Love the site, have learned a lot. About 2 years ago, we came ( late in life, I'm 55, she is 53) to the realization that we desired strongly to become FIRE and travel. We had lived overseas for several years due to my job, and just absolutely fell in love with the experiences of actually living, not just visiting other cultures.
So, we began a fast sometimes brutal journey to downsize, cut back on debt, and aggressively start saving. We piled up oodles of frequent flier miles that will help with our travel costs.
Our FIRE goal date is the end of April, 2018. Our main strategy was to become real estate investors, in SFH's. We sold our beautiful, perfect place in the country (something we still ache over) and began buying Class C housing in our little town, where the rental market is exceptional. We know own 9 rentals and a small house that we downsized to and have remodeled. Our income from the rentals after expenses will be in the neighborhood of 2k per month. My wife is already retired with a small pension and insurance. Her pension is about 1k per month. We are aggressively saving what we can until our FIRE date. We don't have a lot of other assets, but here is what we expect them to be as of that date. 401l/IRA, 150k. Taxable investment account, 50k. Emergency fund, 15k. Rental property maintenance fund, 20k, plus we will add about 500 per month to it, this was not included in the 2k per month of rental income. I'll probably have another 10k or so in cash payout from unused vacation time and money I squirrel away. I also have about 15k in precious metals sitting in the safe.
Our debts are ( not counting rental property mortgages)
Mortgage 575 per month
No car payments, no other bills except for an airline rewards credit card with a balance of about 2k.
Our travel plans are to take 1 or 2 trips a year of 2-3 months duration. We can rent an apartment for a month much cheaper than a weeks hotel, and we will use frequent flyer miles to go back and forth.
So, to summarize, we'll have about 3k a month in income, pretty much tax free. About 250k in assets, but 150k of that can't be touched until I'm 59 1/2. Which is ok, I count that as a raise 2 1/2 years after retirement. Then Social Security for me in another 2 1/2 years. Another raise, WOOHOO. LOL
Doable?