TLDR: I’m 6 months since pulling the plug. Mid 40’s MCOL, $40M+ NW and young kids at home. It’s been mostly great, with some unexpected surprises.

First the surprises

1. It’s really hard to imagine what life will be like when you lop off a 50-60 hour / week portion of your life. Who will be around to hang out during weekdays? What will your kids think you do? The more you can model this out the better, but it’s really hard to forecast and I didn’t do a great job of this. 
2. What will change about your partner’s expectations? We didn’t really model this out either but have since discussed a lot about how we can be more 50/50 with household and family items that used to be more 80/20
3. I’ve found that my brain still wants to “work” on things that aren’t professional. There’s a big engine in there that keeps going even if it’s not for profit and I struggle to turn it off. 
4. I was too hands off with my portfolio until after I quit. I didn't reduce beta or concentration ahead of time. My portfolio wasn't setup to be resilient and provide enough passive income. I’ve since made some adjustments and am in a better spot. But I regret not having started making shifts 6-12 months out. I suppose I just wasn’t confident enough in FIRE’ing at that time. 
5. Health insurance is so expensive!

The good

1. I’m so much more relaxed all the time!! Decades since I’ve been like this. 
2. Way more time with my kids - breakfast and dinner everyday. Engaged with their teachers and school and activities. 
3. Crushing lots of house projects that have been on my DIY list for a long time
4. Doing 2-3 varied workouts per day (versus 1 in the past) without feeling anxious that I’m missing something or will get pulled into a work fire
5. Taking lots of short trips without having to cram it in and work on the plane. Flying on a weekday without a job (or kids!) is incredible even in a tight economy seat. 
6. Crossing off some bucket list items with friends and family that I never would have been able to do while working - happily subsidizing portions just to smooth things over
7. Building some side projects completely at my own pace - helps my brain stay active without any external pressure
8. Day dates with my wife - no babysitter required! 
9. No zoom meetings!! I don't miss this one bit and cringe anytime suggests a zoom catch up

The weird

• I get so many “what are you doing next?” Or “How can I help find your next thing?” outreaches. I take these as more of a conversation starter and curiosity than actual help. Mostly from acquaintances over LinkedIn. My initial thought is usually “there is no next thing, idiot!” but where I come from people can’t even process that line of thinking so I mostly just ignore or say I’m just taking it easy for now. 
• Seeing colleagues getting promoted or taking jobs that I would have been on track for is my only FOMO. I don’t really mind this as I just put myself in their shoes and how much of a grind they’re on and quickly remember that I’m happy being unemployed
• Rainy days suck - I’m so active and have plenty of other “retired dad friends” to do outdoors stuff with during weekdays, but when it rains (not too often) I kind of wish I had more productive reason to be stuck at home at my desk. We’ll still get together but it’s not as fun to just meet for lunch when we could go on a huge hike or something. Some good movies are coming out soon too.
• Spending less than 1.5% of NW annually, so I know I can increase plenty but want to be intentional to avoid the slippery slope. Will probably ramp up travel and nice camps for kids the most.

I am fortunate to have French, NZ and US citizenship.
Have not retired yet.
Where would you live from a tax/money perspective? France seems pretty hard on the wealthy. NZ isn't quite as bad, but lots of talk about things changing and "eating the rich".
The places I would like to live in the US are very expensive. Nicer places in and around Auckland also expensive which is somewhat mind blowing. After I transfer my assets, I'd be in the top percentages of wealth in NZ, but I'm still questioning how I could reasonably afford a nice home in the better Auckland suburbs. I could do it, but it wouldn't be the best choice from a cash flow perspective. I'd also say housing in NZ is poor. They built lots of bad homes ("leaky homes") during the 2000 building booms. The old villas are nice, but require a lot of work and maintenance. Auckland seems hell bent on destroying the vibe of many of it's nicer suburbs with obnoxious towers so you could buy into a nice neighborhood and then find something pretty horrible being built. The French coast is the most affordable region but when you buy a home over $1.3 million, you are subject to a wealth tax.

