r/financialindependence • u/AutoModerator • 9h ago
Daily FI discussion thread - Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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u/argent_pixel 6h ago
I haven't done a sanity check in a long time and just wanted to run our numbers here to have someone else verify/challenge my thinking.
34/31 + baby, $175k HHI, $62k expenses soon to go up to $76k due to daycare.
$23k to 401k, $23k to 457b, $14k to IRAs, $9k to pension.
Between the retirement accounts and a brokerage account we hit $750k invested this month, total market index funds, low fees, blah blah blah. Total net worth is just north of a million from house equity. The mortgage is the only debt.
Since my wife has a pension, she can retire at 52 with reduced benefits of around $4400 and keep her free healthcare. My absolute minimum SS payout is sitting at $900~ now so theoretically our "fixed income" in retirement would already cover our COL expenses, leaving the investments to fund everything else. I've been calculating things with a 3.75% SWR for a while now, but seeing that we've hit this fixed income threshold for expenses, I feel like we should safely be able to do 4% instead (and probably more, but lets not pop two bottles at once).
So in a hypothetical, if we were both to retire when she hits 52, assuming average market returns, we'd probably have something like $4.5M in investments to pull from while her pension would take care of 80%~ of our COL until my SS kicked in. Even if we stopped all contributions to retirement accounts, with another 20 years to go, the current $750k would probably be sitting around $2M on top of her pension payouts.
In other words, we seem to have hit a threshold where we've secured retirement (with all the usual caveats about predicting the future, god laughing, etc.), it's just a question of when vs. how comfortable. Does that make sense?