It sounds like you're doing really well. If your expenses are accurate at $50,000 per year, then you are already FI. But if your expenses and income are both accurate and your income has been that high for several years, then it seems like your total numbers would be higher. Before you make any big decisions one way or another, it might be good to track how much you have actually spent over the last few years, just to be certain.
you are probably right, expenses are higher than $5k some months (but occasionally also less). That figure may have been a bit "finger in the air". Probably will budget a higher number to be on safe side which may delay FI
Total figures may not be as high as they could be because:
1/ we were paying off $100k of undergrad/grad student loans from 2005-2012;
2/ we didn’t really knuckle down on saving/investing as much as possible until 2015 (when income jumped following a promotion) - probably invested a bit too conservatively for several years before that as well;
3/ from 2010-2019 we lived overseas in two of the world’s most expensive (but also amazing) cities, not to mention NYC isn’t cheap either when we we have been stateside! Got out of NYC when pandemic hit and no plans to return;
4/Took a career break from June 2019-Nov 2020, after we moved back to the USA;
5/Have spent $100k on home renovations over the last 2.5 years to make the house more kid/family friendly and generally do some long-overdue repairs. (Tricky to untangle these expenses from "regular" monthly expenses)
could I have optimized a little better over the last decade? Sure, but not many regrets when I look back on it...YOLO!
Hopefully have a few years of high earnings/savings left in the tank to make up for it. And fortunately have nearly recouped any lost earnings from career break noted above too...
My takeaway from this is that you don't really have a handle on the spending associated with your current lifestyle, because you haven't had that consistent history to draw from. And that means that what you really need to do is to track what you actually spend, every month, because you're going to find it's a
lot higher than you think.
Sure, the loans were a one-time thing. But as soon as they were gone, you went abroad to a VHCOL area. And as soon as you came back, you threw $100K into the house. Now it's 529s. Later it will be buying out your sibling on the house, and after that a second home abroad. Etc.
None of these choices are "bad" or "wrong"! But they were choices, and they each added significant $$ to your required outflow. Which means that your annual spend wasn't really $50K, it was some (much) higher number. At some point, you can't really consider those one-offs to be one-offs anymore, because one bleeds into the next, so you
always have something extra going on with your money.* So if you want to be able to maintain a lifestyle that allows you to do those future things like buy out your sibling and buy a second home abroad, you need to plan for those as part of your current budget. To put it another way, your current budget needs to include
all of the things you are currently spending money on, and your future budget needs to include
all of the things you plan to spend money on. And based on what you wrote, neither of those is $50K.
On the flip side, I'd also recommend that you challenge your thinking about what you actually need to be happy. You laughed at the idea that you're already FI and can quit any time -- as if that couldn't possibly be true, because you need over 2x as much. And that's just crap. You have a whole variety of options before you. You already have more in the bank than the vast majority of Americans, and you can live forever on that $$$ if that's your priority. Or you can choose to keep working for some unidentified time to get to some bigger unidentified number. But at least recognize it is a choice that you are consciously making -- that you are
choosing to work many more years to fund a $3-5M retirement lifestyle, instead of quitting now to live a more modest one.
Of course, the problem is that as long as the costs of your future life remain undefined, you're locked into continuing to work to meet that unknown number -- which, of course, also gives you more time to find more things to spend more money on. This is an excellent time to figure out what your real priorities are -- and how much longer you'd need to work to meet those priorities. Caring for aged parents? Great priority. So what options do you have there -- home care? Nursing home? CCRC? What do those options cost, and how long do people tend to need them? Apartment abroad? Fun! What area? How much is real estate there? How much would an apartment you like actually cost to buy? What are the carrying costs? Each of these long-term ideas involves a number; you may not be able to quantify it exactly, but you can do the work to come up with an estimate now. And once you have that estimate, you can back-calculate to figure out how many more months/years you need to work to get that thing. Only then will you be in a position to really think through whether meeting that particular goal is worth the life-energy you will expend to get there.
Finally: words matter. You say your DW likely won't get a very high-paid position, but then assume she could make $100K or more. Dude, that
is high-paid!! It may not feel like it, given your history with VHCOL areas, but it is. So acknowledge that and give it its due. You are currently a high-earner, even if it doesn't feel like it by comparison to others in your immediate area, and you could be very high-earners if your wife goes back to work. That gives you many, many choices that not everyone has. So make sure you make those choices intentionally, and not by simply drifting along in the high-earning, high-spending life that is so easy to fall into in that part of the country.
*Ask me how I know. When we finally finished a big home remodel c. 2007, I thought, wow, that was a metric shit-ton of money, but at least it's done and our spending can revert to normal. Then it was a new car. Then a deck. Then a new roof. Then an unexpected double-vacation-time year that led to a month of travel. And 10 years later, I realized that our spending
still hadn't decreased to what I considered "normal," because there was always something extra happening, so I'd better consider that extra stuff part of my normal.
