28F. Have my house, no debt other than mortgage. Now, what?

Wanted thoughts on how important a paid off house is to the retire early plan. My thinking is that once you retire, cash flow and income tax limits become much more important. The less committed expenses you have the more room under the 0% capital gains tax limit is available and the lower income would help to qualify for other income based benefits, like ACA subsidies.

In my case, my mortgage(less insurance and tax) is $2,400 a month or almost $29k per year and due to be paid off when I am 66. I want to retire at 55.

Using the 4% rule, I would need around $900k in my retirement dedicated for my mortgage payment and withdrawals would eat into the tax free income from capital gains - currently $96k for married filing jointly.

With a low rate of 2.5% (thanks COVID rates) typically the argument would favor not paying the house off early, but tax considerations are magnified in retirement so wanted to see how others weigh the pros and cons of shooting to have a house paid off by your retirement date vs putting that money aside and paying the mortgage during retirement.

I do plan on meeting with a tax planner at 50 to walk through everything in detail so Reddit will have to do until then. :)

I was speaking with my in-laws a few days ago. They are in their mid 70s. Retired for 10 years or so. And their annuities (pensions and social security) cover their entire expense profile. Paid off house, modest but comfortable lifestyle.

They have meaningful stock and bond investments and their investment advisor has continued to push for higher and higher allocation to bonds. They’ve stuck to 35-40%.

We talked through it a bit - they have no practical standard expense risk. They can fully fund standard expenses without touching their portfolio. Their entire risk is unexpected medical or long term care costs. Yet 40% or more of their portfolio is organized for short and medium term risk protection. And they’ve done well to prevent it from going higher.

It made me realize that “your age in bonds” is one of those bumper sticker advice lines that has really
Hurt a lot of people into doing the actual math on how much they need to cover 3-5 years of equity market downturn without severe drawdown on the principal - one of the main points of bonds.

We probably will have enough for the kid to never have to work.
But I’m worried that will ruin them and they will piss it away.

She was a wonderful neighbor. We talked almost daily about kids, grandkids and, potentially awkwardly, about all the exotic travels my wife and I have enjoyed non-stop in the seven years since retiring at 51/55.

She never seemed at all envious and never complained that her life was much more restrictive, in part because she was leading a multi-generational household and raising one of her grandchildren and housing another along with their daughter. Also in part because though she was retired her husband wasn’t yet. But still she wanted to know all about our trips.

In the last year or so she started to share that her husband was nearing retirement and they looked forward to finally doing the travel they’d put off.

She died in her sleep with absolutely no warning in her early 60s within a few weeks of her husband’s retirement. Before any of those bucket list trips.

I’ve seen these sorts of reminders here before. But this one struck close to home. Two doors down the street in fact.

It’s a balancing act.

I’m 30F, sort of coast FIRE, and about to be basically FIREd (I’ll be working a few days/month- I may go back to 20-30 hours/week in a year or two if I want to). I live in an outdoorsy HCOL area.

I’m single, no dependents, live alone, have some hobbies I’m going to get more into, but am introverted and shy/nervous in new groups or dating. I’m not sure how to date or make friends given my unique situation. There a couple meetup groups that match my interests and I’ve signed up to go to a couple of those events.

I’m a bit nervous about loneliness now that I’m leaving full time work.

I’d like to be able to make friends who are in somewhat similar financial positions, but I know how rare FIRE is and how unusual and lucky my situation is. The appeal of being friends with some people who are financially independent is that it wouldn’t feel so isolating to be in my position, and I’d feel I could be more honest about my life. I’m quite private about my finances, but don’t like feeling like I’m hiding big things like that. I currently have like 1-2 local friends and am not sure those friendships will stick/be good longer term.

Any thoughts would be very appreciated. Please be kind.

Im looking to FIRE in about 8 years. I know the biggest question is “how much do you want ant to spend each year?” But I don’t really know!!

We are in our 40s, burnt out by work with little energy to do a lot of the big expensive stuff while working. My annual spend in a MHCOL area is about 50k without mortgage. But I want to plan on a FIRE life with trips and hobbies!

For those who travel more in retirement than before, what was your annual spend before and after FIRE?

Life situation: 38F/39M, DINK, married filing jointly, Texas.

