I've posted my numbers here before for advice/validation and had great responses. I feel like my opinions on sprinting toward FIRE are changing due to my wife and I's current situation. The situation is that we have a 14 month old son, and we've majorly twisted our work schedules to keep him at home (financially it's a wash, but it's just something we wanted to do. Love having the little guy around more). I've managed to shift my work schedule to Mon-Thurs (10+ hr days) to watch my son on Friday, and my wife has managed to drop to 60% FT in order to watch him Tues-Thurs. Monday's are for my inlaws.
Maybe this is just part of having a toddler in general, but we feel like we're in a rut. I come home right as dinner is being served, see the kid just long enough to see him eat before bed, give him a bath, put him to bed, get both my wife and I showered, and plop down in a tired heap on the couch. This gives us 1.5-2hrs on a good day to even say hello to each other. If I have any sort of doctor appointment or anything to take care of, I have to wake up 1-2 hrs early for a couple of days and work 12hrs days to make it up. It's made me think greatly of reducing my hours to spend more time at home.
I'll try to give a condensed financial numbers:
- Age 31
- Income (Me: $103k, Her: $50k(as a part timer))
- Home - Just refi'ed $284k on a $375k home to 3.5% for 30 years.
- Max 401k's, max Roth IRA, contribute to 529, contribute extra to mortgage
- Ample "emergency fund"
According to my rough excel projections, if we continue this path (assuming my wife stays at 60% indefinitely, which wouldn't be the case) we'd essentially completely take care of our post-60 retirement obligations and college obligations in approximately 5-6 years. After which, we'd probably downshift our employment and coast until our kids were in college, if I could convince my wife we're actually FI. (Note: My wife doesn't even think FI is possible, because she's just naturally frugal and doesn't realize what we're saving). We have on our side a fairly nice pension from my wife's company.
If I were to drop to 80% Full-time employment today, and reduce our 401k contributions accordingly to keep our take-home roughly the same, my spreadsheet tells me that it would be 7-9 years where we hit that "post-60 is taken care of" point, and could cruise to the finish.
If we plan on working to some degree until we're 45-50 anyways, does this sound alright? Any glaring holes in this plan? If I had to reduce retirement contributions at all, would it make more sense to reduce the 401k or the Roth IRA? I don't even know if we'd have to work until we were 50, even if we scaled back to 50% FT employment after the "post-60 is taken care of" point, because of our savings rate.
Too many things swirling around my head, I apologize.