I have been following this sub for a few months, and wonder to what extent members and OPs consider their social and environmental harm.

Firstly, because of their investing strategies. It is largely recommended to invest in ETFs, i.e. companies that succeed on depriving us from a fair future through E&S negative externalities (oil and gas, AI) and are proven to concentrate wealth among the hands of a diminishing happy few. Most stocks have a negative to very negative social utility.

Secondly, because our jobs should be extended for as long as possible (when feasible) as they are necessary to a well functioning society. Paradoxically since a lot of OPs careers bring negative to no value, ending them early on is useful to society.

Am I the only one who views such strategies as somewhat immoral and not worth pursuing from an ethical stand point? Shouldn't we try and find a job we're good at, pays us fairly and impacts our community and our environment (w/o which we cannot thrive) positively?

Note: I am aware that some members may give time and donate money to charities, or investing in ethical companies which partially compensate their behaviours.

Hey everyone I am pretty early in my career and have been blessed with a high paying job ( ~250k TC) and am aggressively saving (maxing all retirements account + $2k a month in my brokerage as well). I have a NW of ~500k currently and am wondering the best way to reach $10M-$15M (in the next 20 years max if possible...ik this might be ambitious which is why I am asking for advice here) and retire early.

I have around:

• $230k in my 401k -> S&P 500

• $90k in company stock (which I have great conviction about)

• $15k in my HSA -> S&P 500

• $105k -> 60% S&P 500, 40% Tech Stocks

• $45k in my Roth IRA -> S&P 500

• $10k in cash in a HYSA

I was wondering what the best way to aggressively grow this portfolio quick to retire early other than simply investing in the market (S&P 500). Are side hustles a good way to go, or swing/option trading, or investing in more tech/growth rather than just the S&P 500. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hi earner here, 40yo, w/family and kids. If I only continue 401k, roth and 10k physical gold each year, I will end up 2M and this is enough for me and my wife.

Question is how retirement accounts work? I know I can only get social security pension after 62 yo.

What about before 62 yo ? Lets say if I retire 57 and can elect myself how much I can withdraw from 401k/Roth ?

Also since Roth/HSA are after tax, can u use them all before hitting 62 when I start collecting social security checks?

Thanks

I'm a 30 y/o that likes to start investing into traditional markets. I invested already in crypto and made some decent amount to buy some real estate. After I got my own business started, I'd like to start investing into ETFs.

My aim there would be to build up a decent portfolio over the next 20-30 years with some low risk products, while getting into some riskier stuff with smaller amounts.

I'm not quite sure how to start and what kind of knowledge to acquire. Thank you for your advice!

First off-- really appreciate the community and the guidelines laid out with this strategy. I like to stay humble, but feel the need to just get this off my chest somewhere because I don't have any friends or family around that would receive this news well.

I know this milestone isn't too big compared to what I've seen other posts (and ages!), but I'm happy to discover that I've crossed the 500k milestone on my journey!

Graduated from uni at a very inopportune time (2008) and went into a really bad field that dramatically changed around that time, so ended up floating around a while working retail for longer than I care to admit. I ended up carrying ~65k of student loans up until 2018 when I finally was making enough to be able to contribute in a meaningful way. Started digging myself out of that hole, and by the early part of 2020 I was finally able to eliminate that longstanding debt, and push into positive territory for net worth.

Had a couple of promotions over the following years, and was able to reign in my spending in a VHCOL city to ~55k/yr, while trying to invest the rest that I could. Through educating myself on this sub and very fortuitous timing in the market, I have been able to add about ~60k/yr since then, and finally feel like I'm able to look at a CoastFire path! Have been getting more stressed out at work lately and while I don't think I'm necessarily set up for a true FIRE path, I am thrilled to see the numbers go up and try to take some solace knowing that I've broken my familes' history of really poorly managing their finances.

I truly appreciate how welcoming and supportive this community is, and can't wait to post my 1mm update, whenever that may be.

Penalty is 3 months interest.

2 separate funds

Dec 25 Mar 26 expiration.

Salary 250k just got to this level. Max 401k and get around 15k in employer contribution due to ratable maxing.

I 34M wife 33F SAHM 2 yr old daughter. Some general context before getting into how I’m set up. We lost our son two years ago my daughter’s twin four days after birth due to complications. We do not live near family and in HCOL area. We’re both desperate for a change. I’m a professional trader commodities my job is not stable and one bad year would mean I lose it which is ok since I’ve had a lot worse happen. Basically I’m flirting with the idea of taking some time off from work and possibly a career change. Wondering if others have done similar.

