Can I retire with 4 children?

[chenda]

That does not sound like hogwash to me! I believe in it all, although I have not yet had any such intense spiritual experiences.

Thing is though I don't want to loose my sense of 'I'. Indeed I think it's potentially a bit dangerous, leading to depersonalisation, especially if done outside a monastic settings without guardrails. I much prefer the qualified non dualism, where the I remains and lives in eternity in a loving relationship with God. It's notable I think that lay Buddhism, as practiced in Asia, is much more devotional than the non theistic, 'rational' traditions so popular in the west today. You're average Chinese Buddhist will pray to the Buddha (or other deities) in a similar way Christians will pray to Jesus.

If I became a Buddhist, I'd probably follow the Pure Land tradition. Simple and easy and maybe safer.

[M]

@Alphaville

While I have read all the ERE blog posts several times and have spent over 10 years browsing this forum - I've always been too cheap to buy the ERE book. I'm just not sure what I would get out of the book, to be honest, so I've never spent the money on it. I do read a lot, and I have thought about buying it several times but always backed out of it...Maybe I will buy the book when I retire and realize I could have retired 10 years ago had I bought the book then, lol.

My wife and I used to live on $1,000 /month with 2 kids just fine - and even then there was things we could have taken out of the budget like eating out. Like today, most of the money was spent on the children. I have a brother who lives on about $400 /month in a tent in an unheated house. He gets free food and drink at an amusement park via their "unlimited food and drink" pass, where he spends everyday riding roller coasters after his free meals. He is around 100x his spending now in networth but keeps working because he just watches movies at his job anyway, which he says is something he would do even if he quit so what's the point of quitting?

Yes - I will check out "captain fantastic" - it sounds interesting. Perhaps I will go ahead and buy the ERE book as well, considering how much time and value I have gotten from these forums. I'm sure the book is interesting, if anything. Thanks for the suggestions.

[white belt]

While I have read all the ERE blog posts several times and have spent over 10 years browsing this forum - I've always been too cheap to buy the ERE book. I'm just not sure what I would get out of the book, to be honest, so I've never spent the money on it. I do read a lot, and I have thought about buying it several times but always backed out of it...Maybe I will buy the book when I retire and realize I could have retired 10 years ago had I bought the book then, lol.

The book isn’t a collection of blog posts. It is fundamentally different. The book focuses on philosophy and strategy, not just tactics. You’ve saved over a million dollars and you can’t shell out $10 for a copy of the ERE book?

Not only that, the book provides a common language framework. We’re discussing things like web of goals and forms of capital on this forum which mean specific things.

[M]

@chenda

I'm more interested from a purely curiosity point of view. My intention is not to advance anything, or go anywhere, or join a religion, or go somewhere when I die etc. I just enjoy learning and exploring and to me the mind seems like one of the last things we have that we don't fully understand as human beings, which is sort of ironic. This is another reason why I didn't join a monastery. My intention is not to become enlightened per se, but rather to have the freedom to explore and learn about the things I want to learn about. 20 years ago it was the mind and software development. 15 years ago it was carpentry, construction, and rehabbing foreclosed houses. 10 years ago it was finance. 5 years ago it was nutrition and health and wellness. Now I would like to turn back to focus full time on learning about my mind. Maybe 5 years from now I will be learning about astrophysics, who knows.

I'm not sure if I want to lose my sense of 'I' either...but...to be frank, my sense of 'I' has never really brought me any sort of lasting happiness or peace. Everything I have pursued, money, women, knowledge, and various material things, nothing has brought me long term happiness or peace. It seems to me that an overwhelming amount of the circuitry of the brain is actually setup NOT to make you happy or have peace, but instead to survive and reproduce and prove to your social group that you have high social value. Thus we have a lot of overly proud people with all sorts of anxieties, depression, and sexual and romantic desires that constantly keep them in a state of unhappiness, myself included. Always feeling like they have to do more, be more, achieve more, and be somebody to be happy...But really, this is just the brain tricking you, to convince you to do what it wants in order to achieve it's goals of survival and reproduction. In order to have a lasting happiness, it seems to me that all of this circuitry has to be let go of, including the desire for a separate sense of "I", which is where most of these desires and fears and thoughts spawn from to begin with.

