About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Micro-income, freelance: I had almost made a resolution to really buckle down on generating new gigs in October but that would have been a broken promise because the rest of life was unbalanced in the direction of too much work. But I did polish up some works in progress and that brought in a wee bit of cash.
Micro-income, Craigslist: PiC unloaded another piece of bike equipment, $30. This is a double win: getting things out of our crowded home and bringing in a bit of money.
I’m SUCH a pessimist. Tawcan’s right at the basic level that if things go wrong in FIRE, you should just go back to work for a while but I can’t help but think of all the complicating factors that may prevent you from getting a job or getting a job that pays enough to cover the bills because I remember my Mom having this problem: ageism, an inability to get back into the field you have experience in, leaving you entry level jobs that might discriminate against your longer resume, etc.
Why Allison is leaving cancer research. I’ve followed her career highlights for a while now and am so happy that she’s able to make the shift that she wants to. I wish that the world of research wasn’t so broken. I know quite a few people still in it who can make it work one way or another for a while but it’s draining and a sacrifice frequently and feels less than worth it.
Veronika on obligatory gift giving. I’m very much in favor of eliminating this entirely but that’s out of my control.
I am not at the point where I can afford fashion as a regular part of my budget, my annual spending is under $250 a year because there’s just no justifying spending good money on clothing when I have plenty that sorta kinda fits and my work doesn’t care what I look like. BUT when I do want to shop, this post full of ethical shopping sources is fantastic.
Ways to guard against financial elder abuse. I’ve been thinking of older dear friends with assets (but no children to help) and hoping we can help them guard against this as they get older and need more help.
We assumed: PiC would retire in 8 years and I would in 10, that he would last to age 95 and I til age 98 (hah), that we would continue with our current level of household income during that time.
We scored a paltry 31. At that point in time, they estimated we might:
Have $3,242/mo
Need $10,308/mo
Leaving a Potential Gap of $7,066 /mo
(This is based on a hypothetically “Significantly Below Average Market” which is just how I want these estimates to be – very pessimistic.) Not good!
Their recommendations:Consider increasing your retirement savings. If you have a workplace plan, at the very least try to contribute enough so you will receive your employer’s full match.
I would LOVE to. But I don’t have a workplace plan and it stinks that the only way to put away money for retirement is through taxable accounts if your employer is a dud in the benefits department.
That is why I’ve been focused on both dividend investing and index investing.
Reduce spending: I sure hope we’re not spending $10,000 a month in retirement! I need to have paid off our mortgage and be done with childcare to ensure that.
More than half that cost right now is daycare and housing (mortgage, property tax, insurance) so at least 20% of it will be less in a few years.
Looks like your current asset mix appears to be closely aligned with your Target Asset Mix.
We based this on the percentage of stocks in your assigned accounts. You should review this at least once a year, or when markets move significantly.
Woot! I picked our index funds all by myself. Mostly. I had a bit of analysis help from fellow money bloggers.
Almost a full year later, having made some big changes to our investing and cash holdings and adjusting assumptions, our score has improved to 60. A good increase but it still qualifies as “Needs Attention”. Without taking any possible Social Security into consideration, the current projection is that we’ll have $6,022/mo income.
New assumptions: moved PiC’s retirement age up by two years and mine down by 2 years, set both of our life expectancies to 98 years. The excessively high life expectancy isn’t because I assume we’ll really live that long but rather that we’ll need to spend a fair amount on healthcare in our later years and this is my way of adjusting our needed income expectations. If there’s a better way to do that, I’d love to hear it!
This doesn’t spell the end of our early retirement hopes like I felt it did last year when I first poked around. It gives us some decent goals to aim for in a largely uncertain plan based on a lot of assumptions.
If we did manage to close that gap significantly or even entirely, there’s still the potential college costs to think of. Certainly some of it will be covered by the early start on our 529 but at this point, I’m more comfortable planning for a combination of using savings, cash flowing some portion of it and having JB commit to some of the costs zirself.
:: How do you fiddle with your retirement expectations? How much might your future costs change?
How to Write About a Vanishing World. I have to admit that knowing this is happening has got me quite down. We’re destroying our planet, right now, for us and for our kids already born. How has dystopian science fiction NOT prepared us to stop it??
Tanja is reading my mind pretty much always: Climate change. How are you preparing for climate change in the long run?
Comments are off on this post for reasons I can totally understand but I wanted to comment here – Debt is exhausting! Apparently some people think mortgage debt is “good” (probably because of tax deductions?), I personally find it exhausting and want it GONE.