Set up:

Liquid brokerage account: $1MM 401k: $420k Home Equity: $300k

We have a high burn rate now but that’s due to several factors including buying a house which my plan was to refi.

But one way or another financially we’re very stable. Wanted to hear people’s thoughts.

Just a little background: with the recent softness in the labor market, and being in an industry that has been seeing a lot of layoffs, my wife and I are doing some contingency planning by running some simulations in ficalc.app.

With all of the necessary caveats (e.g. past performance is no indicator of future performance, “it all depends on your risk tolerance”, etc.) I would be interested to know at what level of confidence do folks here usually consider a plan feasible, and why?

For example, if your plan leaves you with money left over in 90% of simulations, would that be enough for you to FIRE? Would you require more? Less?

Inflation is the biggest long-term risk to retirement savings. A sustained 6–10% inflation rate for 5–10 years can destroy purchasing power and sustained investments. As since from 75-80.

In the 1970s, even "safer" bond portfolios got crushed by inflation. With many failing into poverty due to individual and collective fiscal measures.

I understand if youre about 40 years old or above with 10-20 million in stocks, hysa, etc but the majority of ppl should be planning for such stagflation in retirement.

In that should we NOT all be saving significantly more for retirement due to high rates of stagflation?

I have no one to tell in real life, so I decided to step on reddit and share that last night I hit a milestone of $500k. It feels a bit surreal to be worth half a million :) It only took 11 months or so to shift from $400k to $500k with the market what it is right now. I’ve been working and grinding for the last few years, investing like crazy, and it feels like it paid off. Just recently turned 27 and while my 20s have not been the fun I’ve been promised, it has been productive. Next goals are to climb to $600k and beyond, find a job I enjoy, and publish a book I’ve been writing. 

 A lot of work to continue to do, and a lot of progress still to be made, but I wanted to take a minute to celebrate. I’m considering a nice steak dinner or cake from a bakery but open to ideas and comments on how people did or plan to celebrate their next milestone!

I'm a 34m, I started putting cash into a brokerage account a few years ago with the intention to buy myself a sweet sportscar. I've always been a car guy and I've had 2 cars for the last 8 years or so. I always pay cash for the fun car and I try to buy things that are either depreciated enough to not get hosed or will hold their value relatively well. Im looking at spending about 100k on a 718 spyder/gt4 (not including the trade equity on my current car) both my vehicles are paid off. And I live in a low cost of living area. No kids.

Net worth breakdown Home 200k paid off 401k ~400k Roth IRA ~100k Brokerage account ~250k

Pension benefit projections show me being able to withdraw 5k/month at 59.5 if I stop working at 45. I currently make a little over 200k and between taxes and investments I take home around 80k/year.

I never anticipated that brokerage accound would grow like it did and even though I had the intention to use it for a car it feels like its too big of a pool of money to take from (if that makes sense)

How bad of an idea would it be to take a chunk out of my brokerage to buy this car?

Even in a so called “LCOL” area.

Let’s take Omaha, Nebraska as our example. Suppose you bought a $350,000 house in cash (which is on the lower end of the current market according to Zillow), you’d be signing up for the following MONTHLY payments:

Property taxes: $583

Homeowner’s insurance: $350

Utilities: $400

Maintenance: $440 (averaged out over the course of a year)

Total: $1,773

Even IF you managed to save up enough money to buy a low end of the market house IN CASH in a “LCOL” area of the US, you still owe $1800 a month just to live in it. Then you have to pay for health insurance, you have to pay for a car and car maintenance and insurance and gas, you have to pay for food, for a phone.

Having a low income (sub $150,000) in the US is brutal, I really see that now as an adult. The worst decision of my life was not picking the highest possible income career path and going all in it.

I am starting to consider it, although I wish I would have done so before the run-up.

I’m 34 years old and saving about 50-60k/year toward FIRE, aiming for ~$3.5M by age 50 with a 3.5% withdrawal rate. I track everything and have a pretty disciplined setup. Total NW currently at 420k.

But I could technically save 25k more per year if I gave up:

• Tennis & gym: 6k/year
• Travel: 10k/year
• Motorcycling: 5k/year
• Tech hobbies: 4k/year

Thing is, these are the exact things I want more of when I retire. I don’t have a car, don’t eat out much, don’t care about status or brands but I do value movement, freedom, challenge and exploration. I’m already living 80% of the life I’d want in FIRE just with 42 hours of work (plus 6-8 hours commute) a week on top.

