Hello all!
I am a longtime lurker on the blog/forum, but now I have a topic to post!
I come from an immigrant family that has always been frugal/mustachian in its habits. My husband's family... not so much. For a lot of very weird, complicated reasons, my father in law has decided to liquidate some of his assets, and will be giving both my husband and his sister a good amount of money- about 100k, give or take.
I am not sure what to do with this.
I am 31, my husband is 36. Our income is about 130k combined, and we periodically get pretty good raises. We have no loans, our home (420k) is paid off, and we contribute the maximum to our respective 401ks. We have about 30k in cash savings at this moment. We have 2 children, ages 2 and 4. Because my husband has been working for a university for a long time, both of our children have tuition remission to our local state university. I have no other college savings for them because I have been very aggressive in getting us where we are right now college savings took a backseat. We have about 110k in our retirement savings combined as of this moment, and I also am going to have a pretty mediocre pension eventually.
We are not really interested in retiring early at this moment, because we both eschewed more lucrative careers to find relaxed, flexible jobs that we enjoy. I would like to achieve financial independence anyway, because that is just how I'm wired, and my husband is too. We also don't have any "luxuries" that we are dying to buy. The most expensive thing we do is DIY projects around the house, which I work into our budget.
Another issue is that we live in a large metropolitan area but in a less desirable suburb. We may be stuck sending our kids to a private school, but we don't know. I am willing to give public school a chance. Sometimes I wonder if I should take this money and move somewhere "better" with better schools. But no matter how I look at it, the math just does not work out. We would move farther away from our jobs, into a worse house, and end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more. I feel we might as well pay for private school at that point.
I am somewhat interested in purchasing a rental property because there is a lot of development going on nearby and I feel our area is poised for some appreciation. We live in one of the last affordable pockets of a very expensive region. There are still small homes and townhouses to be had for 150k or less, but I feel like eventually this is no longer going to be the case (at least not in a safe area). The home we currently live in could sell for about 100k more than what we bought it for a few years ago.
What would you do in this scenario?