There’s no reason to treat the monthly mortgage/property tax/insurance payments any different than your rent payment. But I hate debt and would probably treat it differently, so I get where you’re coming from.
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Well my current lifestyle is naturally frugal. I don’t care about my phone or gadgets or cars. I like having a job and going to work, I’d just rather have one with less stress and hassle. I’m not unhappy with my job exactly, I’d just much rather have one that I can leave behind when I go home. To me that’s retirement. I could see myself working twenty or thirty hours a week until I’m in my seventies.
These polls are not useful other than to figure out how much investment industry sales propaganda people have internalized. Most people don’t have any idea how much they will need so they just feed back some number they heard once.
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Definitely guilty of that.
White Coat Investor seems like a good place to start. I haven’t dug deep into the articles or courses because the content doesn’t apply to my career choices, but I have heard the guy talk on a few podcasts and he was very knowledgeable. My assumption is they will have a lot more understanding of typical compensation and maybe some calculators that can be used to estimate the overall benefits for your occupation.
The other thing I’d say is that once you start to have a better grasp of those numbers, it would probably be worth the time to talk to a qualified financial advisor. But I don’t think it would be worth it until you have a good grasp of things so you can be able to ask really valuable questions. Almost all the FIRE folks are DIYers for their planning, but with your income potential we could be talking about very large sums of money for simply doing something incrementally better.
Disclaimer: It used to be just the doctor that wrote for this site but their about page shows a staff of 16. Not sure if that means anything but it looks like the site has turned full on into a business.
It’s a tough financial planning project but it’s not insurmountable.
One of the things that people mess up is that they expect their financial plan as they approach and are in retirement to be as simple as their financial plan when they’re saving for retirement before age 50. But this is not the case.
Retirement saving/planning before 50 is actually easy to plan because there is a general plan that works for almost everybody: budget and spend less than you earn, saving and invest the difference, prioritize saving in employer sponsored plans with a match, utilize tax deferral vehicles, invest in low cost diversified index funds. The single simple recipe works for 95%+ of people, maybe 99%.
Retirement saving/planning at retirement is difficult because it is NOT a generalizable process. Your retirement plan as you near retirement becomes specific, not general. You need to know: where will I live in retirement, with whom, what will be my home ownership situation, will I have health care coverage, do I want to travel a lot, do I want to leave an inheritance, what expenses will I have in retirement that I don’t have now and vice versa, what employer pensions do I have, what are my government social security benefits going to be, what are my other savings, when should I start to draw them down, how do they get taxed differently, etc. etc. etc.
It’s possible to work all this out in spreadsheets, or another option is to pay a fee for service financial planner that doesn’t sell financial products like funds. But one thing that doesn’t work is looking for the one simple plan that everyone can use like pre-retirement savings. Retirement and post-retirement planning are specific to your situation, there’s really no way around it.
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Happiness definitely depends more on the strength of relationships and the capacity/habit to regularly experience and express awe, appreciation, gratitude, etc.
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It’s actually a good idea to stagger retirements within a marriage. Retirement is a big adjustment and two people simultaneously making a big adjustment and spending all day together can be a major relationship stressor. Our retirement plan has my wife retiring a year before I do for this reason.
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For sure. And with happiness solved we’re 1/3 of the way to solving well-being. Morality and meaning are a bit tougher, but FIRE-able.
Not for me.
Mortality = my way or the highway
Meaning = NY Rangers Stanley Cup
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My wife’s two years younger than me and gives me the side eye every time I tell her she’s giving us a couple extra years of work on the back end. I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m kidding.
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Sure but if one person has the Financial Independence Retire Early mindset and the other plans on working the next 20 years in her regular job I could easily see resentment.
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You’re certainly correct. That’s getting at a question of priorities. My wife and I have the same priorities - retire early enough to enjoy some years where we’re still physically healthy enough to do some traveling and activities. We share the same values and have a shared responsibility to get us there. A 20 year gap seems more like a difference in values, which could be problematic.
Anyway, I have a full proof plan if needed. No matter what I do, if I bring a puppy home all is forgiven. Can’t rely on that trick too often though.
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100% and that’s why I started the conversation recently. We mostly have separate finances and she has a higher savings rate than myself at the moment! Hopefully 10 years down the road I’ll have made a convincing show of things and she’ll choose to join me. 
Any mines you’ve encountered along the way and have any tips?
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I’m in the same boat. I’m on track to be able to retire at 50 and then plan to actually retire at my leisure once I don’t enjoy going to work. Wife is much more financially conservative and also just wants to work longer. I’m a few years older, so not sure she’s going to be happy if I retire when she still plans to work for 5-10 more years.
I’ve brought up the issue a few times, and hasn’t gone particularly well, so have some work to do. Maybe I’ll try to find some part time job so not fully retired.
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Just tell her you’re going to work and go to the library. I’ll meet you there.
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No advice, just do what you’re doing. Communication and make sure expectations are aligned.
But man there’s nothing worse than coming home from a hard day’s work and seeing your partner laying about the house. I had that happen to me years ago when my girlfriend at the time was unemployed and looking for a job. Even though I rationally knew it was of no fault of her own it still irked me sometimes. That’s what got me thinking about one person FIREing it up and the other person just going to work every day with no end in sight. Maybe it would be fine but maybe not and it’s hard to completely work things out in advance. Because that feeling of inequity and imbalance isn’t rational or planned, it’s just felt, you know what I mean?
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“Nothing worse” is not really accurate now that I’m thinking about it, just kind of irritating after a particularly bad day. There were a bunch of other problems with that relationship though, most of which were probably my fault.
Yeah obviously communicating those expectations is big. On the flip side of things, the retired partner is gonna get resentful if the attitude of the working one is “well of course now you’re the de facto housewife/husband and you do 100% of the cooking and cleaning, right?”
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Anybody else just planning the ole “Jump off a bridge” technique when they run out of money?
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