Hey all,
I've been lurking around here for a bit and finally decided to throw my name in and try to track my progress and keep myself accountable to being FIRE by 2030. Although I am truly hoping to be FIRE by 2028 the wife is not as on board as I am and thinks that may be too early, but we will see how things change when we are closer. Wife and I have always been fairly frugal, she more than I, but we never really thought about long term plans and planning for the future. She is still fairly skeptical of being FIRE within 10-15 years, but she tends to be fairly pessimistic. Our (read my) biggest challenge currently is getting my wife to fully buy in to the idea and strategy to become FIRE, she is reluctant to increase her 401k contributions, and with the extra money we have leftover every month she just wants to put in a money market account earning .75% interest. She has a hard time accepting risk when it comes to money and is very reluctant to invest in the stock market (this is partially my fault for losing a good chunk of money by making some dumb decisions). I just recently got her to agree to putting money in CDs instead of the MM so we can at least earn a little more interest. Going forward I am hoping to at least split our savings outside of 401ks between our brokerage account and CDs.
Current financial position:
Monthly Income - $10,000 ($6,200 take home pay)
Monthly Expenses - $3,500 ($1,500 in monthly bills - Mortgage, electric/gas, water, insurance, internet)
401k - $90,000 - Currently contributing about $2,100 per month combined
Roth IRA - $21,000 - Currently contributing $150 a month
Brokerage - $9,000
Home Value - $250,000
Mortgage - $150,000
Car Value - $35,000 - Both are paid off, we used the money in our MM/CD accounts to pay these off
I know a lot of people around here will look at our vehicles and think we spent too much on them. Both my wife and I both had to replace our vehicles in the past year from ones we had been driving for 10+ years and feel like we got great value out of purchasing those vehicles (both were ~1-2 years used with around 30-40k miles on them at the time of purchase) so we decided to do the same this time around instead of buying older/cheaper cars. We also wanted a dependable bigger vehicle with AWD as we hike/camp/climb in places that require a AWD vehicle to get to.
We could also work towards lowering our monthly expenses. I have been tracking our income/expenses for the past year and a half while trying to work out a budget that we can stick to. We currently pay about $1,500 in bills monthly between mortgage, electric/gas, water, insurance and internet (this likely won't change anytime soon) and our budget for other expenses is currently $2,000 which we have been sticking to fairly well so far and have been within $100 every month this year.