[Laura Ingalls]

M
I can’t let my 16yo son hear of your brother’s system.

If the park takes work campers he will run away from home with my camper and never come back.

[M]

@white belt - it isn't about the money. I am just not interested in the book. Based on the reviews it sounds like a dry technical book full of philosophy and theory that I won't learn anything from. I'm not even sure how much the book applies to me since most of my ere challenges involve navigating societal expectations while raising 4 children on an ere budget. No amount of spreadsheets will convince a child to not want to go to an amusement park or keep someone from judging you for buying used clothes for your kids.

If I were single with no kids I would have been retired at 25 and I would have no issue leaving the thermostat at 50 degrees in the winter time. If you try that with four children it's child abuse. Most of my money and time goes toward the children. It seems like the whole system of ERE is based on a non-traditional path of being single or even better married with no children. I'm just not sure I will learn much from the book.

[M]

@Laura hahaha. I don't think they take work campers. My brother happens to live right next to the amusement park so it works out great for him. Somewhat ironically he also owns about 50k worth of shares of the amusement park company, so in a strange way he is ripping himself off by going there and eating for free all the time.

[Alphaville]

M
I can’t let my 16yo son hear of your brother’s system.

If the park takes work campers he will run away from home with my camper and never come back.

@white belt - it isn't about the money. I am just not interested in the book. Based on the reviews it sounds like a dry technical book full of philosophy and theory that I won't learn anything from.

i wouldn't take @wb's hectoring personally, i think perhaps it's bit of a "professional deformation" from his military training, which doesn't necessarily play well among civilians. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Déformati ... ssionnelle . he means well though, but i think he's just not seeing your perspective.

anyway i think that most people aren't interested in "discussing web of goals", or why would anyone want to spend time and money to be able to do that, srsly.

me, i just want to live well, by my own standards.

so, what the book is good at is showing how the pieces of the puzzle come together as a whole economic system. in this it's not heavily theoretical. if you work in software, reading it should be a cakewalk.

and here in the forum people tend to nerd out excessively, but the book is practical and solid.

i don't use the system to do what @jacob does. i didn't come here looking for a guru or someone to imitate. i'm more interested in working out problems. you help me with mine, i help you with yours, that sort of thing.

anyway i use the ere system to work at things i enjoy, a bit like your brother, and i have no desire to quit. also i hate hate hate other people's clothes--i have a good nose and can smell the whiff of others, even after washing. grosses me out. i also like eating well. also i like hippy stuff like organic and sustainable and "green" that costs more so that we can preserve some wilderness. i also like living in cities that save space but are not cheap to live in.

but everybody is different, everybody wants different things. you have four kids you want to raise well, your wife wants more time with you, you want to figure out how to do it all. so, that's a problem you're trying to solve, and you need tools for it. that makes sense.

i use the ere toolkit to keep or increase my living standards while lowering the monetary costs, at the same time that i strive to live "sustainably" in hcol cities i couldn't normally afford. this has nothing to do with retirement--as i said before i have no interest in retirement. i have my own wishlist, you have yours, your wife has her own, @wb has his, etc.

so i'm not here as a "believer" and i don't earn a commission . besides, some libraries carry the ere book and you should be able to request it via interlibrary loan if it's not held locally. a million bucks gets saved $10 at a time--personally, i like your thrifty attitude and skepticism lol.

but anyway, see: https://www.worldcat.org/title/early-re ... ef_results enter your zip code for closest location.

so, tools... ere is systems theory applied to personal economics. i think you already have a lot of the necessary components, skills, etc. otherwise you wouldn't have your money pile.

the thing is @jacob put a lot of work to make the book coherent and comprehensive. then once you get the gist of it you can retool for your own purposes, rather than imitate. it's fun when it works and you see results from it. how you implement it, and to what end... is up to you.

[M]

@Alphaville Well, that seems like a good enough recommendation for me. One of the cons of living in the sticks is the closest library that carries it is over 100 miles away. So I just bought the ebook. I have 4 bookshelves full of books already so everything I buy these days are ebooks since they don't take up physical space. If anything it will better help me understand some of the terminology better in some of the forum posts.

