You can get fairly good diversity with nothing more than a basic 3-fund lazy index portfolio (domestic equity, international equity, fixed income) and owning your own home. Super cheap fee/overhead-wise and takes almost no effort to maintain/rebalance.

We use a Roth ladder to avoid penalties. Super easy to do, takes maybe 15 minutes each year. Even better, we keep our conversions amounts in our zero-tax conversion space (standard deduction plus child tax credits) so we don't owe any income tax on our Roth conversions either.

Cost Sharing Reductions. The subsidies reduce your monthly premium while the CSRs reduce your deductible, copays, and MaxOOP.

The subsidies and CSRs are set on current year estimated earnings. When there is a big discrepancy between your estimate and your IRS record they may ask you to verify your estimate. When we retired we wrote them a letter explaining the situation and that was sufficient for them.

We've had policies from five insurers during the last seven years and they all have accepted credit cards fee-free for individual monthly payments or monthly autopay. That might or might not be true if your premium is substantial. Ours has always been rather small and it may well be that there is some sort of cutoff that we have simply not run in to.

We accidentally overpaid once with one insurer and it wasn't a problem. They applied the credit forward against the next month premium as most utility providers will. We never prepaid other than that.

$600-$700 for family of six on average. We buy a lot ahead when durable items go on crazy sale so our months are a lot more variable than the average though.

The front page has lost a lot of its value, but you can still find plenty of good deals in the forum threads, particularly if you stay on top of things with alerts.

I miss FatWallet.

Mid 40s seems to be the most common. Mid 30s is possible for really diligent savers, high-earners, or couples. Lower than that is rare and usually an outlier of some sort.

I was out at 37, worked for 16.5 years, not including small jobs during college.

Most people seem to value their time at almost nothing when it comes to work. Everyone is loathe to give up their precious few personal hours on their days off to do something they don't enjoy, but the same people will accept losing almost all of their hours during the work week for 40+ years for a job they don't enjoy much, if at all. Considering that our time here is limited and callable in full by chance at any time, any rational person who enjoys life should value their time very highly.

If you value your time highly though, then saving money by reducing consumption becomes a mental choice between luxury goods rather than a matter of going without. Think of saving for FIRE as spending on an expensive luxury reserved for an exclusively tiny percentage of the population, just as a nice house in the Hamptons is. You can have the house in the Hamptons, maybe, but only if you are willing to trade an additional 10-20 years of your life to get it. How much is a year of your life worth?

Add up all of the joy you could get from having 10-20 years of freedom from work and money worries and see if that is more happiness than what you would gain from living in the Hamptons. Or maybe find something in-between that will give you a mix of time-happiness and possession-happiness.

I don't smoke, but I've known several weed aficionados over the years and at least two of those made it a hobby to grow their own. One of the natural advantages of weed is that it is generally hardy and relatively easy to grow, or so I have been led to believe.

So maybe take your habit in-house provided your local laws allow for that.

True, but the great thing about virtue signalling is that you can do it without actually practicing any of the underlying virtue. Sort of like how a lot of wealth signalling is actually debt signalling in disguise.

Frugality is not a popular virtue any more. Our society incentivizes and markets consumption pretty much 24/7, so it's understandable that people at large have the opinions they do. Unsurprisingly, our system also imposes massive costs associated with all of that consumption and many people view it as cheating or immoral if you bypass those costs voluntarily.

I post semi-often about various parts of our FIRE existence. We live an excellent middle-class lifestyle with a budget that is around $40K or less in most years though we could safely almost triple that if we wanted to. Nice house in the Austin metro, nice car, eat well, kids have all the toys and whatnot. I suspect most people would be surprised by how little a nice life costs once you remove the huge spending buckets of housing, debt, income taxes, childcare, and healthcare (thanks ACA!).

FIRE folks, particularly those who retire with kids and lean-ish budgets (say $80K and under), also need to account for the tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in ACA and FAFSA benefits and their relevant AGI tiers/cliffs. Those are effectively risk-free (well, not free of political risk, just market risk) tax subsidies that add to the tax-free return of the mortgage payoff for some people. The ACA can be worth $10-$30K per year for a family, while the FAFSA can be worth $50K or more per kid that goes to college.

