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With rates as low as they are, I don't know why you would pay cash for a home. You can lock a 30y fixed rate for like 3.5%? You can almost certainly average better returns than that with your cash over that long of a time horizon, and effectively arbitrage the difference. Admittedly, I have a...

Yea, I absolutely would pivot most or all of my portfolio to low risk / low return once I actually pull the trigger. That's why I think whatever my number is, it needs to generate enough income for me at like 4% return :)

Thanks! Our spending habits are way below our income. We are reliably saving $25k/mo at the moment, and annual bonuses/stock are saved on top of that. And by "saved", I mean plowed into various investment vehicles. I do a lot of real estate investing. Also building a vacation house on a ski...

Thanks for the perspective - that’s fantastic to hear!

Yep! I love cooking so playing around with the idea of culinary school. I’ve been watching a lot of woodworking videos and think that looks awesome. Being able to make tables with that resin fill, I think would be great. I love traveling and fishing, don’t do enough of that now so will...

Admittedly haven’t looked, but I already work in tech consulting in a very niche space (cyber security, focused on large global banks) and sometimes work gets subcontracted because it’s just hard to find people with this skill set. So I’d just become one of those that gets subcontracted to...

Thanks! Regarding monthly, there’s no reason other than habit. And it only takes maybe 5 minutes because I’m adjusting balances in a spreadsheet column for a handful of cash, brokerage, retirement accounts, and then associated debt balances (car, mortgage, etc). The totals are just...

Thanks! I should add that around $500K of that is equity in our primary residence, and I think most folks exclude that from their NW numbers since it's not really "spendable", so maybe I got a bit jumpy :) Still feels pretty great though!

I keep a spreadsheet in which I track my NW monthly, so I have a running series of columns so I can always look back and see how it fluctuated month to month over time. I just did a preliminary completion of August (I usually do that, and then update on the last day of the month). I'm happy to...

I'm pretty active in real-estate investing in general, both on the land development side, as well as rentals. I own a 10x unit building in Long Beach, CA. It's not inexpensive - it's probably a $2.8M asset. A worrisome turn of events is not simply the economic impact on folks that rent (it was...

Similar situation, but a few years behind you. Currently 42, was the CISO for a F100 corporation, now run the Security portfolio at a large consulting firm. Current NW around $3.5M, but would expect I'll have another $2M on the pile by the time I'm 49. I'm already itching to pull the rip cord...

Actually, the real opportunity cost is our time. I've had a few tragic reminders of that in the last ~2 years or so. And yes, $1M/yr sounds huge when you're looking at it from $320k/yr, but that's combined and my wife is about $250k of that, and you're right in observing that we all think that...

Congrats. Very similar stats. And very similar mental struggles. I'm 42. I live in SoCal. NW is currently around $3.5m, but going up quickly because of rapid spikes in income. Every day, I wonder if today is the day I should pull the plug though. Married, no kids, no plans to have kids. Two...

Yes, it's 100% gambling. I thought the sarcastic / jokey tone of my post came through via the laughy face at the end, but clearly not. So to clarify for anyone else that was confused, I am not actually advocating that people run out and buy a bunch of call options after a down day, with the...

Or, whether you're a Bull or a Bear, take advantage of the short term volatility and just buy a bunch of call options at close of trading after a massive selloff, since the trend seems to be that the underlying equity pops back the next morning. Sell your options for a nice 300% return and call...

Your way is fine, but too complicated for most people. If most people were that disciplined, stupid passwords wouldn't be a problem, but here we are. Regarding a password manager getting hacked - see my prior post. You aren't worth the effort, and you would have to be compromised individually...

I didn't read every post here, but I've worked in InfoSec for ~20 years; I try to stop bad guys on the interwebs for a living, and I use LastPass. You can certainly point to obscure ways a bad guy might get at your password vault, but frankly, you aren't worth the effort. The name of the game...

Depending on the material, walls can seriously dampen wifi signals. Your kitchen appliances, probably not so much. Also, 5GHz has faster potential throughput as compared to 2.4GHz, but also has shorter range. Wifi Extenders will suffer the same problem, so they really need to be positioned well...

Thanks much. Your observations are fair; I have the data to really analyze our spending (my wife plugs everything in to Quicken every Monday night like clockwork, but I haven't spent the time to isolate what will persist after retirement, vs. what is just superfluous today). Seems obvious now...

Likely because the service you subscribe to prioritizes download speeds over upload (very common for consumer / home plans). Fast upload speeds are more common for business users / plans that run servers on their connection and expect many other users to be downloading from them (which you are...

For posterity: both of those scenarios would result in the devices receiving no traffic at all, rather than slow speeds as described by the OP. In the first scenario where both routers hand out IP addresses from the same range via DHCP, you run the risk of IP conflicts between networks. It's...

Great additional tips everyone, thanks! Regarding primary residence - good point on excluding it. I'll have to noodle on the exact logistics a little, but I definitely don't plan to leave both residences idle. I'm thinking we might alternate - maybe live in MT for a year while we lease out the...

Thx - also a fair and sobering point. I'm always a pragmatist and the second home is being built in Montana, so we could always bail on SoCal and set up permanent residence in MT. I enjoy it here, but not so much that I'm willing to throw away all the years of hard work. If it ever comes to...

Thanks for the response - and that's not really a debbie downer answer; just the opposite, if you're getting by on $100k/yr with two homes etc, then it's likely my $200k estimate is high. If I bring my number down to, say, $150k/yr @ 3.5% the net asset number comes down to $4.3M, which is much...

Hi All - New to the forum, and mostly plan to read / absorb info for a while. I don't really have any specific questions at the moment. I think my biggest unknown is what my annual income number should be for the desired lifestyle (simply because I haven't bothered to estimate that yet). In...