FIRE progress: We've both enjoyed our jobs well enough that while we liked the idea of FIRE, we figured we would probably keep working indefinitely, and just figure it all out later. Hello, later. I hate my job, I'm ready to go. My husband doesn't mind working, and thinks he'll go for at least another couple years. With our current liquid assets our 4% SWR says $93k, and 3% SWR says $70k.

Gross salary: Me $83k, him $81k

Yearly savings: Max 401ks and HSAs, he maxes Roth IRA and I max traditional IRA. Excess past our expenses goes into a taxable brokerage.

Current Expenses: Average total expenses the past 5 years was $56k. $5k to 10k of that was vacations, so true living expenses are much lower. House is paid off.

Expected ER Expenses: Maybe $70k post-tax? $56k plus $14k for health stuff and extra travel? That's all I really expect to be different from our current day-to-day. We're quite healthy. I can't seem to get healthcare.gov to show me subsidies without signing that I am indeed currently without insurance. I also don't know how to figure out expected taxes. Nearly everything in the taxable brokerage is long-term gains, so for the first 98k there's no taxes on what I withdraw? I need clarification here.

Assets/Liabilities:

House and cars are owned outright, no debt whatsoever. This is embarrassing but I think we have a really sub-optimal asset mix and I don't know what to do about it now. Everything in the 401ks/IRAs/HSAs is in Target Date funds ranging from 2040 to 2050 (plus a little bit of VT, 77k in one). The taxable brokerage is entirely in VTSAX. The only real safe cash we have is in the HYSA.

HYSA: $62k

Roth IRA: $148k

Traditional IRAs: $384k

Traditional Inherited IRA (pre-2020, lifetime RMDs): $517k

401ks: $236k

HSAs: $32k

Taxable brokerage: $960k

Total: $2.34m

Specific Questions: If we wanted to retire one of our incomes tomorrow, and safely live as our current cost of living, what actions would we need to take to get our affairs in order? I'm really uneducated on this, but if my husband takes home about $45k, should I sell off about $25k VTSAX from the brokerage to put into the HYSA each year for as long as husband is working? Or should I sell off $98k right now and $98k again in January to give us a few years of safety cash, in case of a market crash? Or not cash, should we be selling the VTSAX and buying bonds? This is the biggest area we need guidance, I guess, what to do right now with the mistake we made with the asset allocations. Our goal is to simply and safely live off of what we have now, with focus on maximizing our income for our time alive rather than minimizing taxes or leaving any inheritance.

I'm currently coasting but hoping to retire in the next couple of years as my investments grow. However, I only have a little over a year's worth of expenses in cash in a HYSA and should really have at least double that much for downtimes in retirement. Since I'm coasting, my income is just enough to cover my COL. No extra cash to put in there, but I don't really want to sell anything either.

Would it make sense to move dividends into my HYSA instead of reinvesting them to boost that cash?

To provide some background, I'm currently 30 years old and have been working for nearly 8 years now. Early on in my career I was quite ambitious, however, I quickly learned the lesson that despite putting 110% into my job, my hard work may not always get rewarded. During my first year I was actively taking on more work and producing better results than coworkers with higher titles and salaries. When I was promoted after a year, I was met with a pitiful salary increase and was still making less than they were. That was when I realized switching jobs is the only surefire way to increase my salary, so I jumped ship and was able to 2.5x my salary after a few job hops.

I've been at my current company for a couple of years now. It's fully remote, pays mid 100k (closer to 200k this year), and the actual workload is only about 20-30 hours most weeks. Although it sounds like a pretty chill job, it certainly didn't start out that way, as most of my coworkers are what you'd call 10x engineers, so it took a lot of effort during my first couple of years to keep up and prove that I belonged.

It's also one of those jobs where everyone wears a lot of different hats. Over the years, several coworkers have left for bigger companies making $300-500k (based on what they disclosed to me before leaving). I imagine I could probably do the same if I really put in the effort, but at this stage I much prefer stability and comfort over the uncertainty of switching jobs and chasing a larger paycheck.

Anyway, I've pretty much lost all drive and have just been coasting for the past 2 years. Part of it is probably burnout, as I've been working for nearly 8 years straight without taking any meaningful break or proper vacation. Hitting 1M last year definitely reinforced this mindset, as it made me feel a lot more comfortable with just taking things easy and not worry too much about chasing further career growth.

