My new husband and I stumbled across this website a handful of months ago and are very grateful to MMM, his wife, and this community for what we've learned. We're also very fortunate in that we (especially my husband) didn’t even know we had quite a bit of stubble and therefore walked into this new awareness of FI with a frugal mindset and a healthy net worth.
A week or two of intensely reading through this website we realized, "oh my gosh, could we really retire in less than 10 years!?!?"* (We're in our mid-30s.) With this new realization, it seems like a lot has changed: how we view money (blindly saving and sitting on cash, vs. investing assets, vs. liabilities), how we picture raising our children (actually being around!), and so forth.
Anyway, I wanted to share a couple of fun experiences we've had since.
We stumbled onto MMM while researching how to combine our newly wedded finances. We met with our financial advisor (at a “MegaBank” branch) to whom we were (at that time) ignorantly paying a large management fee (1.5%!) to lock us into “special-only-available-to-MegaBank” funds that also had their own high fees (another ~1.5%!!). We wanted to see what he thought of our savings and investment strategy – and we were starting to realize we needed to bail on the managed fund investments so we wanted to discuss that too.
The first grin-worthy moment is when this smug banker dude, with his nice suit and shiny watch, asked us for our spending and earning rates. He had to verify twice that what we said was our savings rate (>65%) was accurate. Then, he asked for our desired retirement age. "Early at 60?" he asked. My husband and I tried to be mature but we busted out laughing. After we regained our composure, we told him that we'd like to retire in less than 10 years. What a great feeling that was. Surprisingly, he seemed depressed/upset about it. He crunched the numbers into his program, sighed, and verified that it was indeed possible and then quickly moved on to how we wanted to invest the extra cash we’d saved in the previous year. After a few more weeks of reading, we’d moved all of our moveable investments (taxable and Roth IRA) out of MegaBank and into Vanguard.
A second moment that made us smile is when we met with our HR department to change our payroll deductions to where we now shovel all we can into tax advantaged retirement programs. We didn't let her in on our <10 year exit plan, but as we were walking out she said, "so you plan on retiring in 10 years or so I assume?" Yep. :) We’re also fortunate enough to have the workplace option of deferring twice the “normal” limit (both 403b and 457b for each of us), and being able to reasonably live on what’s left over through MMM lifestyle. The HR department lady said as we were doing it, “Boy, must be nice to have some other external income to live on”... another grin-worthy moment.
Would anyone else like to share little moments like these that remind you of how eye-opening the FI/FIRE plan is when you realize it’s possible? It feels like we're in on a huge life secret, which we would love to share with everyone who would listen – only we're finding they don't want to talk about it. (That's a different topic altogether.)
I'd love to hear your stories!
*Turns out after we ran numbers to death and realized we already have ~15-18x annual** expenses, we should be FI within 5 years.
** Pre-child annual expenses. We’ll see how that goes...