[Alphaville]

oh no, interlibrary loan would have delivered to your local joint... now you're stuck with it for life!

anyway i also buy only online these days. still use the local library for paper. i used to be an almost compulsive book "collector," but in a city the most expensive thing is real estate, and tree pulp takes up a lot of space, so i've gone virtual. plus i move every so often, and trees are so heavy... same as vinyl records, they make moving hard. plus i am a heathen and really like the annotation and search tools of ebooks more than "the smell of paper" or whatever. sorry paper!

anyway, looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the book, particularly those sections i mentioned, and how you might design your own system for your family's purposes.

[IlliniDave]

@IlliniDave - The medical expenses are about 14k in premiums, plus 4k last year for birth of child ...

Okay, yeah, that makes a big difference in your numbers.

Whenever I participate in "Can I retire?" discussions I always answer from the perspective of what would I do in the same situation, then highlight some of the primary rationale so the asker can weigh the relevance of my considerations to their situation. It's not meant as a criticism of the asker's choices.

Traditional, non-expanded Medicaid was/is generally means-tested (at least in some situations) and in my opinion overly harsh on how deeply the applicants assets had to be depleted before benefits were available. Apparently ACA sought to address that and I suppose erred on the side of being opened to gaming to ensure the system harmed as few people as possible.

Humans are natural exploiters and I don't have an issue with anyone who operates within the law to their best advantage, whether it's a billionaire using every available means in the IRS code to minimize taxes, or an early retiree exploiting ACA to keep medical costs low. I've retained values that were baked into me growing up, many of which have abruptly become controversial in the last few years. Ironically my moral views are shaped by values that are now increasingly classified in some circles as immoral. So you have to take anything I say with a big grain of salt.

[M]

@IlliniDave - I completely understand. I do not take it as criticism, but more of a back and forth to help me understand and refine my ere plan more. The morality of going on medicaid is a thought that I have wrestled with since the aca came out. I was raised to work for everything and never take advantage of anything or anyone. Based on how I was raised, even the thought of not working is immoral, unless you are disabled or born into a rich family.

In todays world of free helicopter money, government funded food banks and healthcare, school lunches paid for by the government for everyone, the line between what is and is not taking advantage of the system is getting fuzzy. For example, the government paid for all the kids lunches at school this year regardless of income (except mine which were at home). The only way to opt out of the free lunches would be to take the kids out of public school and pay for private school or do home school which is what I did. Does this mean all the parents of kids in public school are now immoral?

My neighbor started going to a governemnt funded food bank during the pandemic. She is single and the boxes are too much for her, so she started dropping extra food off at my house. I am a secret millionaire in real life, but on the outside it appears we are a large "poor" family. The food gets eaten but this seems immoral to me. I struggled with if I should tell her to stop for weeks. I even talked to some other people about how I should handle the situation and they just laughed and told me not to worry about it.

I struggle with these questions a lot, but the reality is that the way the law is setup today, with a family of six I would need to make about 150k or so to not qualify for government assistance for medical care in some form...If I were to phase off medicaid at around 50k or so, my insurance would be heavily subsidized via tax credits, unless I deliberately bought a non-exchange insurance plan. It seems almost as though the system itself is setup such that the immoral option of relying on government funding is now the default option...and I'm not sure how I should feel about this.

[Frita]

By not working, think of all the time you could spend with your family. Kids benefit from being involved in activities together, teaching each other and learning new things. And you could do extended trips during school holidays, if you choose. Even as kids get older, they benefit with a strong parental (but not enmeshed) relationship. For example, yesterday my teen and I spent three hours making these strawberry-rhubarb and s’more mini pies (not luck posting the beautiful and tasty results) in a test run for a food truck/small business plan he’s been working on and to give to a friend for her 16th birthday. He and his dad have been doing historic restoration projects. It’s fun to see what rabbit holes kids take you on!

Since your spouse has been running the household full-time, I would caution that there will be adjustment and renegotiation of duties. Avoid cherry-picking.

Where were you when I was wasting time on a series of degrees?! It took me forever to realize there are other, better ways to learn things. Beyond the partying, I think avoidance of full-on adulthood was a factor for me. Some people also like letters behind their names and/or hanging diplomas on the wall.

I actually requested my local library to buy the ERE book. The wait was minimal, perhaps a few months, and now I have easy access. As @Alphaville said, it is different from the blog or forum.

