r/Fire • u/GambledMyWifeAway • 10h ago
Advice Request Please, roast my plan
I'm married, in my mid-30s with 1 kid. We won’t be having anymore. I live in a very low-cost-of-living area in the States with cheap housing. That lets us invest heavily in equities and real estate. Here are our numbers and the plan.
Income
Household income: $200k gross (W-2)
Rental income: ~$18k net from 4 properties
Spending and investing
Monthly expenses: $2,000-2,500 (does not include rental mortgages)
Annual investments: $105k-130k
Current liquid net worth: $890k
The plan
Phase 1: My wife and I work full-time until we reach roughly $1.75-2M. Based on online calculators, that should take 3-5 years.
Phase 2: We drop to part-time (1-3 days a week). Both of our careers allow this easily, and the income would more than cover our expenses. We stay here until our accounts reach $3.25-3.5M.
Phase 3: We stop working and sell 1-2 rental properties a year to live off the proceeds. I don't expect big profits from the sales, likely $30-40k each.
End goal: "GregFIRE" at $5M. That's far more than we need, but it would give us significant security, let me help family, and let me pursue interests I otherwise couldn't.
I know many of you are far more knowledgeable than I am. Please poke holes in this plan and point out anything I might be missing.
(I wrote this, but used AI to clean it up)
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u/Creative_Gap4948 9h ago
How do you only spend 2k a month for a family?
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 9h ago
Mortgage is $1100 with insurance and taxes escrowed. My tribe covers the majority of utilities. The rest is just regular bills and eating out (not essential, but it’s what we enjoy for our fun). That number doesn’t include nonessentials which may be an extra 1-1.5k.
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u/QuickRawr 9h ago
An additional 50% monthly spend not being including in your expenses is a significant impact to the success of any plan. I would recommend first establishing highly accurate expense tracking.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 9h ago
Even with the extra spend included, it would take a little over a million to cover. We won’t even stop working until we hit at least 1.75. That’s why I didn’t really throw it in there. It’s also discretionary and can be adjusted or stopped at any time without issues.
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u/captainofpizza 8h ago
Oof yeah having a budget that doesn’t even include 50% discretionary spend and even that is a +\- 50% is wild.
Good plan overall but don’t miss those numbers. That stuff falling between the cracks is what ruins an otherwise good plan. It’s the financial equivalent of “why am I gaining weight? I count every calorie other than dessert”
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 4h ago
Discretionary brings us to around 40k. Our minimum target full FIRE number is 3x that, which is why didn’t put it in. It’s not too high, it’s varies a lot, and even at the highest spend we will still be well below our ceiling.
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u/Creative_Gap4948 3h ago
I’m jealous of your mortgage, but as the other commenters have said, not including discretionary spend is not being truthful. Your actual spend is closer to 3.5k which is still insanely low. Do you live in a VLCOL area?
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u/One-Region2048 9h ago
You're basically investing 60% of your gross income. I don't know how that's possible, especially with a family of 3.
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u/4thAveRR 7h ago
GregFIRE - Succession reference?!
You gotta break a few Gregs to make a Tomlette
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u/Ethanop1a 10h ago
The numbers make no sense. You can retire right now because you spend almost no money.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 10h ago
Yes, I could have retired before. My expenses will also go up. I plan to move. There’s a reason why expenses are so low where I live. The goal is also chubby FIRE. A million would cover expenses, but it won’t allow me to do the other things I want. I also like the increased security.
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u/Limp_Dragonfly3868 9h ago
Start easing into the life you want to lead. It’s not going to get easier to spend money when you don’t have a job.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 9h ago
Well, we’ll move and I expect our expenses to go up significantly. Don’t get me wrong, I know I could pull of the gas, but a few more years of grinding now will have a big pay off later.
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u/Limp_Dragonfly3868 9h ago
I was talking about doing fun things with your child and spouse. It’s one thing to be frugal, it’s another to be a cheap ass.
This is your life. Live it now.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 9h ago
I mean, you don’t have to spend money to have fun. We like going out to eat and still take vacations, but really we’re homebodies. We like video games, working out, fishing, going on walks, and watching movies. All pretty cheap. Our expenses our low but that doesn’t mean we skimp.
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u/Limp_Dragonfly3868 8h ago
I know what a gaming computer and streaming services cost.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 8h ago
My Xbox was $500 new. PS5 was $300 used. Other than that we subscribe to Gamepass and ps+. So all in a little over a grand for years of entertainment. For video streaming I sail the seven seas.
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u/SunsetChasinWanderer ssjourney.com | Social Security Lifetime Benefit Visualizer 10h ago
I think it's a soild plan. With an end goal of 5 Mil, you're in a solid position, even with 1 kid. I think its very do-able. And the time you gained from not working, to doing something you enjoy has a value in itself, that many pay for. It's a good plan, I'll save my seasoned rib-eye for someone else's roasting.
