Hey folks!

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chickenstick
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2023 8:05 pm

Hey folks!

Post by chickenstick »

Hey there! Just introducing myself. 30yo male, life with my 30yo wife and two kids (6yo girl and 4yo boy) in a rural area in southeast USA. I was first exposed to FIRE via MMM in August 2021 and knew it was the way I needed to go, but based on the burnout I was dealing with in my job that I needed to bookmark it mentally and come back to it in January 2023 after I got a new job and had a year of stability (2022) for my family with no new things.

January 2023 came and I devoured several books on FIRE/ERE including Jacob's book. (What a great book.) Wife and I slashed our expenses from about $3700 to $2500 per month nearly overnight. Cut a lot of junk costs thanks to Jacob's book and realization that we were paying for certain things (some types of insurance) more out of fear than sound economics. As much money as possible this year is going to go directly to paying off some debts we have, and will be hopefully debt-free by the end of Q3.

My income primarily comes from my day job in software design. I have a side hustle that makes probably $200 per month - not a killer income, but a source of joy to me and a labor of love that happens to make money. I also have some experience in other design work and make an extra few thousand $/yr from that.

Wife has her own startup that's poised to grow very sharply this year - no debt, profitable, just a matter of turning up the marketing.

We homeschool our two kids, and my daughter makes money by helping me fulfill orders for my side hustle. I'm using it to impress upon her the concept of investing vs saving-to-spend. Our homeschooling track for them will involve equipping them with all the principles in the ERE book such that both of them can retire no later than 25.

My wife's and my goal is to retire within the next 5 years and devote the rest of our life to research and legal work on behalf of the abused and trafficked.

Pretty much it! Happy to answer any questions that don't involve identifying information. I'm thinking of starting a journal but probably will continue it on my blog, deepfinancejourney.blogspot.com. The first few posts there are super rough because I didn't want to procrastinate for the sake of perfection, but I'm working on a way of doing more substantial regular postings, maybe on a monthly cadence.

chickenstick
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2023 8:05 pm

Re: Hey folks!

Post by chickenstick »

First substantial blog post on August 2021-December 2022: https://deepfinancejourney.blogspot.com ... -2022.html

AxelHeyst
Posts: 2118
Joined: Thu Jan 09, 2020 4:55 pm
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Re: Hey folks!

Post by AxelHeyst »

Welcome!
chickenstick wrote:
Thu Feb 02, 2023 4:57 pm
We homeschool our two kids, and my daughter makes money by helping me fulfill orders for my side hustle. I'm using it to impress upon her the concept of investing vs saving-to-spend. Our homeschooling track for them will involve equipping them with all the principles in the ERE book such that both of them can retire no later than 25.
Nice. I'm curious what your homeschooling approach is, and how specifically you're planning on impressing ERE principles upon them. I'm not going to have kids, but I'm 'Uncle Axel' in some form or another to at least half a dozen young ones and I could see being more involved in some of their educations.

mathiverse
Posts: 788
Joined: Fri Feb 01, 2019 8:40 pm

Re: Hey folks!

Post by mathiverse »

Welcome!
AxelHeyst wrote:
Thu Feb 02, 2023 7:22 pm
I'm curious what your homeschooling approach is, and how specifically you're planning on impressing ERE principles upon them.
+1! I'm interested in this as well.

chickenstick
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2023 8:05 pm

Re: Hey folks!

Post by chickenstick »

We're in the phase of learning basic skills right now - learning how to read, how to do math, how to be responsible for one's own toys and bedroom, helping with housework, and starting to learn about money. So a lot of the ERE teaching is by example right now, or by bringing them into discussions about wasting food, breaking things, repairing things ourselves, and so forth. This coming year will probably include learning gardening, sewing, and may involve helping to mow the lawn under very careful supervision.

Our overall homeschool approach tends to focus heavily on lots of reading, hands-on exploration of the world directly, playing together with non-electronic toys or coloring, working on puzzles, watching YouTube videos about engineering/how things are made, or helping with actual household responsibilities like cooking, laundry, etc. They're only 6 and 4 so their academics are only so rigorous right now, but primarily consist of math lessons and reading lessons, although the reading lessons has slacked with our 6yo since she knows how to read now and has taken off.

Their school also involves as much real-world experience as we can give them with actual non-housework, value-producing labor. Our 6yo's job for me unloading inventory and packing orders every so often is going to open the doors for discussions around investing, taxes, savings, etc. Her income is 100% covered by the S&H costs paid by customers, so it does not impact our family finances at all. (I'm going to pay her a small bit of interest on her savings to simulate actual investing, but not sure yet where this will come from - side hustle profits, or just our family budget.)

We do have her enrolled in a ballet class that she absolutely thrives in, but I'm considering moving this to her own income since her earnings will easily cover it and still allow her to save a lot. She's also super interested in engineering, so during our latest dryer repair episode she worked closely with me to tear the dryer apart and figure out what was going on.

My wife has a real gift for breaking complex topics down into bits the kids can start to understand, so she will be able to take some of the ERE concepts and introduce them during their school hours in the morning (after breakfast until lunchtime, usually). Then once reading really picks up and the kids can handle more abstract concepts, books like Jacob's will be assigned reading, along with the books by Cal Newport, and the other books in the FIRE crowd.

My wife and I have toyed with starting a podcast talking about select things in our journey to retirement. This would be a good topic and she's have a lot more of value to add than I do at the moment!

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