Health insurance is a wildcard in the US. I think we need to be prepared for anything to happen. The spending (that benefits the insurance industry, pay-for-service medical model, and big pharma machine) is out-of-control. It is not sustainable. Anyway, we do not have health insurance and pay out-of-pocket, old school. I know this is not for everyone and is controversial on this forum. YMMV

Looking forward to seeing how it unfolds for you...

[Alphaville]

It seems almost as though the system itself is setup such that the immoral option of relying on government funding is now the default option...and I'm not sure how I should feel about this.

i believe the only moral duty here is to look after your children by all available legal means; and if you're lucky to live in a decent civilized society that looks after its own members, then why the hell not.

i wrote a long salty rant defending obamacare and condemning the previous system, but deleted it before posting. i think to avoid getting this thread shitcanned into the politics dungeon it might be best to just discuss what options are available to your family, rather than how some ideal world should be according to some ideology, because that quickly degenerates into political warfare.

as for understanding what constraints occur in health markets and why some ideologies fail at explaining them, you can watch the final lecture of this microeconomics class--happens to be taught at mit by one of the authors of the aca, and so he explains the many constraints and market failures they were trying to solve with it. see: https://youtu.be/jsiCft5v2dk

the whole course is available for free to the public, and it's pretty good. i've watched about half the lectures and enjoyed them. but anyway it's likely best to leave the discussion about that particular video for the youtube comments section

[Douglas]

Great job M and thanks for starting this post... it resembles my family's situation somewhat and it helps to have insight in a parallel path. Being close to family combined with frugality you are getting seriously low spending numbers for a family of 6. Nice work! When my wife wasn't working she was able to hustle to keep our expenses on the low side while also maintaining a nice standard of living. Now that she is working we pay out the ass for everything but it still seems the better deal for us at least temporarily.

Shooting from my experience here, if I were you I would keep working at same job/company but just downshift the intensity. Try and take on more interesting projects and saying no more often to uninteresting ones. Don't put in the overtime unless really needed. At some point your employer might let you go, but maybe not? Anyway, by keeping things interesting at work it might not be so awful to want to quit, and you could bank even more money to buy that grain silo.

[RealPerson]

@M

Great posts here. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences.

This clip from Bill Maher sums up the entire college thing really well in a few minutes. Much better than I could say it. And it s funny as well, of course.

https://youtu.be/_x5SeXNabd8

[suomalainen]

The short answer to your question is "no". The reason, you already know:

most of my ere challenges involve navigating societal expectations while raising 4 children on an ere budget. No amount of spreadsheets will convince a child to not want to go to an amusement park ... Most of my money and time goes toward the children.

I'm not really all that interested in other people's opinions about my lifestyle, so I deleted the clause alluding to others' opinions. I mean, that's what FYM (fuck you money) is for. But, as @halfmoon's wise step-son countered to her once: your dreams are not my dreams. So whether you're working for money to give your kids optionality to follow their dreams AND/OR you are directly working with your kids on their dreams ... you're working for your kids. Call it retirement if you wish, but it ain't - ask any stay-at-home parent if they're "retired" and they'll laugh at you.

Also, you might want to rid yourself of your ego, but your kids still need it, so stick around, for them.

But yeah, you have enough money and skills, it seems, to try something different in your "free" time, if you so desire. In five years, you're gonna be five years older. You may as well have been doing what you wanted to be doing during those five years. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

[M]

@frita That is a good point. Spending more time with the kids would certainly be benericial.

@aphaville - I think this is more of just a psychological issue for me. I was raised to believe that anything gotten for free is immoral and using the system. This may just be an old and outdated belief I need to rethink. I have certainly never thought the aca was bad or immoral in general, but for some reason the idea of me personally benefitting from it is a hang up. Interestingly, I have no issue with other well off people using the aca subsidies or being on medicaid.

@Douglas - yes, this is likely what I will wind up doing, for a while at least. Take it easy at work, take more time off work, etc. If they fire me now I'm not sureit matters much, lol.

@RealPerson - haha, thanks for the laugh. The everyone has a degree, but no one can change a tire hit me hard as I think of all the office workers I have met over the years who zero mechanical ability.

@suomalainen - haha - true. I would certainly still be very busy raising the kids and doing chores etc. Somedays it already feels more draining raising chikdren than working a full time job, and I'm not even the primary care taker. I have no idea how single parents survive.