Parents, are you behind the camera or in the picture? I always forget to try and take pictures with the kids, so generally I have pictures of them playing but PiC has always from Day One made it a point to take pictures of him and JB together. Those two goofballs. I love that succession of pictures.
I don’t typically keep up with most rap feuds, though they can produce some amazing music and this is no exception, but a friend passed on the link with a note: TI had a feud with Shawty Lo so he filmed this video in Shawty Lo’s hood. I especially appreciate this in light of this money related story I just read about TI buying up homes in his old neighborhood that’s rapidly gentrifying and creating affordable housing. That’s a multi-millionaire I can tip my hat to.
One of my favorite things about having my office space settled is that even though it’s only October, almost all the Christmas gifts for the family niblings are ready to be wrapped. I might even tackle that wrapping this month to settle my stomach over the upcoming holidays. That’s because I have THE GIFT BOX.
It’s a really simple process. I keep a spreadsheet of the niblings’ ages, sizes, and favorite colors. When I spot a great sale on kids’ clothing or books, and I have a gift card, I pick out as many things as I can for up to $100 total, and voila! Their gifts are done. I can usually get a good armload of clothing so that’s always fun.
I’ll grant you that it’s not that exciting – they don’t get toys just clothing or books, but I’m all about practicality and frankly, all of the niblings have toys coming out of their ears. The clothes will get passed down through all the cousins and the books, well, you know how I feel about books. The more the better!
I also add more random gifts for JB’s friends, and the children of our friends, throughout the year during similar sales but those lucky kids get books, clothes, puzzles AND art supplies. We ran into the Aaron Brothers closing sale and picked up a stack of cool painting projects, all between $4 to $10 each, so that when ze gets invitations to an unexpected birthday party, we’re already stocked up and ready.
We aim not to go to more than 5 parties a year so that keeps us from overspending on random kids.
I’m sure this all sounds a bit cheap, so much cost control!, but it’s just not a priority to spend real money on STUFF at this age. I’d rather spend discretionary money on our library, the homeless shelter, the humane society, and educational museums.
On the environmental front, this year, once I practice enough hand sewing drawstring bags for our own use, I’d like to find cheap happy looking fabric to make up fabric gift bags for at least Christmas presents to reduce the waste of paper gift wrap. If I work up a batch for other gifts too, all the better! But this is likely to be a year round project.
Stephonee pulled off a grand student debt repayment by credit card scheme. All details here.
Basic Economic Security in the United States: How Much Income Do Working Adults Need in Each State? This breakdown puts us in California as needing somewhere between $94,000-$106,000 per year. If we didn’t have to save at all then I suppose that might do it but I can’t comprehend a world in which I didn’t always need to save. Even when we’re no longer making income, I have trouble envisioning that future in which we just spend a limited income and don’t save actively. I’m so programmed.
This seems like a bad idea: “Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company…For Nectome’s procedure to work, it’s essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).”
Folks shared their plans for saving for their children’s educations over at Stacking Pennies’s post on saving for baby.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable with stocking up the 529 aggressively, or more aggressively than we have been doing. I simply don’t know what JB will choose when the time comes, going to college and graduating is a relatively new thing in our immigrant family. All of PiC’s family went to college and even went on to higher education. That was true even if you went back a generation.
In my immediate family, I’m the only college graduate. My parents went to college but didn’t have the time or money to graduate, they were already raising us by then. Grandparents? Hah. Grandma was smart as a whip and she used her natural intelligence to the fullest, parlaying a 2nd grade education into raising a huge family and running a tiny farm and growing it into something that sustained her into her 80s.
It always disappointed Mom that I didn’t go on to graduate school because she hoped for more, and better, for me, but that just wasn’t my path. Formal education, Asian though I am, simply wasn’t my forte. Working hard and smart was. I got my English BA and hit the working road hard. Honestly, there’s not much a Masters would do for me in my current line of work, I’d have to pursue a PhD to make any difference in my working path and even then I doubt it’d be worth the investment. The ego boost doesn’t seem worth the price tag, either.
Our current savings plan: We’ve been working on contributing $14,000 (the maximum for one parent) per year to JB’s college savings aiming to go north of $100,000 but … there are too many unknowns here for me to be really comfortable with that much or more.
I simply cannot predict JB’s interests and commitment to higher ed, and what the landscape of higher ed will be in 15 years. I’m tempted to forgo much more in the way of contributions to the 529 and simply invest in our brokerage toward our hoped-for early retirement and mortgage paydown, and plan to cash flow college should the expenses rise above the saved amounts. We’d be abandoning tax free growth but if ze didn’t use the money, there would be a penalty to get that money out as well.
:: Am I being too risk averse (avoiding that penalty) with that line of thinking? What would you do?
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