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That was deeeep. Interesting, but deep thoughts.
I'm not sure whether that's a compliment or complaint. :-)
What are your priorities when planning for FI? In my head "FI ASAP" would entail working a full time job and sacking away as much money as possible during that time while still maintaining a MMM quality of life.
While I attended graduate school, my wife worked full time and we saved approx 50% of our combined income. The original plan was for me to transition to a full-time position after finishing the grad program. With no outstanding debt and a sizeable savings, we'd be in a position to buy a house and have kid(s) while still maintaining a good savings rate. My wife would take care of the kid(s) full-time and run her own part-time wedding photography business.
We changed course when I surveyed the job market for my field and saw that: a) the possibility of me landing a full-time position was incredibly low, especially with the area of specialization I work in, b) if I ended up landing a full-time job, it would very probably be in an area of the country that we didn't want to live in (due to possible reduction in quality of life, less opportunity for my wife to make money from her side business), c) my wife's earning potential was greater than mine and she likes her job.
All of this occurred prior to us consciously planning for FI, but the 50% savings rate and my wife's full time position gave us quite a bit of flexibility. First, we didn't have to wait to buy a house and have kid(s) if we didn't want to. Second, I would be able to pursue business ideas that had been brewing while I was in grad school but couldn't really act on at the time. Even if they flopped, we'd still be in the black and relentlessly saving.
Then we started planning for FI. Purchasing a home fit right in with our FI goals. We were able to reduce our monthly housing costs and start building equity. We also figured out a way to hyper-accelerate repayment of the mortgage. Paying off the mortgage probably wasn't optimal for FI (we very likely could have seen greater returns from investment than the savings from paying off the mortgage early), but we figured it'd help reduce risk while I worked to get my business ideas off the ground, since a stable income from me is even less of a requirement now than it was when we owed the mortgage.
To accelerate reaching FI, we also reduced expenses, my wife has received promotions, and we rented out rooms in our house. Our savings rate,
sans a steady income from me, is approx 70%. This puts us in a good position to start having kid(s) without compromising FI too much. It has most certainly given us great flexibility w/ respect to raising kid(s). We don't have to send them to day care and we can home school (currently leaning towards this).
We've also considered moving back to our hometown in a few years, which might postpone our reaching FI a bit. But we've been loners since moving away and want to be with family and friends. And it's unlikely they'll be convinced by my exhortation that they should all move closer to us! :-)
As far as justifications go: Starting my own business can potentially be in line with reaching FI faster. If it ends up being a net drag on FI, at least I'll have learned something, gained experience that I otherwise wouldn't, and hopefully had some fun. Having kid(s) is time-sensitive and we don't want to miss that train. Relationship building and skill collecting is what really allows my wife and I to grow as complete people (as opposed to, say, experience and "stuff" collecting). We can build skills just about anywhere, but it's hard to do this, work toward FI,
and build all new relationships from scratch in an unfamiliar environment.