Howdy, I find myself here in my mid 40's as I have recently decided to squeeze as much value out of our financial situation as possible. For the last 15 years I have been a tight arse and very frugal with my money and in that time I have also met and married a frugal lady. I was made redundant in 2012 from a 10+ year job and since then have been a casual 'on call' employee and in the last couple of years joked with my wife that I am basically semi retired. A few months ago I found the FIRE movement and realized that we are sorta in a position to be semi retired due to our frugality. At this time I decided to stop being lazy with our money (generally just sitting in offset accounts) and try to wring as much value out of it as possible to hopefully generate passive income to see us out our lives. In Dec I decided to do our first budget as i was concerned that semi-retirement meant we might have been going backwards financially. Currently I work around 5 months a year and with tax A and B on 2 kids our income is around $36k/year, luckily our outgoings are only around $34k/year. My wife is also returning to the workforce after a 10 year break and as she is keen to earn some coin I have said "tag your it" and hopefully she will be the breadwinner for the next decade or at lest giving us some more investment money. Realistically though we will probably both work part time/casual jobs to tick over some cash until we are happy with our passive income stream and once the kids leave home (another 10 years away) our costs will reduce significantly. Our current plan is to convert our small home loan into deductible investment loans and invest in etf's whilst keeping a modest emergency fund in the offset. Short term goal : Optimize cash and loan assets Med term goal : 500k assets Long term goal : 500k shares Have a great week!
My experience is that living expenses increase significantly the older I (and the kids) get - just standard of living expectations increasing. I'd be pushing harder now so that things are a bit easier in the future - but to each their own.
I see the logic in keeping pushing on for the next couple of years but I am enjoying being a stay at home dad for 7 months of the year and making great memories with the kids. When the kids eventually leave we will drop to 1 car, have the home loan significantly lower (or paid off) , have a little extra income from military pension at 55 and not too far away from accessing super at 60 and topping up again until 67 when we are eligible for the pension and by then we will be bathing in money with as much gold as we can eat.
