427Vette
Recycles dryer sheets
Seeing that we are going to have a daytime high temp of -17 degrees below 0 today I thought it would be a good time to chime in here and introduce myself. My wife and I are both 41 years old with no kids and I am a complete newbie here. I/we have been investing for a number of years with no direct plan but I have always followed the advice of my dad who taught me to go to bed with more money than I woke up with everyday. It appears that most of you people are very well versed and educated on the subject and I am a little embarassed about the lack of my own knowledge in this area. I wont even try to pretend that I can speak at your level. With that being said I need a little help, or ideas, advice, opinions on how I am doing on a potential early retirement. I thought we were doing pretty well but after a meeting with two different financial planners and getting simular feed back I was dissapointed to say the least. They both had us slated to work full time for at least another 20 years. I thought that the outlook was a little better than that. Or perhaps they both just want me to keep funding their lifestyles.
We run a small contracting business together that we run out of our homeplace so it is hard to determine a personal budget that we currently live on. It seems that no matter how we try to seperate business cost from personal cost they somehow overlap slightly. But I believe that we would spend about $4,000.00 a month without business expenses. It is impossible to set a percentage of income to invest too. This all depends on what happens throughout the course of the year and what equipment we need to replace and so forth. We invest as much as we can as often as we can. However with that being said we always max out our IRA contributions plus a little extra which always equals $40,000- $50,000 annually.
Our total net worth is $2,500,000. Hopefully I calculated this correctly, I included in that number my own home, a couple of investment properties and 2 pieces of raw/recreational land, a lake cabin, my collector cars, equipment etc. deducting any debt of course. In march of 2015 we will be debt free as we owe a little on one of the investment properties yet. We have $1,360,000 invested in various Municipal Bonds, Roths, Traditional IRA's, Simple IRA's, and cash. We have been averaging about 7-8% returns on our money.
At this point I am looking to see if I can get opinions to see if the financial planners are correct and I need to plan on setting myself up to work for twenty more years (I certainly hope not!!!) or what sort of changes I need to be making now to prevent that. If you need other information please ask.
Another thing to think about is if I am able to quit working I will have a business to sell or at the very least have an equipment auction. This money would be able to be put to work rather than being tied up in depreciating assets.
Looking forward to inteligent responses, thanks in advance!
We run a small contracting business together that we run out of our homeplace so it is hard to determine a personal budget that we currently live on. It seems that no matter how we try to seperate business cost from personal cost they somehow overlap slightly. But I believe that we would spend about $4,000.00 a month without business expenses. It is impossible to set a percentage of income to invest too. This all depends on what happens throughout the course of the year and what equipment we need to replace and so forth. We invest as much as we can as often as we can. However with that being said we always max out our IRA contributions plus a little extra which always equals $40,000- $50,000 annually.
Our total net worth is $2,500,000. Hopefully I calculated this correctly, I included in that number my own home, a couple of investment properties and 2 pieces of raw/recreational land, a lake cabin, my collector cars, equipment etc. deducting any debt of course. In march of 2015 we will be debt free as we owe a little on one of the investment properties yet. We have $1,360,000 invested in various Municipal Bonds, Roths, Traditional IRA's, Simple IRA's, and cash. We have been averaging about 7-8% returns on our money.
At this point I am looking to see if I can get opinions to see if the financial planners are correct and I need to plan on setting myself up to work for twenty more years (I certainly hope not!!!) or what sort of changes I need to be making now to prevent that. If you need other information please ask.
Another thing to think about is if I am able to quit working I will have a business to sell or at the very least have an equipment auction. This money would be able to be put to work rather than being tied up in depreciating assets.
Looking forward to inteligent responses, thanks in advance!