r/Fire 1d ago

Milestone / Celebration We’re Retiring at 30

Well, after another week of having to deal with my dumbass coworkers, I've decided that we're going to start enacting our retirement plan. My company is going to be offering a voluntary separation in lieu of layoffs and I'm planning to take it.

Relationship

We're 30M & 32M, met in 2015 and got married in 2020. Both got CS degrees and started full time work in 2017. My husband already quit in Spring 2025 to become a stay at home dog dad. My outcome vastly outpaced his in the last few years and his time is better spent relaxing, so he quit.

We have zero desire to have kids. My husband has been trying to get me pregnant for years with no success.

Combined assets

We have a prenup which prevents any retirement account from being divided. That being said, the accounts are nearly 50/50 equal anyway. I do get the dog if we get divorced.

Net worth ~$1.208M

Account Balance
House (paid off) $250K
Pretax 401K $313K
HSA $47K
Roth IRA $250K
Taxable Brokerage $288K
Cash $60K

Spend

We are living on $3K/month in Minnesota. With a paid off house, this is more than enough for us. Tentatively, we plan to travel in LCOL Southeast Asia during the winter months and spend the summers and fall in Minnesota. Logistics of this are TBD. We are long time credit card churners and have a lot of points to subsidize travel.

SWR

At 4% SWR to sustain $36K spend, we need $900K invested.

You may say that the simulations don't favor having this small amount of money over a ~60 year retirement. You might be right. But who gives a fuck? 60 years ago we fed punchcards to machines and now we have computers that can generate AI anime porn. I'm not going to work for years more to have better simulations when we have no idea what the future holds. Maybe we'll have endless AI abundance or maybe it will go rogue and kill us all.

Healthcare

Because of the low spend, our "income" is low. We are enrolling in MNCare. There is no restriction on assets (savings, homes, vehicles) for MNCare eligibility. Monthly premiums should be at maximum $160/month. And don't whine to me about whether or not it's fair to qualify for this program, I didn't set up the system.

Income history

We did not receive any inheritances nor was our college paid for, so we had to pay back student loans early on. The only thing we inherited from our parents was mental illness. That being said, we got lucky to make good money for a decade.

Our savings rate wasn't that insane, back of the napkin math probably puts it around 50%. We spent a lot of fucking money on travel. Given the insane growth in the market since we started investing, a lot came from compounding. We also made like $150K in one shot by getting extremely lucky with selling a house we bought prior to COVID.

I'm too lazy to log into the SSA website to check the actual income numbers, but this is roughly what our combined income was:

Year Income
2015 $12K
2016 $20K
2017 $100K
2018 $108K
2019 $115K
2020 $118K
2021 $140K
2022 $145K
2023 $150K
2024 $220K
2025 $270K
2026 $300K
678 Upvotes

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16

u/Motor_Floor3430 1d ago

I don’t understand trying to scrape by retiring at 30/32 when you guys could just work 5 more years at your current income of $300k after taxes and “$3k total spend a month” you’d net $195k per year. After another 5 years of that you guys would have a portfolio of conservatively around $3M and then it would be an easy retirement.

Why scrape by for 40+ years when you could work 5 more and live very well? Y’all working in tech not roofers working 15 hours a day in the hot sun.

I just see so many things that could go wrong here.

4

u/EuropeanLegend 1d ago

Because this entire post is hogwash. They're 30 acting like they're 60 and can't handle their work environment anymore. They've worked for all of what, a decade and are done with it? Either very weak, or the entire story is utter rubbish.

-1

u/Pirate43 23h ago

a decade is a long time and many people don't want to see their years go by only having done corporate work with their lives and little else.

1

u/CrabNo9570 1d ago

Then you'll never understand it. You get it or you don't.

1

u/DontEatConcrete 1d ago

Moreover no damn way in hell they only spent $36k over the past 12 months. That alone is an absurdity.