Just a little (link) love: baby goat foraging edition
January 16, 2020
2020: If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families this year, please read this post.
A Twitter thread on Excel keyboard shortcuts, thanks @PhysicistLisa! I love Stephanie‘s which is so useful to me right now, to paste without formatting: ctrl + shift + v
I hope to live a life that warrants this kind of memory / obituary when I’m gone.
I was thinking of Sarah’s thoughts on how FIRE intersects with feminism, particularly as a well paid woman in STEM. She makes a great point in her reply comment: I worry that so much of our feminism is focused on getting women promoted and paid – getting that representation at higher levels, with salaries to match.
We do need feminism to get us up there with the promotions and payscales, but is that the only way to do feminism as a STEM woman? I would like to think that advocacy for and building cultures where URM including women feel welcome is as much feminism as climbing the ladder and staying in the workforce but maybe that’s simply not possible if you aren’t a higher-up woman who is being paid well. Thoughts?
Speaking of feminism, I’m still mad about Tokyo Medical School and their sexism.
I was thinking about how I’ve not ever just lived on my own, or lived off my own income by myself, I’ve always had someone to care for or support. I’ve also never been in a position where I didn’t need to save for the future, so the idea of figuring out a retirement spending budget where I’m only spending and not saving any longer feels weird. Over at Abby’s, I was wildly guessing that we might be good in retirement with $110,000 in annual income but it’s such a guesstimate. I don’t know if we’ll still have a mortgage (assume yes?), what we’ll do for healthcare, or what other regular expenses we’ll still have (little to no childcare I hope, pet expenses vary widely). Tanja made the very real point that we can’t blindly rely on a 4% withdrawal rate for these calculations. It’s a tough needle to thread. I neither want to spend the rest of my life working (no matter how long or short that life is) nor does my health suggest I have a long good life ahead so I don’t want to spend what’s left of them working all the time. But we don’t have enough saved to change that picture any time soon. How much do you think you’d need if you were no longer needing to save?
On the subject of early retirement, I like following Tanja’s journey into this unknown to me realm. I’ve got a few early retired friends who have been retired for many years so I know it can be done but it’s nice to follow Tanja’s journey from the saving period to the doing it period.
Baby goats and forage
Baby Christmas is feeling great today, running all over the house and nibbling sagebrush blossoms. pic.twitter.com/qlDRqFJTiR
— AngelesCrestCreamery (@ACCgoats) January 6, 2020
Retirement calculations feel like such a guessing game! What I look for is the major, specific expenses that have a high probability of being different. For instance my husband and I are committed to keeping our 30-year mortgage’s end date whether we stay in our current house, refinance, or downsize after we launch all our spawnlings. So our retirement calculations assume a paid off house; technically it’s not guaranteed, but I’m going for the moderate-confidence scenario here and we have a good track record of paying off debts early. We won’t be saving for retirement anymore so that’s 10% less needed right there, and we tithe 10% of our gross income so that adjusts down slightly as our income drops. We didn’t own two vehicles until our commuting situation required it, so we should be able to get by just fine with a single vehicle again in retirement. So, the standard “80% of current income” seems like a reasonable target for us.
The rest of our potential future expenses are so unpredictable that it would be like throwing darts at a dartboard. No more health insurance for the kids, but increased medical bills for us? More efficient utilities & energy production, but increased climate-protection costs? Groceries for 2 instead of 5, but increased convenience/restaurant foods since we won’t be able to cook as much? Trying to use a crystal ball to guess at these would drive me crazy, so I just assume that they will all even out and that we’ll find ways to adjust if necessary. Having confidence in our level of savings is good but having confidence in our own resiliency is even better.
I want to assume that we’ll stick with our 30 year mortgage, or whenever we eliminate that with our theoretically accelerated plan, but even that is uncertain. Our accelerated payments at best might have reduced our term by 8 years? Now I have to go find out ….
I think you’ve hit in on the head right there, though – I DON’T have confidence in my resilience anymore.
If I had 25x of current expense, I would absolutely feel comfortable retiring. FT infant care plus an expensive mortgage will both go away, and are significant enough to give a big buffer.
I do currently use the 4% rule with a post-RE fantasy budget, for now. We’ll sharpen pencils if we get to a point where we are making real plans to live without jobs. I honestly don’t see T retiring before 55 (which would simplify certain things), but things could change between now and then.
That’s actually a good point.
I worried because I didn’t have a handle on when our mortgage would go away and whether we’d have a market crash when we needed to sell or if we’d want to sell and rebuy (and I hope we wouldn’t do so in a way that costs MORE but who even knows).
My mortgage + extra mortgage payments + retirement savings combined account for something around 40% of my gross income, so even allotting money for upkeep, property taxes, and some kind of health insurance, I’ll need to bring in a lot less at some point. If I stay on track I’ll have my house paid off in 8 years, 10 months and I think I can retire then – it’ll be maybe 8 years early, not EPIC but I’ll take it.
OR between now and a paid-off house, I could quit my job and go travel and rent out my house and come back and work a less well-paying job. So long as I don’t touch my retirement accounts, and so long as they grow at some reasonable rate, I’ll still be able to retire fairly comfortably at full retirement age.
I’ve been tracking my spending for over a decade, and I think I could live quite nicely on 48k/year post-tax if I retired without a mortgage. More is better of course – it would mean more options for travel! It’s always been just me in the financial picture which has worked out very well so far. I was lucky to catch the 401k bug in my 20s, started saving as soon as I had access to one, and all of my employers since have offered decent retirement plans.
That would be a pretty fantastic annual expense price point. I’m glad you have always had access to good retirement plans.