Reply to Has anyone here on a normal income successfully FIREd?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You need to figure out what kind of childhood you want your kids to have. HCOL or LCOL, and what are you willing to deny them for the sake of FIRE? You also need to understand that if one of your children has significant special needs, it will be really expensive and any notion of FIRE will vanish immediately. Instead it will be work until 70 to pay for therapies and adult care.

What is your FIRE number assuming your kids will need a 3br home, health insurance, and college? Are you willing to deny them all sports and activities? Are you willing to make them go in-state or to a much less good college just for FIRE? It can be hard to find a woman who's on board with that.

I would really question your assumption that there's no rush to have kids. Plenty of women don't want an older husband or don't want their kids to have an older dad, and that's what you're on track to be if you don't get serious about dating very soon. Yes late-30s men can still date, marry, and have kids, but it becomes more and more of a liability. Especially if they don't earn that much. You don't earn enough to make up for it.[/quote]

Well, you didn’t answer the question, but you do raise some good points. My FIRE number is just for me, not for a family—my number is $2 million plus a paid-off $500,000 condo.  That would provide $60,000 per year (3% withdrawal), which is fine for me.

Obviously, that would not be enough to support a family, But I assume that my future wife will probably have another million dollars and some home equity (after all, given how much I value savings, I don’t see how I could end up with a spouse that has a fundamentally different view in that regard).

So with $3 million and a paid-off house, I figure that’s plenty for a LCOL area. And I’m not opposed to working in the future if needed – I just don’t want it to be a necessity.

Lastly, I guess I just disagree with your assessment that, in a few years, I’ll be too old to date. I’ve never heard of a 33-year-old woman that wouldn’t date a 39-year-old man. In fact, that seems to be more common than not in my experience.[/quote]

A 30 year old woman won't have $1,000,000 not even close. If she's 35+ like you, then you'll be paying roughly 60K in IVF costs per kid. Maybe only one, but still. You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. 40K per year in daycare, 150K per year for college...like I said, good luck![/quote]

I don’t foresee more than one or two kids, and I will definitely make sure that we pay in-state tuition for them, even if I have to go back to work to pay for that.  However, I don’t buy into the DCUM notion that there’s any value whatsoever in those $80,000/year SLACs.  If they want to go expensive colleges that are actually worth it (e.g., Harvard), they’re going to have to take out loans.

And there’s no daycare because we won’t be working – that’s the whole point.[/quote]

Wait. Both of you not working. At age 41/35? And still paying for college (even in-state)? Show me the math.

Your demented stricture of $1m in savings at age 33 is ruling out a huge number of women. No doctors no PhDs. Nobody who's had any sort of significantly costly or work-impairing health problem. Who wants to FIRE-parent, meaning deny their kids various normal things, limited to 2 kids, with an older dad, in a LCOL area. Who has no family in need of support. And who actually likes you enough to do this. Can't you see you are looking for a unicorn?[/quote]

My husband could FIRE at 43 with a military pension  but it would likely mean living in a terrible school district and we don't pay for college. I'm not willing to do that with my kids. We're not there yet but kids need a ton of support post college. Weddings, buying a house, grad school. Are you going to be old school and say, yeah post 18 you're cut off for life?
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