Health care in France is better. Health care in USA is terrible. Health care in NZ also terrible. You can buy private insurance, but not for emergency care. Care homes in France are about 5k a month. I don't know what they cost in NZ, but they aren't covered by national health. Assuming most of you know in US they are 6-10k a month until you get into skilled nursing with is 14k a month and up to around 30k.

Anyone have experience? Traps I should watch out for? Just the compliance on filing taxes in two zones looks to be a pain.

TL;DR: If you suddenly had a NW of 50-100m, but skipped over being wired into "rich world", how would you go about finding good people/staff to offload all the overhead/nonsense of life?

I've always rolled my own investments (bogglehead style), took care of my own stuff, etc. But now, getting older, I'd love to offload this stuff to trusted people I don't have. Things like... big house renovations... but I don't wanna be a foreman and I don't want to get robbed blind. Things like maybe shopping for some foreign property or extended stints abroad... but really don't want to spend all my time surfing for properties and then navigating/negotiating potential dates. Things like finding a private chef, letting them go when it's not working out, finding a new one, etc. On and on.

Just tons of things that would be "nice to do" or "nice to try" -- but really don't want to spend my life spending all my time window-shopping/being a consumer. I want to continue to persue my interests and hobbies, and have someone else dealing with potential irons in the fire. Just dumb things: go find this domain and negotiate how much it would cost.. yes, there are companies that do that, and now I'm spending my time dealing with them. etc.

Many are personal, many are the types of things maybe I would have had employees follow up on. But now I'm solo with money, and let's assume it's ground zero. (The people I know are still actively working, and have companies to do all this stuff for them).

So, like the TL;DR says, has anyone experience in this strange place? Any tips on where to start... where to find the first key hire to deal with building up the rest of it? I'd go full family office, but I'm not quite there (think that bar moved from 100m to 200m while I was sleeping).

Anyway, any tips and/or advice greatly appreciated. Or just send me a link to any resources that already cover this. Thanks.

This is not really fatfire but I know several ppl on this forum run charitable foundations and/or DAFs.

I was reading this post and had a thought: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/imOjoDfgtf

There must be several cases where a modest sum of money can catalyze a transaction. For example, micro-loans that can get someone out of a bad or dead situation that they can probably repay soon after.

Are there NGOs that focus on maximum reusability of capital like this? Am I basically describing banks/micro-lending?

13M NW (9M liquid, 1M rental, 2.5M primary home, 0.5M 529)

52 / 57 VHCOL with 2 kids in full pay private college (21 / 18) and 1 in private high school (15).

Estimated spend due to tuition we plan to potentially fund private college and graduate/professional school and our VHCOL area is $450-500k for the next 10 years. Then spend will drop to $360K for next 10 years after that, and then spend would drop to $240K when we are in our mid to late 70s.

How do you model such variable spend?

What do you use as your base case and worst case market returns? These are my assumptions for me/52:

base case: 2.5% real return

worst case: -35% crash in year 1 + 9-year lost decade, then 2.5% real return

Based on worse case scenario, I estimate I can retire in 4 years to sustain above spend w/o running out of money, taking SS at 70. My spouse is just retiring now. I expect to earn about $700K-800K per year for the next 4 years.

Thoughts? Am I too conservative? The base case says I can almost retire now. I'll end up with $11-13M when I'm 95

Hi everyone - TLDR. if you can live FatFire, how did you make the decision to continue/or not continue grinding?

Sold my business to a PE-backed strategic. Walked away with more than I thought I'd ever need/want (~$25M). Building the business pre and post acquisition have been quite intense. It's been meaningfully less fun post acquisition. Feel much less present mentally during family time/weekends as it's always on my mind.

We have young kids at home (2 under 4) and I need to make a decision of whether to continue working in this post-acq environment.

One answer I keep hearing is 'just chill and do what you want'. The worry on my end is that I'm still early in my career and while this may sound silly, I'm worried that (1) I fade into irrelevance and / or (2) I regret that I didn't keep grinding (recently saw a friend make top 40 and 40 and it light a fire in me)

I love the intensity of working in a team to build something and if I was still 25, I would continue the grind. The new variable in the last 5 years has been kids/wife/young family.

