Hi all, I just posted my first couple of posts so I guess I should post my "story" here .
I'm 40 with a wife (38) and child (7). We both work and have a very good combined income > $300K. However, there is a lot of stress and doing all the child-related tasks on top of our jobs is not the way I would prefer to live. Some people like the go-go busy-all-the-time pace; not me.
I have been working at my job with slowly increasing salary for almost 18 years - since college. I am bored and somewhat burnt out on it. My wife is a doctor, so her path was long and arduous and she has only been making good money for 3.5 years. She likes some aspects of her job, but the hours and on-call shifts are too much.
The good news is that we are both reasonably frugal and I caught the RE bug in 1999. We saved pretty well even through the "lean" years while we had a younger child in daycare/preschool and my wife was doing her residency and fellowship training. Now that she is making a nice salary we save easily (conservative estimate) $90K-$100K per year.
Net worth is currently around $1.4m, consisting of 401K/403B balances, taxable investments with Vanguard, and a lesser amount of stock options, home equity, cash. I have some unvested stock options that are worth > $100K which will fully vest in a little over 3 years.
We have a sizable mortgage with still about $385K remaining to pay. Also my wife's med school loans are still at $130K or so. The net worth factors in these debts, however, and both loans are at great interest rates.
My plan for now is to hang on at work at least until those stock options vest - so 3-4 more years minimum. After that I will evaluate our net worth and might consider quitting my job. Even if my wife continues full time our lives would improve by having me do most of the child-related work (which I already do out of necessity due to our schedules and work commitments) and take back some of the house work which we pay for (cleaning/mowing). I would be more inclined to cook more interesting things, etc.
I would hope my wife is willing to stay full time for a few years more after that. Her income is higher and we would still be bringing in > $200K. It would slow our savings rate by a good amount, but we may already have a net worth in the vicinity of $2m at that point. The nest egg will grow as long as we don't tap it.
My thinking for 10 years from now is that my wife can shift to part time work. I think she would enjoy working part time reasonable hours. I think if she quit entirely she would have a lot of trouble filling her time. She doesn't have a wealth of hobbies/interests like I do or a burning desire to spend a lot more time on them.
I'll end this ramble here for now. Our future looks very nice, but I feel like I need to grind away for at LEAST 3-4 years before we start having some interesting choices to make. And I will need to be sure my wife is on board. She knows about my plans in general, but maybe hasn't thought through a lot of the details like I have.
Oh, and there are a lot of things I would like to do after ER - a couple of which might (long shot) produce income. I am not planning to be a couch potato. As for now, I spend too much time reading ER forums and blogs .
I'm 40 with a wife (38) and child (7). We both work and have a very good combined income > $300K. However, there is a lot of stress and doing all the child-related tasks on top of our jobs is not the way I would prefer to live. Some people like the go-go busy-all-the-time pace; not me.
I have been working at my job with slowly increasing salary for almost 18 years - since college. I am bored and somewhat burnt out on it. My wife is a doctor, so her path was long and arduous and she has only been making good money for 3.5 years. She likes some aspects of her job, but the hours and on-call shifts are too much.
The good news is that we are both reasonably frugal and I caught the RE bug in 1999. We saved pretty well even through the "lean" years while we had a younger child in daycare/preschool and my wife was doing her residency and fellowship training. Now that she is making a nice salary we save easily (conservative estimate) $90K-$100K per year.
Net worth is currently around $1.4m, consisting of 401K/403B balances, taxable investments with Vanguard, and a lesser amount of stock options, home equity, cash. I have some unvested stock options that are worth > $100K which will fully vest in a little over 3 years.
We have a sizable mortgage with still about $385K remaining to pay. Also my wife's med school loans are still at $130K or so. The net worth factors in these debts, however, and both loans are at great interest rates.
My plan for now is to hang on at work at least until those stock options vest - so 3-4 more years minimum. After that I will evaluate our net worth and might consider quitting my job. Even if my wife continues full time our lives would improve by having me do most of the child-related work (which I already do out of necessity due to our schedules and work commitments) and take back some of the house work which we pay for (cleaning/mowing). I would be more inclined to cook more interesting things, etc.
I would hope my wife is willing to stay full time for a few years more after that. Her income is higher and we would still be bringing in > $200K. It would slow our savings rate by a good amount, but we may already have a net worth in the vicinity of $2m at that point. The nest egg will grow as long as we don't tap it.
My thinking for 10 years from now is that my wife can shift to part time work. I think she would enjoy working part time reasonable hours. I think if she quit entirely she would have a lot of trouble filling her time. She doesn't have a wealth of hobbies/interests like I do or a burning desire to spend a lot more time on them.
I'll end this ramble here for now. Our future looks very nice, but I feel like I need to grind away for at LEAST 3-4 years before we start having some interesting choices to make. And I will need to be sure my wife is on board. She knows about my plans in general, but maybe hasn't thought through a lot of the details like I have.
Oh, and there are a lot of things I would like to do after ER - a couple of which might (long shot) produce income. I am not planning to be a couch potato. As for now, I spend too much time reading ER forums and blogs .