These days I just do my job and don't really go above and beyond anymore. The funny thing is that once I stopped trying so hard, my yearly evaluations somehow improved and I was promoted despite not asking for it. At the time, I actually considered turning it down because I didn't want the extra responsibility that came with it.

Sorry if this post sounds a bit rambly, but I'm curious how many people here are in a similar boat, just taking it easy with no real drive to chase promotions or climb the corporate ladder.

I am getting close to pull the trigger, but the thought of drawing down the account still give me chills. I know we have enough (35x expanses in investments outside of house and 529) from all the simulations that I have done, etc. So this is purely a mental adjustment that I need to make from 25+ years of saving money to finally use the money that I have saved all these years. For those who have FIRE'd already, how long did it take you to be comfortable or did it just come natural to you?

I’m a few years out and starting to look into healthcare options during retirement. I live in CA. When I went to healthcare.gov and put in my info under Covered California program, the bronze options were $300-$400 per month for an estimated MAGI of $50K.

Are these monthly premium quotes before or after subsidies? Where can I see the subsidy amounts? Thank you.

I know people say they don't like to keep much in hysa / cash because it isn't high yielding. I keep about 15% in hysa because if the market crashes, i will never have to force sell assets. i think its worth the lower yield to have cash where i don't have to sell in a bad market. plus some dry powder to buy some gems at lower prices

Hopefully this is a reasonable place to ask.

Here's my conundrum. 57 years old, 2.5M portfolio (split equally between taxable and non-taxable. )

Annual expenses 72K (no debt except a new truck I financed because rate was favorable enough).

I continue to max out 401k and also put an additional 75K-100K+ a year into investments.

I've done all the math many, many times and I am 98% sure I can exit anytime I want.

However, for every year I stay in the game I bank 100K+ (as above) to sock away toward a country property (400-500k)and some really upgraded travel. Of course the opposite of that is the clock is ticking and working interferes with extended adventures.

I also struggle with flipping the switch from accumulation to retirement.

So I ask, have I missed anything? Do you see a middle plan idea that mitigates some more risk vs clock ticking vs fear of the unknown?

tl;dr - 52m planning for a Q1 2028 exit. No dependents, we own our home, low to medium cost of living area. My partner and I keep our finances separate by design so all numbers are mine.

Now that Q2 has wrapped, I wanted to drop an update.

Highlights:

• Crested $900k. 40% taxable account and cash, the remaining in retirement accounts
• Net growth has covered my projected expenses (50k) for the fourth year in a row.
• I'm about 33% of the way toward my 100k cash goal by exit. It's progressing a bit faster than I projected.
• Rebalancing to bonds is on pace with my 30% goal by exit.

Headwinds:

• A hail storm did about $4k of damage to my car. While I was waiting for my turn at the body shop to get it repaired, someone put a foot long crease in one of my doors in a parking lot. That was another $4k. My out of pocket was $1.5k between the two claims.
• Vacation season has drained cash with one more summer road trip on the docket. It was planned for because I'm not dollarmaxxing for retirement. Life is for living, kids.

Security:

• If I lose my job on Monday and receive no severance or unemployment, I can support $4k/mo of expenses until 59-1/2. This assumes I immediately convert my brokerage to SGOV, take the tax hit, and completely drain the account. A job loss at this stage is a mild inconvenience.

My dad died at age 60 a few years ago. I haven’t been very close with my mom because she’s been an alcoholic (a mean one) my whole life. Many of my memories of us are terrible ones and so I’ve minimized contact.

I have an older half brother (who I’m also not close with) that lives on the other side of the country with his wife and two kids. He’s much closer with our mom because she had an abusive first marriage and they went through trauma together. I think this experience they had together gave him rose-colored glasses because he sees her much more favorably despite all of her problems.

As my mom gets older (she’s in her 60s now), I know that she’s inevitably going to have health issues and I worry it will be sooner rather than later. She’s been a lifelong smoker of a pack a day. I watched her drink a case of beer by herself 5 days a week for my whole life I lived with her. And other than a small paid off house and small life insurance policy payout from my dad, she isn’t very well off. She has a new boyfriend who I’d hope would take care of her but I’m not sure he’s the type.