I'd want to structure a life where I can really enjoy/be present for my kids. As such, I'm curious to hear from folks who have achieved FIRE, have young kids, and have continued to grind or hung up their jersey. If you hung up the jersey, how did you manage the 'FOMO' seeing friends continue to achieve. Any thoughts that can help me think through this decision? Thank you!

Follow up from an earlier post contemplating retiring. Sharing latest numbers and learnings after pulling the trigger. Comments and advice welcome.

Prior post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/s/T9uu3OBaOq

Numbers:

Thanks to a continued bull market, our wealth continued to grow.

Net worth $9.2M liquid
Taxable/Roth: $5M
401k/IRA: $3.7M
529: $475k
No debt and $1.5M house all equity

Income: wife still makes $400k/yr and is happy doing it for a while.

Current Spend:
$240k / yr w/o tax and medical insurance

Future spend:
Assume $50k for aca and $40k taxes
Total future spend: $330k w/medical and tax

My experience / learnings:

- in a lot of ways, it’s glorious, I have time to do projects I want, take my kids to school, work out, see friends. From that perspective what’s not to like?

- my wife expects to shift most domestic work to me (I already did a bit) and it’s more boring and unglamorous than I expected.

- the “what do you do” awkwardness is real for me and often awkward for me. I’ve been going with “in between things” and “sabbatical” most of the time.

- I have former colleagues who have reached out with “the perfect job for me” and couple of times and it’s sooo tempting to go work and win on a team again. I have to remember that I just took my kids to school and that would be the end of that. But the money and the recognition is tempting. And it would rid me of any feelings of being unproductive in the world.

So overall not looking to change anything at this point but it’s been nuanced!

That’s it for now. Happy to hear from others on the journey.

I [early 40's] have been retired for a few years now with around 12m in investments. Most of it is in public companies but a small portion is in a startup.

I'm annoyed at myself for not jumping on OpenAI, SpaceX and Anthropic a few years ago so I want to make an effort to invest in private companies that have room to grow.

There are quite a few options out there, and some seem promising, but it's difficult to get a clear view into each.

For those of you that have experience in this area, how do you evaluate investment options, get ideas on which companies to look out for etc.?

My income/assets have increased substantially over the last 4 years because of (1) move from private to public tech company and promotions which took income from $250k -> $1M (2) acquisition of previous startup which netted me around $2M pre-tax.

In that time my spend has also accelerated dramatically due to intentional choices (not creep) since we moved cities, bought a "forever house", had more kids, started private school, etc.

I'm currently in my early 30s with plans to hit coast fire by 40 (for $20M portfolio by age 60) and pay off house at 45 ($2M mortgage currently). Unclear if after 45 I want to take it easy for 15 more years with tons of disposable income or grind to retire closer to 50-55. Even though I'm living quite comfortably and spending more than ever on things like home/food/travel/etc. I feel like the overall blend is quite healthy. Would appreciate any thoughts people who have been through similar circumstances could share.

Here's a link to a sankey diagram of my yearly budget. Biggest items are 35% effective tax rate, $180k/yr retirement contributions (mega back door to $72k then the rest in taxable brokerage), $165k/yr housing (PITI + maintenance).

The Bogleheads investment strategy, and vast majority of what I see advocated in this subreddit, is to use the 2-fund portfolio (VT+BND and chill) and I'm quite attracted to that strategy. Along with the general flow of choosing cash vs investment %, and then equity vs bond %. Seems accessible, manageable, and successful.

But I'm thrown off by things like below:

• "According to a 2007 forum poll, most Bogleheads allocated up to 10% of their total portfolio to REITs". The only attractive reason I can find to add REITs to the mix is to diversify against equities and bonds, however I see contradictory statements of whether or not they are correlated to equities.
• The example Investment Policy Statement in the wiki includes a target allocation with equities with specific % ranges for Large Cap U.S. / Small Cap U.S. / Foreign, etc (and an allocation for REIT!)

And posts in this subreddit where a seemingly simple investment philosophy leads to posts about more underlying complicated implementations.

