Congrats on the marriage! (We married young too. Best decision ever.)
Does your wife bring in any income, or will she in the future? Are you merging your finances?
Thank you, thank you! She does bring in income, but she works contract as a wedding planner. She's only been doing it for the last year and with how the business in run, obviously there's a cycle between people booking the venue, paying, and executing the wedding. So we are still figuring out how the venue is going to pay her. It also means she has high and low seasons and I do not have enough data to project that for her yet. I will be able to have a better grasp on it next calendar year.
She has another contract job that will bring in a few hundred a month that follows the school calendar. So that should pick up in August. All her income will go directly into whatever our stash goal is, sans her allowance.
Our finances are merged. She doesn't have to worry about any of the expenses and is happy with just an 'allowance' of $100 every month. This is accounted for in the above budget.
Welcome to the forums and congrats on the marriage! I'll leave the budge for other people to comment on.
Since you are newly married, I would think part of your next steps should be making sure you have a clear foundation and goals for how you want to build your life and what you want to make happen. Are you both interested and on board with FIRE? What does your ideal life look like? What concrete steps do you want to take over the next month/year/two years/five years? If you are both interested in early retirement, what does that actually look like for you? What do you anticipate your needs will be? How much money will you need to make that happen? What big expenses do you have coming up and how much will you have to put aside per month so you don't have any nasty surprises? Does your spending match your goals/ideals/morals? How do you decide together on spending money, what is your process? What is your policy for helping out or loaning money to family?
If you can figure all this out early on it will make you a stronger team and significantly reduce the chance for miscommunication/resentment and money issues.
You better believe this was discussed ad nauseam prior to getting married. She is very low maintenance and a fantastic financial partner. She's probably a bigger saver than I am, and thats saying a good bit. See above about the allowance, she's good with putting all her money towards goals and just getting an allowance; trusting me to put us on the right FIRE track.
My original 3 year goal that we last discussed was having our $96k mortgage paid off. However, at 3% interest I've been reading that it's probably best for FIRE to build our stash elsewhere first. I'm just trying to figure out where best to put that stash, start seeing what numbers those produce to see what changes need to be made for a 10-yr FIRE.