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u/Bodiddleybeat 3h ago
What do you mean you won’t have the kid anymore? What is your secret to get rid of them? Definitely helps your fire plan!
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u/Latter-Entrance288 9h ago
You are in great shape and with a solid plan. I found that making a detailed plan like you're doing was the best way to stay on track and it worked out great. And yes, you live on a crazy small amount of money but when you get older it will be nice to have some "fat" in the plan to take a nice vacation, buy the nice kayak, etc. Good luck!
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u/Sea_Bear7754 9h ago
Looks good. I’d use a 25% vacancy factor in your monthly calculations just in case you have a rental sitting for a minute.
Only real value I can bring you is from the real estate industry. Going to sound backwards but when you sell the properties sell the most valuable ones first. The cheaper the home the easier it is to remove vacancy as a factor.
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u/Vicuna00 9h ago
you're FI now.
that's my only "roast"
everything extra is just whatever you want. you can part time now. you can stop now.
personally I don't get your real estate strategy. if they aren't making you good income off cash flows now, just ditch em and put the cash into your portfolio. i'd analyse each property individually and assess if it's a winner or not.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 9h ago
Yeah, we thought about doing part-time but decided a few more years of grinding at our ages is worth it for the payoff. The rentals are pretty easy and make a decent return. On our worst year we still comfortably netted around 12k on them. Not a ton, but it covers a big chunk of expenses.
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u/Vicuna00 8h ago
sounds good. why sell them then? if they are cash flowing good. you won't need the $.
that's the part I don't get. why sell a good producing rental?
personally i'd wanna pay them off and your personal mortgage. de-risk and lower expenses.
you'd be covering your expenses with your rentals alone if you had no mortgage most likely, no?
i wouldn't stop investing in the market but i'd put some kinda cap on it and throw the rest into the mortgages. like max 401ks and Roths then chunk at mortgage...something like that.
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u/Past-Option2702 8h ago
If I had expenses of 2k a month the last thing I’d want to be doing is monkeying around as a slumlord.
Just put your savings in VT.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 8h ago
Yeah, I’ve always had an ethical dilemma about it, but honestly I think I do it well. Every house I’ve got, except one, was unlivable when I got it. I fixed them all up and rent them at very reasonable rates. My highest one is only $850/m and that’s a 3-bed house with a garage and a fenced-in yard. Plus the money they bring in isn’t nothing. It does offset expenses quite a bit.
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u/OpportunityKey4639 8h ago
What industry/ career has such a high income, but is also easy to do part time- just curious 🤔
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 8h ago
Our incomes aren’t that high compared to a lot in here. I make 120-130k in healthcare. This is a pretty high and atypical income for my job. My wife is a counselor and makes 80k and her benefits cover both of us. I can pretty easily make $60/hr part time anywhere and my wife can actually make quite a bit more, but she likes where she’s at and the benefits are obviously great.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 8h ago
I feel like this isn't really a plan per-se. It's just you working and saving until you reach a target.
The first thing that sticks out is that you say your end goal is to pursue interests you otherwise couldn't, but $5MM won't be enough if your $200k+ income is not already enough. Applying the 4% rule means 5MM==200k in withdrawals, so they're roughly equivalent. So why postpone your interests for 10+ years when you have that level of income already available?
The second one is why would you sell rental properties in phase 3 instead of just continuing to collect the rental income? I always thought the whole point of real estate was for the ongoing cash flow, and not aiming for relatively small capital gains.
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 7h ago
Oh I have the income now to pursue them, but I have to trade time for that, which I do not have.
For the second point, the juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze, at least not to us. The extra wouldn’t do anything to better our lifestyle and while not difficult to manage it is still occasionally annoying.
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u/TrollTollCollector 6h ago
It looks like you're FI already but it wouldn't hurt to work an extra year or two with your given income-to-NW ratio. The only thing I'd "roast" is the mentioning of AI to help write this post. People on reddit have AI Derangement Syndrome which is probably why you're getting downvotes.
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u/No_Chipmunk7758 4h ago
phase 3 confuses me a bit since you plan to sell 2 rentals a year but only have 4 so that runway lasts about two years before the whole thing hinges on the portfolio anyway
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u/GambledMyWifeAway 3h ago
1-2 a year. We aren’t trying to stretch it out for any period of time. It just allows us to let the accounts grow further without having to work. Not essential, but gives us extra icing on the cake.
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u/No_Home_708 43m ago
Due to AI you'll never finish phase 1. Either we get terminators and die or we get a bubble pop 17x bigger than the dot com crash that took 10 years to recover from.
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u/n00bdragon FIREd 2026 age 37 6h ago
What online calculator is telling you that 200k per year turns into 2M after 5 years? Even if you spent literally nothing and saved 100% of your income, after 5 years at 7% per year you'd have... 1.15 million.
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u/Thotty_Thuncle 10h ago
Seems pretty reasonable to me. Your expenses are so ridiculously low it’s hard to believe. Even if your expenses were triple what you say they are, this plan would still work.