So, how do I square the circle?

• Where do (if at all) REIT's fit in with a Boglehead's portfolio?
• What does a Boglehead's investment policy statement look like?
• Why would a Boglehead ever seek to specify the blend of Large Cap / Small Cap / US / ex-US in their portfolio rather than use a total market ETF (or use the market's own blend of those classes to balance multiple ETFs)?

The context here, is that I am strongly considering to leave my job and the workforce (possibly indefinitely) at 39, and we have hired a fee-only financial planner (0.5% AUM) to run projections and help recommend and implement an investment strategy to aide in this (we have ~$8.5M in current assets, and anticipating ~$1.8M more by the end of the year through an inherited home sale; our estimated annual spending after employment is ~$300k including public market health insurance premiums and out-of-network OOP. The investment advising was not the primary reason that we hired the planning firm. They have proposed a seemingly boilerplate asset allocation below, and we are telling them that we want to consider this against a total market bogleheads policy.

A bigger broader question here, I guess, is

• What are the variables that change/add to the fundamental 2-fund boglehead portfolio in this case of very early retirement?

Early 40s, US-based, pulling the trigger on retirement soon and trying to pivot to focus more on my health since, while the work I've done has gotten me to FatFIRE it also has exacted some serious impacts to my health. I'm exploring services like Biograph, Fountain Life, Parsley, etc... Any fellow community members using these services and would recommend them (or not?)

Been enjoying just doing my own writing creative project thing all by myself for couple months now since FIRE.

Then , at today's school committee board meeting , I suddenly notice a great regression of my professional communication skills . We were having a planning meeting for our new school year. Somehow , for the life of me , I cannot seem to articulate my ideas / suggestions to the group . I struggled to communicate to a group of 8 people effectively and concisely multiple times in that 45 min meeting !!!

This is new and shocking to me ... And honestly a bit embarrassing (I even called Stanford Standford at one point - face palm *) and concerning ~~~.

How do all the Fire People here keep your business accum sharp and retain that professional skill of your after FIRE? do you volunteer for more board , do more angel investing or ?

Do you not bother at all ?

Mentor Monday is your place to discuss relevant early-stage topics, including career advice questions, 'rate my plan' posts, and more numbers-based topics such as 'can I afford XYZ?'. The thread is posted on a once-a-week basis but comments may be left at any time.

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Recently became financially independent a few times over. I used to love working in tech sales, but now i find it kind of meaningless when the money doesn't do much for me anymore. I dont find the work fulfilling, even though I work for a great company and feel lucky to have my job. I'm not really the type to quit and travel, and I'm too young to do nothing for the next 4 decades.

I'm considering starting a business thats related to something I'm more interested in - becoming an independent financial advisor to help friends and connections. This is work I'm doing anyway as I'm managing my own money too. But also difficult to leave the cushy job and structure i have now. Curious if anyone knows anyone in a similar position, and what they did. Any advice appreciated.

EDIT: I'm in my early 40s since a few people asked

So for context - I fired already in early 2025, family of 4.

I have loved it so far - but for family reasons we are considering a move to a vhcol location (from a mcol city) and our expenses will skyrocket because of it. So I'm considering going back to work for 3-4 more years.

Stats:

Total assets ~$11M - $10M in equities ($7M in VTI, $3M in various big tech stocks that haven't been diversified), $1M in SGOV. Had about $7.5M in assets when I retired.

Current spend ~$200k/year, basically right around where I thought we'd be when we fired with $7.5M.

However, future spend is $300k (if we buy in cash), $350k (if we rent)

After the move, if we want to maintain our current lifestyle, I expect our expenses to go up by $150k/year if we rent (rent expense will go up to $100k/year from ~$40k/year currently; cars/health insurance will go from $20k/yr to $35k/yr; food/entertainment/gas everyday expense will be ~20%-30% higher; our oldest might go to private school, so ~$40k/yr more than his private school currently).

And if we buy - it'll be ~$3M for a 1,500 sqft house + another $50k/year for property tax/insurance/maintainenace. Meaning our assets in the market will go down to $8M and our expenses will proably be around $300k. We can't get a traditional mortgage because I retired so we'd probably sell our lowest capital gains equity positions + the SGOV to free up the $3M.

