Anyone willing to take the time to hash out some details with me? Give me your 2 cents on a few things?
I'm so sad it has taken me this long to find this! I've always been relatively thrifty and have often thought of our retirement years and had always sorta planned on at least 55 yo bUt I'm hoping we can do it sooner! Even if it means one of us just works part time or PRN.
First off, I suppose I should fill you in on our situation...
Income:~120k
2 rental properties: One is worth ~180-190K Owe ~86K Paid 125K Rent 1400/mo (the "worth" comes from zillow and is approx. and not to far off as I know the market here in Austin/round rock fairly well)
Other is worth ~250k HELOC on it is 36K but the house is pd off Pd ~167K for it initially Rent is 1700/mo
Primary home is worth about 305-312K and we still owe ~271K so the pmt is about 1870/mo
My questions around the house situation is we aren't counting anything as income really since we still owe money on them. So the 1700 I get for the one gets paid on the HELOC, less ~600 to cover the tax and ins that is due at the end of the year.
The other has a mortgage of 955/mo(escrowed) which we get 1400 for rent so I just send it all to the mortgage to pay extra. What would you do? My thought is pay them off as quickly as possible then throw that money at our primary or buy another rental later.
both cars are paid for and kinda old so will need newer ones eventually We aren't the type to bike so I'm gonna be realistic about us and we don't always like to do the same things so it's good for us to have our own transport but I'm cool with older and cheap!
We are in our mid 40's
We have no other debts/kids
We pay for life ins-I feel we shouldn't be doing this at this point. Would you agree? Add this money to pay into the Roth IRA's? We currently aren't adding any money to the IRA's due to the houses but I feel we can do better once I get a grip on the spending, which we are pretty thrifty overall. So I think...
I just learned that our American funds Roth's are kinda expensive and we should probably move them. Where would you move yours too? There's a total of about 88K between the 2 plus about 17K in a money market acct we have with them too. Would you put it all in the vanguard index fund as a roth?
Do you add the equity you have in your home as part of your early retirement money? You can't use that money to pay bills or groceries, so I don't understand that. I get that it applies to your total net worth but I wouldn't calculate that equity as part of my money to live on if I retire early fund. Maybe once pd for we can use the rents, less expenses. would you sell one and dump it all into a fund of some kind?
I'm so not clear on how the dividends affect taxes on young retirees. I have a lot more investigating to do on that front. But for now I just need to figure out where to put the money and learn how it all works. So I"m sure I'll have more questions later. I'm seriously hoping in the next 5 years we get it worked out!!! Does that even sound doable to you?
I can't say thank you enough to whoever takes the time to read my ramblings. my mind is racing!