Hi All,
Long time reader but first time poster. I’m a big fan of the community here and was hoping I’d get everyone’s take on our next steps towards financial independence. We recently hit a big milestone (non-mortgage debt free + home purchase) and our goal is definitely to reach financial independence and make sure we have an optimized plan to get there. So if you’re up for it, please read along and give your 2 cents on the good, the bad, and the ugly and how you would suggest we proceed.
About Us:
- Married to my wonderful wife with 3 great kids.
- Both in our early 30s.
- Wife stays at home and will be homeschooling the kids.
- I make around 120k plus have incentives and equity grants (around 140k with those, but they can vary up or down).
- We just bought a home (on the lower end of our range) with a 20% down payment. Mortgage + Escrow is about 1/7 of our take home pay.
- No CC, student, or auto debt (paid off everything over the last 3-5 years!).
- 6-9 month emergency fund.
- About 50k in retirement funds.
- We have a minivan (family car) and a smaller commuter car – both are paid off.
- Live about 10 miles from work.
Our main financial goal over the past 5 years has been to pay off all debt, increase income, and complete graduate school. Now that those goals are done, my primary financial concern now is that our retirement accounts aren’t much to boast about just yet. However, going from renting to owning will save us $500 a month in payments plus all of the cash we had going into paying off debt is now free to use elsewhere.
I clearly need to start investing more, but how is best to do it to minimize my time to FI? Max my 401k and then hit a Roth IRA? Start saving cash for another down payment for an investment property? Direct stock purchases…. stockpile baseball cards… something else?
If you can, feel free to case study my rear-end and play pretend. What would you do? About how far from FI am I?
Thanks in advance.