geekster777

10 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Honestly, I've been hand waving this somewhat. We'll be on my wife's insurance for the next several years at least, and live in an area where public schools are quite good (Massachusetts). My assumption is that each kid will add ~$15k in cost a year, though I could be underestimating this. I'm planning a few layers of buffer here. 1) My wife wants to keep working past 6 years from now and has no interest in FIRE (this is huge, but 6 years is a long time for her to change her mind). 2) Once kids are old enough for elementary school, I can go back to work. If my math is wrong, 7ish years of overspending shouldn't set back our FIRE too considerably. 3) Being a stay at home dad to start should seriously eliminate the expensive childcare costs. 4) My FIRE numbers don't include my 401k/IRAs, which I can dip from (with penalties) if necessary.

geekster777

10 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I quit in May. I'm a bit worried though. The gig was good, people were great, but writing on the wall was that management expected devs to be so bullish on AI that no handwritten code would exist moving forward. Simultaneously, deadlines were getting aggressive and OKRs more optimistic now that everyone can be a 10x engineer with Claude. I probably could have ridden it for another year if I really wanted to coast, but ultimately I'm too burned out to do that sanely.

Financially, I'm in a place to (lean) FIRE, but my wife is 6 years away from FIRE. The plan is for me to be a stay at home dad (supplemented by the above FIRE income), while my wife who is also in tech continues to work and advance her career. In our soonest timeline, that leaves me 10 months to pursue hobbies and projects before an infant makes focus time more difficult. I've spent the last two months on my backlog of videogames, writing some music, hitting the gym, and exploring new hobbies (mahjong, climbing, and drawing). I'm hoping to focus my pursuits into quarters (Q3 being music and Q4 being video game development). Hopefully, this will cement habits enough that they'll continue as my life transitions.

But to circle back to my worries above. I'm planning on exiting the workforce for good if possible. If I enter it again, it will most likely be in 6-8 years (as kids enter school). This is a long time, and likely the industry will shift significantly in that time. I fear the cash cow that is software development will be less lucrative in that time, or that my skills will be too outdated. So while I desperately want the year off, another year of work would put us in a more secure financial position. And I'm most in my prime now, and therefore able to secure a high paying gig right now. It's /probably/ fine, but becomes an issue if we hit road blocks in the next few years (layoffs, injuries, economic disaster, etc). That's a lot of financial anxiety that I probably don't need to have, but it's still present. While the economy remains shaky, I don't necessarily feel confident that my purchasing power will keep parity over the next few years.

geekster777

เดือนที่แล้วdiscuss

Made a fun app that generates daily riddles. If you give an llm an answer then ask it for a riddle, it's pretty clever and fun to see what connections it draws: https://riddles.jpn.fyi/

I'm also currently working on an app that lets me hum a tune into my phone and generate guitar tabs. The audio processing is proving to be temperamental at pitch detection, but I'm planning on looking at some autotune libraries to see how they clean up audio for processing. Main problem I have is that I'll come up with a tune in my head, but by the time I sit down with a guitar and find my first target note, I've forgotten most of what I'd hummed.

geekster777

2 เดือนที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I live in a tourist town (population 45k, with 2M visitors this past season). It's truly lovely. Our museums kick ass, the food and cocktails punch above their weight, and there are countless activities in the off season. Sure, I can get a cheaper burger or pay less rent just a few miles down the road, but instead I stay and benefit from tourists pushing the quality upwards. I often see folks focusing on the low-effort schlock shop, damning all tourists, before heading to one of the 8 local coffee shops (who could never survive on locals alone). The best thing a local can do is to openly give recommendations, helping to hold competition and quality to a high standard.

geekster777

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think of it more as I could work a few more years at my current high paying miserable job, or the same few years + 1 at a flexible (arguably less miserable) job.

For me at least, the goal has been to bank big cash early, then let the compounding do the heavy lifting towards the end. As I mentioned above, getting a 10% increase takes a lot more savings late in the game whereas the snowballing effect of compounding interest is stronger, so I'm coming out ahead just by staying afloat without dipping into my savings. I look at the work that appeals to digital nomads (pre-covid, this was work FAANG and other high paying jobs didn't widely offer), and it seems more valuable to spend some mobile years financing a nice adventure with the stability of a job that lets me work from home. It means a gradual transition to RE and that very little in my lifestyle should change once I pull the trigger. Personally I'm looking to reach FI /then/ transition to a remote/part time job as a way to reduce risk while offering some extra flexibility - everything I earn in that time should be gravy and it should allow me the freedom to travel and enjoy the experiences.

geekster777

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Sure, landing the same tech job may not be feasible. As I mentioned, the big nest egg should ease that blow. You can instead get a lower paying tech job you're plenty qualified for. You can also get a job doing something unrelated to tech, like Uber/gig work, secretary, waiter, creating on Etsy, or really anything. A disruption to early retirement isn't going to be so dramatic that you need to get your same 6 figure income as before in order to stay afloat. It's something where an extra $15k a year coupled with some cost cutting will get you through a recession with minimal damages (cost of living dependent of course, but I'm assuming a conservative ~$60k/yr expenses). Landing something more lucrative creates a noticeable surplus.

geekster777

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

You do have the option of going back to work if shit hits the fan. Maybe it'll be harder to find a job, or to find one that pays as well as before, but that's pretty heavily tempered by the fat nest egg you have. It's a pretty big misconception that by "retiring" you're permanently cutting off all abilities to produce income ever again.

It's easy to see "oh if a wealth tax is introduced, you'll run out of money by 50" as if it's a huge hole in the plan, but if you're 30 that gives you 20 years of draw down time. A change in the market or legislation won't sneak up on you and suddenly drain you of all your cash - if it does, it's probably something affecting the entire population. You'll likely have a year or two of drawing down more cash than you should before you pivot your plans.

The most vulnerable time during FIRE is the first few years of early retirement (where a market crash could wreck you), but is simultaneously the point where you're still at your most employable (plenty of relevant contacts, skills that aren't out of date, and a relatively small gap on your resume).

geekster777

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

May not be enough to pull the trigger, but definitely enough to transition down to a part time or remote web dev gig in a low cost of living area. Once you have such a net worth secured, you just have to keep from pulling from it for a few years while it compounds.

The big thing is that around 900k is when you get diminishing returns on savings vs market fluctuations. Bumping that amount by 10% would require saving $90k, which is a tall order. Or you could wait for a 10% market increase (it's up 14% this year). Not that the market is guaranteed to go up, or even by that much (we're in an unusually good market at the moment with inflated optimism). But at a certain point you hit a tradeoff where the market on average increases your wealth faster than savings off your salary will. At that point it makes sense to transition to a job that just covers your cost of living - one that you like more and offers more freedom.

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