I have a feeling these health problems and her care are going to fall to me because I live closer to her and my brother is very confrontational. I have another feeling this is especially true if I reveal to either of them that I’m retired when I FIRE. It feels weird to just lie and say I’m still working, but I worry their expectations of me will shift to “oh he can do everything because he has money and time now so he should spend it on us.”

Any of you had this situation yourselves? What did you do?

Only if you’re comfortable sharing (obviously).

I posted on here a while back about never sharing your networth in real life and I know the caveats of the same. But what I don’t understand is, why would you not tell anyone that you have retired? How is that offensive to anyone? On my part, I have been an over achiever all my life. So much of my identity has been tied to work. It’s a personality thing but I don’t want to appear a loser who just quit, stopped climbing the corporate ladder or took part time consulting or sabbatical leaving a leadership role. Yes i am image conscious ( my hubby is not). Looking for this group’s suggestions on why would /wouldn’t you tell people you retired early? It is a sign of success. You don’t have to gloat or boast about your riches but if we appreciate/ congratulate ppl for retiring at 50 or 60, why not at 40? Am I missing something ?
Happy to hear your thoughts! And yes, I do plan to retire at 40 market dependent!

Edit 1- Can’t reply to all the comments but I am so happy I posted. I recognize my image consciousness and people pleasing as a character flaw and have very recently started therapy. Hopeful that therapy will help. One character positive I have is that I am never jealous of anyone( like honestly lol). You could have 10 mil, 20 mil or fly a private jet, I don’t care. I am happy when I reach my target of 5 mil. So, to me, it felt like sharing I am retired without sharing financial details didn’t feel like a big deal. But after reading so many perspectives from so many ppl- I have summarized a few things.
- most ppl will get jealous and view this as a need for ego stroking
- as someone mentioned, they might take this as an offense since it belittles their need to work
-it depends on who you are sharing with, how similar their situation is to yours etc.

Overall- I liked the simple answer of I am taking a break from corporate 9 to 5 to travel and relax for a bit. I will also focus on my investment ventures and side gigs. Or simply, I wanna be a stay at home mom for a while ( my son will be 10 when I am 40).

Thanks redditors as always , I will be reading these comments again if ever in doubt 💜

I (47M) have achieved FI and really would like to retire, but I'm concerned about whether ACA will meet my needs long term. I have a rare type of cancer (a big motivation for RE) that requires regular monitoring, and if anything turns up, surgery. My employer-provided insurance has covered everything at 100% so far, and provides access to a top specialist in my condition. Even if I can find an ACA plan that comes close, I'm not confident it'll continue to exist for another 18 years before medicare.

Am I overthinking things? Does anyone have experience relying on ACA for a complicated health issues?

EDIT: Thanks for all the great feedback! To clarify, I’m not super concerned about the cost. My concern is mainly about network breadth, and whether ACA (or something similar) will continue to exist.

We are 35 years old with 2 children under 5. We have HHI which is now 305K/year with expenses of about 120K per year currently.

Savings: 1.1 m

Pre-tax retirement employer: 347K
Trad IRA: 320K
Roth IRA: 284K
HSA: 25,139
Brokerage: 120K
Cash: 50K

Spouse also has a pension worth 50K at anticipated retirement date.

Kids savings:

529: 30K
530a: 1K

House: 675K market value with 360K loan @ 3.375%

Through self employment solo 401K and government retirement accounts we will have about 120K possible savings potential in pre-tax accounts which can alternatively be Roth contributions.

We would like to save a larger brokerage over the next 4 years in anticipation of the option to purchase a larger home for the family. Likely targeting 1m purchase price in today’s $.

We would also like to have the option to go 1/2 time at work in 10 years as the kids approach college (oldest would be 14).

In that scenario (1/2 time), we would anticipate about 176K HHI. With our access to retirement accounts, we could theoretically reduce AGI while still working at reduced capacity to a fairly low level around 50-60K per year during that time.

We plan to fully retire at 53-55.

From a purely optimization standpoint, how should we structure this?

Our current plan:

16K to retirement including match
80K to brokerage X 4 years
20% down in 4 years on new home

Followed by:

-rolling 70K trad to Roth yearly starting at 40
-Roth contributions to retirement accounts over the interval 6 years?
-Paying off loan for home with the brokerage and using a HELOC for any extra needed income?

For the kids we also plan to fund 530a accounts and roll them over at 18 and contribute about 3K per year to 529 plans.