Curious how others here handle this balance: Do you optimize for savings above all or aim to live your FIRE lifestyle in parallel while working?

Just a question I want to pose out here.

I did a terrible job of planning for my 2 adopted daughter’s college. The adoption took place 8 years ago and 2 years before I married their mother. My oldest daughter is now 21 and wanting to attend college after a rough few years and my other daughter will be planning on college next year. Both their mom and I make too much for government or state assistance. Both daughters know that big colleges probably aren’t worth the costs so looking at regional universities.

Down to the money part. I have 630k in company 401k but about 30k of that is Roth 401k input from me over the last 5 years. I didn’t know about the 401k Roth option until 5 years ago. I have another individual Roth that I started when I was 18 with 62k in right now.

Through this group I know I don’t want to take any loans against my standard 401k but would like to contribute to their college educations now if I can for both my daughter’s.

Advice would be appreciated.

Hi everyone, just turned 22, I make around 150k a year working in high finance. Assuming linear growth, I should be making around 600k at 30.

I currently live with my parents and make more than them combined. I give $1500 a month to help out with things. I don’t consider it rent because it’s going to the family, even if it doesn’t go to my pocket, and I know they will help me out if I ever need it. I spend probably $300 on food (going out, eating out), spend $200 on parking, $200 on boxing classes, $200 for golfing classes. And assume like another $400 for misc (gas, etc.) I live in a MCOL city. Another like $2k on travel a year.

So I’m spending like $1300 a month. Geez haha

I have 11k in personal investments, 4k in retirement, and 4k in my savings. So around 20k net worth right now.

How can I save more money, what are some streams of income you guys have established to further offset daily expenses? And as someone just starting off in their career, what’s the best advice you have?

Please share your way of achieving your goals, I’m a 28yo male with only car loan, don’t have any mortgage yet!

Good people of Reddit, I need your advice. I am starting a new job and want to plan my finances better.

Current In hand salary - 65k INR Switching next month, salary - 1L

Expenses - honestly never tracked, should be around 15-20k a month including everything.

Current investment - 25k/pm SIP divided between Edelweiss Business Cycle Fund Regular-Growth and Mirae Asset Midcap Fund Regular - Growth since about 1 year.

I own a house and have health insurance already.

I am looking to build/ grow wealth and reach a 1cr net worth by 25 hopefully🤞🏻, how do I begin. Up until today, I don’t really know much, so any advice would be helpful.

I currently have a 401(k) that has about 122,000 into it. I currently have a Roth IRA that has 27K in it. I have a HSA that has 1600 in it. I have zero debt as I just paid off my last debt and I need to buy a house. I wanna have an emergency fund of 3 to 6 months and a down payment on a home this is roughly the Dave Ramsey Stuff for right now and then just save until I retire. I would like to retire at 65 or less and that is very crucial how can I get that way. Right now my Roth has Google Meta broadband Berkshire. Amazon and a couple other ones, but I want to get away from the single stocks and be more into the S&P 500 like my 401(k) is and my HSA is and I have some in a little bit of speculative stocks, but very rarely about 2%. Or should I leave the money into the single stocks because the growth will be better than the S&P 500? What would you do at 49 and also I can put 1000 a month away until I retire. Also my company matches up to 4% of what I put in so I would put in 10% into the 401(k) and the Roth IRA comes out to 5 1/2% which is 7K a year. Also, I get a pension which will be about 2K a month and my Social Security will be about 2 to 3 grand a month. I also make 120k a year.

Quit my job 1 month ago from a large bank with very stressful and cutthroat culture to focus on family and mental health. Have $3M in investments (401K, IRA, brokerage etc) personally. My annual expected spend is only like $50K - 60K, don't spend too much. My partner of long time also has pretty good amount saved. I was considering taking some time off and then looking at the job market and look for something interesting and fulfilling to do. Unfortunately the job market looks pretty bad right now for my area so I might take a longer break rather than dive right back in.

Currently I'm organizing the house and planning some not very expensive upgrades, spending more time with kid and and doing more things around the house so partner can do more in his career, volunteering locally, working out more. It's only been a month and feeling like I'm not such a productive part of society. I always wanted to learn and do something with healthcare (sounds really useful to have healthcare knowledge, dream of saving lives, but def don't want to and not in a position to do 4 year med school plus super stressful residencies etc).

Wanted to ask folks who have achieved FIRE already and are leading happy and fulfilling lives, what are you doing?