There is also the factor of how principal home equity is almost completely shielded in financial aid calculations while a taxable brokerage is considered a fully-available asset. If you have a kid that goes to a high-priced CSS Profile school, then paying off your mortgage might save you $250K or more in higher education costs too. Not to mention the tax impact if you are forced to sell equities out of sync with your original exit planning for those shares.

Ignoring these factors if you have kids and are lean-ish can easily lead to a situation where all of the investment gains (and then some) are lost to dramatically increased healthcare and higher education costs, which tend to be two of the largest spending buckets people face in life after primary housing costs.

We've had ACA policies for the last seven years. All excellent policies with various PPO or HMO firms. Our natural budget qualifies us for pretty much maximum subsidies and CSRs so our costs have been minimal. This year and next are actually free of any premium due to the temporary COVID bump in ACA subsidies, but our premium before the bump was only $38 a month.

The ACA is one of those rare government programs that seems to actually be run well. We've had no problems at all in seven years and the customer service folks are available and friendly.

I would double check the bill text or look around a bit online, but I believe anyone other than the student or their parents is considered a third party in terms of FAFSA impact.

Good luck!

Bonds provide ballast to equity portfolios through lower volatility, larger cash return, and (mostly) negative correlation. There's plenty of research out there on the "ideal" 60/40 traditional buy-hold-rebalance portfolio just as there is on Trinity and other SWR research.

Nobody knows what will be the ideal portfolio moving forward. Go 100% equities and you might kill it, but you also expose yourself to a lot more variability in survivorship depending on what exact year you FIRE in since SORR will be amplified. Go less than 50% equities and your portfolio will likely die a slow death from lack of adequate performance. Conventional wisdom is that a bond allocation between 10% and 40% will be okay in most scenarios. Indeed, assuming you stay on top of your rebalancing, the negative correlations between the bonds and equities in a mixed portfolio can lead to better outcomes than a non-mixed portfolio and do so with lower risk.

The best you can do is just make your guess on what might happen and bet accordingly. Some people are all-in on crypto, some think real estate is the way to go, I'm perfectly happy just sticking it out with a boring 3-fund index portfolio fairly similar to yours.

We spent around $3K on a power rack, weights, barbells, bench, and all the rest to put together a lifting gym in our garage. Wife and I are both leaner/stronger now in our 40s/50s than we were in our 30s. Our three teenagers all lift too, which is great for them in many ways.

Not to mention that we take care of our equipment and with the market as it is, our gym setup is worth more now than it cost us.

We also picked up a nice SOLE treadmill for when the weather keeps us inside, but otherwise long walks together are the norm for us and are free.

Jacob is an interesting guy with a penchant for conveying complex issues in easily digestible ways. This will be a useful article to link anytime the "Won't you get bored, what will you do?" topic comes up.

Nobody knows that far out. Nobody.

You can get current real-world costs and policies for your situation at https://www.healthcare.gov/see-plans/#/. Only takes a few minutes and requires only anonymous data. You can then extrapolate out from there if you want, but 15 years is an eternity in healthcare policy nowadays.

We budgeted $24k per year for a family of six, but actual costs under the ACA have been $1K or less in most years. This year our monthly premium was $38, but the COVID changes knocked it down to zero.

It's a meme from a classic movie from back when plastics were a burgeoning newish field.

There's a great future in plastics. Think about it.

I want to say one word to you. Just one word: PLASTICS.

Yes. 100% yes.

Life is so much better post-FIRE that the idea of working more just to pad our portfolio a bit seems silly now, if not outright foolish. We're likely never going to spend what we have anyway, but we would certainly have enjoyed quitting three years earlier with the birth of our youngest kid.

My point was not that I consider us poor, but that we appear that way on paper in some contexts. From many valid global viewpoints almost everyone in the US is wealthy.

As I said, perspective is everything.