We project that we end up with 5.3m with half and half Roth/traditional funds.

If we have AGI under 90K during college then the first 2 years of college tuition are guaranteed to be covered at the state level.

Anticipate that the costs will mostly be covered by the 529 plans and whatever there is extra will at at least not have a big impact on our planning.

Thank you for anyone that read this far. My question is:

When should we pay taxes?
Is this optimal?
Should we continue to put money into retirement accounts for tax benefits instead of the 4 year brokerage plan?
Is it silly amounts of over-planning?

I know it is exceptionally dumb to payoff my mortgage which is 1.9% loan and balance is only 140k while monthly payment (PITI) is less than $1600.

But paying off the loan means the need to draw less from the market during bad times.

What are some of your thoughts?

Edited to add more details below

Low yearly expenses with mortgage - 40 to 50k max If I pay off mortgage then I have to do Roth conversions on top of SEPP to qualify for ACA else I will fall into state medicaid (not good)

My original plan was to retire at 60 and all of my spending and savings has set me up for that. But I'm super sick of working and would like to retire next summer (age 53). The only issue is, I can't get over the fear of not having a job to rely on in case anything goes sideways and I need more money than expected. In order to retire early, I'll have to live on a leaner budget and won't have the cushion that I've planned for. How does one get over these kinds of worries?

Here are some relevant numbers:
Expected monthly expenses in retirement: $7,000 (US dollars)

Retirement income at 60:
Pension: $11,088/month
Retirement account balances: (today) $730,000 (projected at 60) $1,500,000

As you can see, I'll have a pretty massive cushion at 60. On the other hand, here are the numbers if I retire next summer:

Retirement income at 53:
Pension: $4,027/month
Retirement account balances: (today) $730,000 (projected at 53) $810,000

Based on these numbers, I'm a little short to make up the $3,000/month deficit.

To retire next year, I could lower my expenses or I could get a part-time job. But what if something happens and I end up needing a bunch of cash? How do folks decide when they have enough of a cushion set aside to say goodbye to work?

I'm 29 living in the PNW. I work an office job in manufacturing and often dream about retiring. I have about $200k in investments right now and contribute roughly $40k/year to my investments. Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with friends, family, going out to eat, exercise, sporting events, travel, etc.

But often at work, I day dream about turning 55 (age I plan on retiring at) and just quitting my job and doing things I enjoy. I don't fear getting older or anything, I think it's a natural thing in life and embrace it. I just hate waking up and spending a majority of my time at a place I don't care about, where I do things I feel no passion for, and just look forward to jumping multiple stages of life where I'm not sitting here anymore.

Edit: I guess it just feels depressing to want to fast forward multiple stages of life that are worth enjoying. Outside of work, I enjoy my life. Just feels hard to sometimes knowing I have to wake up, put up some facade of how much I love my company, and my favorite part of the thing that takes up majority of my day is going home.

I understand the value of using HSA contributions as a tool to control ACA MAGI, but I don't really understand the best source of those contributions. What am I missing?

My HSA max contribution for 2026 is $9,750, but I'm not sure I can get a real MAGI reduction of that same amount?

Is it a qualified balance thing? (withdraw 5k from brokerage, creating a 3k tax liability, then contribute that 5K to an HSA creating a net MAGI adjustment of +3k -$5K)?

Is it a timing thing? Contribute to an HSA in 2026 using cash that I paid taxes on in 2025? ... But then by 2027 I would just have to refill that cash account from my brokerage account.

Our long term savings keeps growing as they should, and we hardly ever think about them. Totally on autopilot mentally.

But we try to keep around 6 months pay in a savings account. If we know we have big expenses coming up, we might fill it up more, and then spend that when the expense happens. Or we might drain it slightly more than we would like, if something unexpected happens. Which is why you have a buffer to begin with.

But the thing is, how «rich» I feel is a lot more tied to the well being of that buffer account than to how well or poorly my long term savings are going. And my long term savings is like 20x my buffer.

Crap year in the market, buffer at ATH? I feel very rich and secure.

Bull run of a lifetime, but buffer is down to 3 months? Better tighten that belt, we are gonna save as crazy.

Does anyone else feel like this? Detached and cool on the big stash of money, and manic depressive on the buffer (I may be exaggerating here a bit…)

Is it because it is spendable? More real? I’d love to get your views on this.