I have been thinking about this for such a long time, that I feel the need to share. In sharing parts of my situation my wife may appear to be “not on the page” concerning FI. I don’t mean to be rude about how her in any way, but without some context, the story is kind of meaningless.
I first heard about FI in the summer of 2016, via an online article about Jacob. Nice read, but it seemed to extreme for me. None the less, I found MMM a few months later, and that really got the ball rolling.
I am 36 years old, and my wife and I have two children, but despite this late start on the FI journey, we made some real progress in the first few months, where needless costs were reduced and removed, and I began to gain a few more practical skills myself. We built a small portfolio of stocks that were liquated in 2017, where we choose to invest in a holiday home close to where we live (not exactly following the standard FI path, but it generates an ok rental income, we continue to do some work on the holiday home, potentially it could be sold for a profit).
Also in 2017, my wife started a college degree to become a high school teacher. Fair enough, we agreed on that. One consequence of this was that our income fell and progress in “building the stash” slowed a lot. This is also the 5th time that she is starting a college degree, so it really has to work out this time.
During this time, I cut down on a lot digressionary spending relating to myself. At the same time, my wife has continued her main hobby, horse riding (dressage). As many of you probably, owning a horse and travelling around the country for competitions is probably one of the least FI friendly hobbies you can have.
So that just about brings me to where I am now. Still optimizing “small stuff” in the budget, while substantial amounts of our income (I take home about 80% of our income) are spent each month on horse riding. And before you ask, the horse riding is not negotiable.
I stopped reading the forums at ERE and MMM in early 2018, because I honestly got a little depressed by reading these journals of people in their 20’s really hitting the ball out of the park each month, whereas I was making very modest progress, despite the hard work.
I have run the numbers (believe me, I have done this many times), and I still believe that we could reach some level of FI by the time I am 49, if we keep on saving, and my wife starts teaching in two years time. But even if that goal is reached, I have a distinct feeling that my wife’s expensive hobby would continue, and she would probably have to work to sustain it – so I would appear to be a stay at home husband (yeah, maybe I should just get over that).
Alternatively, as such a large portion of my income already goes to un-FI related things, then perhaps I should consider a little more digressionary spending on myself (like subscribing to watch Premier League football again, and perhaps some upgrade to my 2001 Kawasaki?).
Adopting MMM thinking has made our finances more robust. But FI is a pretty distant target.
One more thing – FI sometimes gives the impression of enabling a kind of utopian family life and releasing you form the shackles of some soul draining job. I guess that this is the truth for some people. To be honest, I often have to look after our two young children alone in the evenings and at weekends, for varying reasons. While it can be fun, it is often really hard work. I sometimes find myself looking forward to work the next day. I work in engineering, and I am lucky enough to have (mostly) great colleagues and tasks that I see some value in solving. Work isn’t always great (I worked at another company for 1½ years that certainly wasn’t fun), but it doesn’t have to be bad.
While this post is irrelevant to single people pursuing FI, I think perhaps other people are in similar positions where they are more or less single handily supporting a whole family, including a wife who really isn’t on board with the idea.
Any creative ideas on how to handle this situation?