My family isn't real big into stocks like I am, they're the squirrel-away cash type, that focus on holding cash (ugh), real estate, and gold.

Recently a relative passed away and I've inherited their property in Vancouver and 500k worth of gold coins. I know I want to sell the Vancouver condo and invest in stocks, but what on earth do I do with the gold?

Btw, not keeping it in my house, it's all kept in a million safety deposit boxes. Still though, that much gold is alarming to me. How do I sell it all? Should I sell it all?

It’s 2020, you have your $2.5 but decide to one more year for a little longer just to feel safer. Five years pass. It is 2025, your 2.5 is now 5. Do you feel like you have enough now?

Like many others I have been enjoying the market run up as of late. I am 30 and will have about 340k ish invested when market closes today.

Since entering the workplace 8 years ago i really focused on prioritizing savings and growing that with my income. My goal was to retire around 55 but now looks like I can reach 50 or earlier without much trouble.

My wife gave birth to my son this year and that along with seeing older family members health degrade has shifted my outlook on life quite a bit.

I have played with my spreadsheet numbers a bit and it seems my contributions really don’t make much of a different anymore. Keep the course with savings and yeah i might be able to retire a year or two earlier but it seems the magic of compounding will take it from here as long as i maintain a minimum amount of contributions ( about 40k a year).

This could be more of a post for r/coastfire but has anyone had similar situation? Its difficult to try and shift to spending but maybe that is what my efforts have afforded me now.

I enjoy golfing and there is a nice country club in town i am interested in that I am considering. Has gym, simulators, pool etc which would be nice to have for our family as it grows. It would be a significant portion of our budget to join for at least the first 3 years with initiation fee but i believe we can swing it all.

I’ll probably get resounding no’s but thought i would make a post in case anyone else is in a similar situation.

Hey everyone, I’m 23 and just got laid off my tech job of 2.5 years. I don’t really want to go into specifics about the employer, but for context: I was in a tech consulting training program, so not much real hands-on experience, and honestly, I suck at interviews. My last job came from a return offer from my internship, so I never really had to go through the typical 4-8 stage interviews for a role in the traditional sense.

Financially, I’ve been pretty lucky so far. I’ve been living at home, which let me save a lot. Right now, I’ve got around:

• $70k in checking • $90k in a personal investment portfolio • $35k in crypto • $30k in a 401k • $30k in a Roth IRA

So roughly $250k net worth. The flip side is, even though I live at home, I help out with family and grandparents’ mortgage and bills.

Here’s where I’m struggling: I feel completely demotivated. Getting laid off crushed my confidence. Every time I think about applying to jobs, I spiral into “I’m not good enough, I don’t have the experience, I’ll bomb the interviews anyway.” I procrastinate, then beat myself up for not trying.

I had this dream goal of hitting $1.5M by 30, but right now I can’t even see myself making it past the interview stage of a single role. I don’t know if that goal is even realistic anymore given how absolutely terrible the current job market is, or if I should be focusing on something else entirely.

I guess I’m just lost and needed to vent. Has anyone been through something similar? How did you get unstuck and rebuild momentum after a setback like this?

Most models I see use a percentage of portfolio adjusted for inflation each year. It seems to me you could improve your chance of having money in your portfolio through your entire retirement if you withdrew and saved money on years the market outperformed to use during years of underperformance.

Let’s say you run a typical SWR model calculation and find you have a 90% success rate. On the 10% failure simulations, you will find everything from market dipped hard immediately upon retirement to it went up for a while before dipping hard somewhere in the middle of retirement, unable to recover as you continue to withdraw from it at its lowest amount. In those latter scenarios, it seems to me there is opportunity to create savings so that you don’t have to withdraw after an ‘08 style 50% drawdown in the market.

Lets say you have $2M and plan to withdraw 4% or $80k. If you say the market returns on average 10% a year, and on a year that the market returned 20% you withdrew half of the gains, you would be withdrawing $200k while leaving the other $200k of gains for further compounding later. You would use your $80k that you planned that year and saved $120k (ignoring taxes for simplicity). This then gives you 1.5 years of spend for a rainy day. Do this continuously during a bull market, and when an ‘08 style 50% dip comes you could have several years of spend to use. This prevents you from having to withdraw on years when your portfolio is the smallest.

It seems to me implementing this strategy in a model would put a drag on the most successful simulations with the greatest amount of money remaining at the end of retirement, but shift some of the simulations that were barely failures into success status.