[Alphaville]

@aphaville - I think this is more of just a psychological issue for me. I was raised to believe that anything gotten for free is immoral and using the system. This may just be an old and outdated belief I need to rethink. I have certainly never thought the aca was bad or immoral in general, but for some reason the idea of me personally benefitting from it is a hang up. Interestingly, I have no issue with other well off people using the aca subsidies or being on medicaid.

ah i see. well you can always pay full price for your insurance or find a way that lets you purchase insurance as part of a group.

eg some kind of association plan if you have a business. see: https://www.associationhealthplans.com/ahp/what-is/
although i've read somewhere those plans aren't worth a damn. not sure really. haven't had the need to research, luckily.

anyway the mit video i linked explains clearly what the health care problems are in our country: access and cost. the law makes tradeoffs at the social level, where you or i are just statistics. so don't take any of it personally. it's all about populations.

when i was homesteading for a few years i was forced to be on medicaid. i wanted to just purchase catastrophic insurance, but the option had disappeared from the insurance marketplace in my state. and because we were homesteading and living with little money, we weren't even eligible for a subsidized plan-- they put us straight on medicaid. i never used it actually. it was a pain to get on it and stay on it. every month i got a different letter that i was on/off/on/off. i never understood, but i suspect it's because although we had medicaid expansion we had a republican governor who didn't want people in it.

this was one of the reasons that made us rejoin the workforce--the fear that public healthcare can be politicized. that said, i wouldn't mind a public insurance option i can opt in or out of when choosing a health plan. done right it's very cost-effective, and we don't have huge medical needs (yet, lol).

anyway now we have "employee provided" insurance, which as the video explains is not really employee provided, it's just a hidden tax... but given the alternative options, i don't mind, because it's a lot better than being sick and untreated... or bankrupt

i have to say we have really good healthcare now, we can see good specialists, copays are good, maximum out of pocket is manageable in case of catastrophe... no penalty if we make more money either (like medicaid). total cost of course, split with employer, is a bit terrible at $20k per year for premiums plus copays deductibles etc etc...

we could self-insure at the lower end, eg doctors visits, dental, etc (we used to).

but having to cover things at the higher end of treatments, needing complicated surgeries or transplants, mris, pricey drugs, developing a chronic condition, etc-- would be an atrocity that would wipe us out. so in addition to health insurance, disability insurance is also in the mix.

so yeah, like the video says, even having access, cost is a big problem in our country. $10K/person/year, so for your family,.. $60k (ouch) if you're "average". but it's impossible to predict one one side of the mean one may end up.

so remember that in this context you're just a statistic, and you can't easily buy things individually-- your family fits into the big scheme of things. from my pov it's far less "moochy" to get subsidies on your insurance than it is to show up at the emergency room, have a costly operation, and then walk out on your tab. it's also cheaper for society to subsidize someone's insurance premiums today than having to subsidize 60 years of disability tomorrow.

in economic calculations it's always about the alternative options. taxes aren't charity. you pay in, you take out, society provides for itself as a whole--it's not about you or me personally. but personally, i'd much rather get government services i paid into (social insurance) than receive charity.

besides--depending on economic theories, it's possible that in a world of fiat money your taxes or mine don't pay for anything (well, at the federal level anyway).

[M]

@Alphaville - oh wow, that is interesting. I have often fantasized about homesteading and do minor gardening some years, but always come back to the idea that it takes me about 3-4 minutes at work to make enough money to buy a sack of potatoes, but substantially longer to prepare the garden, pull weeds, water plants, and finally dig up and clean the potatoes...of course, in my experience the food from the garden tastes waaayyyy better than the store food. For now I have compromised by buying some food direct from local farmers and buying the rest from the store.

I have thought about quitting my job before when I had less assets, and the thought of medicaid being taken away then stopped me. Now I am at a point where I could afford my own insurance from investments, but ironically it now looks like the aca will be here for a long time anyway. So I might actually wind up with way more money than I expected. Or I might end up broke if the aca goes away and the 4% rule fails.

When you say it was a pain to sign up for medicaid, can you elaborate? Did it take a long time to sign up? A lot of paperwork? Something else? Thanks.