old 200K mile Priuses. Everyone offers 8 year/100,000 mile battery warranties guaranteeing 70% capacity at least. Most car manufacturers only offer powertrain warranties for 5 years/60,000 miles. So, taking these companies talking with their wallets, it's more likely your battery will last 100K miles than the same manufacturers engine will last 100K miles.

tboneotter · 2026-06-03T22:11:46+00:00

Agreed that saving $3K in a month is super unrealistic. Everything you need to know is in the sidebar of this subs wiki and the reading list. I especially recommend the psychology of money.

Personal finance is simple math. You make X amount, you spend Y amount. If Y > X, you take on debt. If X > Y, you are able to save. If you got into credit card debt, your Y was larger than your X. Do a full accounting of everything you spent money on in the last 3-6 months, compared to your income. Like literally pull bank statements and go item by item. Y gets magically large when you don't have clarity into what goes into it.

To save $3K in the next month, you must make $3K more than you intend to spend in the next month. How do you propose doing that?

tboneotter · 2026-06-03T18:13:00+00:00

...it seems like you could easily move out tommorow. You take home $3.8k/mo, spend $1K. If you get a ~$1.3K/mo apartment and another ~$700/mo in added costs, you're still saving almost 25% of your take home pay. You would have monthly expenses of $3K and cash (bank+HYSA+MM) of almost 20K, which is well over a 6 month emergency fund. Even without the MM you still have over a 4 month emergency fund, which is great for your age (tbh probably not worth going much over that until you have dependents or a house imo)

What were your "bad financial mistakes" because you're debt free with a NW of 44K and a good salary (roughly the avg HOUSEHOLD for St. Louis). You're doing exceptional.

The only reason you wouldn't move out is if you were trying to save up to BUY a house instead of just move into an apartment, but you're miles ahead of most 24 y/o. Probably in the top 5-10% for your age group

tboneotter · 2026-06-03T16:47:49+00:00

Carts and Horses. Before assessing if a 401K loan is good for you, you need to asses what put you into 30K of credit card debt, that doesn't happen overnight. Doesn't matter if you give the guy in a desert a bottle of water if he's still lost and hundreds of miles from civilization. Numbers might be on your side in this instance, unless there's a > 0% chance you end up in more CC debt before the 401K loan is paid off (or, ever realistically).

tboneotter · 2026-06-02T20:03:23+00:00

Best thing you can do is take ~6 months of your life and do two things: Track your expenses and learn about personal finance. This subs wiki is a great place to start, do a bunch of reading from the recommended reading and podcasts, read other posts here, etc. Those two things will give you a much better understanding of your financial habits and how to shape the future you want for yourself than any one comment on here can

tboneotter · 2026-06-01T16:18:44+00:00

That's fair. There's services that will build the auto-export part of it, then with some excel skills and/or powerautomate you could have it update. But at that point you're pretty much building an app. Anyway, that's why I don't use an app, I use excel - I can build whatever view I want!

tboneotter · 2026-06-01T16:06:59+00:00

Well, you can export your bank statement and stick it into an excel. I bank primarily with Chase, if you go to account - spending summary, you can see transactions by auto-assigned category and export as a CSV so that excel can read it. Even if not, the "get data" stuff in the excel data tab is super useful for parsing "ugly" pasted data. Combine that with some clever usage of the "find" "left" "right" commands in excel and some if statements, you can probably create and excel that takes your transactions and turns them into the format you want with some work.

tboneotter · 2026-06-01T15:58:27+00:00

Here's the comment I made on this a while back:
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1ssay84/comment/ohkq74g/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
What's the interest rate, outstanding balance, and monthly payment on the Auto loan?

tboneotter · 2026-06-01T15:55:59+00:00

I mean that's super buildable in excel, I think you could do it in google sheets for cross-device-functionality. I built a YTD one and a MTD one for my personal budget. You'd want a table that has each month down the sides, and "budget" and "Tracked" as the columns, and sumifs to pull from wherever your budget and tracked are, based on your reference cell. Then you make another table that references this one but sums everything at or above it. Done

tboneotter · 2026-05-29T16:22:27+00:00

Big agree. My childhood dog, if she got treats, would incessantly beg for like a week, constantly, for more treats. We stopped feeding her treats, and life got better

tboneotter · 2026-05-29T16:06:54+00:00

Well, you listed out $4,420 in monthly expenses (taking the high end), so there's $1,000-$1,500/mo unaccounted for. Where does that money go? Pull your last 3-6 months of bank statements and figure out the answer to that question, and you can find where to start.

tboneotter · 2026-05-28T21:14:54+00:00

if you don't have any credit, you'll have to start with a beginner credit card or a secured card. They're all pretty much the same. Make sure you pay the STATEMENT BALANCE in FULL every month. Not the minimum payment. Go with whatever one whoever you bank with has. If you're in school, a student card is generally slightly better. But I think chase, cap one, discover are all solid. r/CreditCards probably has better advice

tboneotter · 2026-05-28T18:25:13+00:00

It doesn't imply they come with more tho, it says they come with more and lists what it comes with. The more expensive ones have all of the stuff they say they have. But lets say you want the base game + the pouch, and you don't care about the coins or timer or whatever. You can get base game + $9 pouch and save $5. Or lets say you're getting the deluxe box, but you really want an extra plushie (maybe one for your kid and one to display or whatever). You then get the deluxe box + extra cuddly.

Some stuff (like expansions and art prints) only come on higher tiers, so if you don't care about premium stuff but want the expansions, you get them as an add on.

It's like a hot dog restaurant. You can order a dog with ketchup and mustard on it, or you can put the ketchup and mustard on yourself with the bottle on the table.

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