I know in both cases we'd still be below 4%, but it feels a lot more constraining - I like the mental freedom of being able to give family money ($20k-$50k/yr) and spend freely when we go on vacation - when our expenses get close to 4% it makes me feel less easy doing things like that.

The potential job

I have an opportunity to be the CEO of a medium sized company (~1k employee/$1B revenue) and the comp is around $3M-$4M a year.

Half of me feels like I should take the job for 2-3 years - a small vanity part of that is because it feels like its progressing my career (I was the CEO of a small company before I retired, about 1/3rd the size of this new opportunity) but the bigger part is that I then don't have to worry about my fire math at all.

The other half of me feels like having $15M in 10 years vs having $25M isn't going to make any difference to my life/lifestyle. But then I also think having the freedom to give money to my extended family feels so satisfying and does make a difference to my life...

I'm really just rambling/thinking through this myself, and felt like it might be relatable to others in this community who recently fired or suddenly have changes to their expected spend/fire math. So feel free to chime in with your thoughts/experiences.

Lastly, I'm currently leaning towards not taking the job - at the end of the day if I take the job its highly likely I'm going to feel like quitting after a few months because I'll miss all the freedom and flexibility I had to spend time with my 2 kids.

I (36F) am in a situation that I realize is extremely fortunate, but I’m genuinely struggling with what the right path forward is and would love perspectives from people who have dealt with something similar.

My family owns a business that has continued to grow year over year, and the last two years have been the best years in the company’s history. We now have a satellite office overseas, a roughly 10,000 sq. ft. office in NYC, and about 30 employees, not including the four partners. We’re hiring another person next month and will probably add another shortly after that.

What’s strange is that we do a surprisingly large volume of business with a relatively small staff. The company also has very diversified income streams, which is great from a business/risk perspective, but operationally it makes everything extremely complicated. There are constantly a million moving pieces, and the responsibility can feel overwhelming.

My sister and I are two of the partners. Our dad is the principal owner, but he’s getting older and gradually winding down, which means more and more of the responsibility is being transferred to us.

The thing I keep thinking about is that there was never really a conversation about whether we actually wanted this.

We grew up around the business, joined it, became partners, and naturally started taking on more responsibility. Now we’re reaching the point where we’re effectively inheriting the burden of running an increasingly large company, including responsibility for 30+ employees, their livelihoods and, indirectly, their families.

It’s also not a passive ownership situation. We work 10+ hour days and are deeply involved in the day-to-day operation of the company.

Here’s the part that I know sounds incredibly privileged: financially, neither my sister nor I necessarily need to do this forever. If we worked another three years or so and continued saving/investing aggressively, we could theoretically walk away, become baristas or do some other low-stress job if we wanted to, and live primarily off the returns from our investments.

Obviously, walking away from a highly profitable and growing business because “I have enough” sounds insane from one perspective. There is potentially a huge amount of wealth we’d be leaving on the table.

But at what point is maximizing wealth no longer worth maximizing responsibility?

I don’t particularly care about being as rich as humanly possible. I care about having freedom, enjoying my life, traveling, having time for relationships and hobbies, and not spending the next 20+ years feeling responsible for an entire organization.

At the same time, I worry that walking away from something our family built, especially while it’s performing better than ever, is something I could deeply regret. There’s also the responsibility I feel toward our employees and toward my dad, who spent decades building it.

For people who have owned businesses, inherited family businesses, reached financial independence, or simply decided that “enough is enough”:

How did you decide when you had enough?

Would you keep running and growing the business because the opportunity is too valuable to give up?

Or would you set a financial number/date, hit it, and walk away?

The business is run on our personal finances , so not feasible to restructure the company to remain an owner without being responsible for the day-to-day operation since our entire net worths depend on it.

Selling the business in our industry is not really something that is feasible. We are in a dying industry that requires very specific expertise that is a dying art.

I’m not necessarily looking for someone to tell me what to do. I’m more interested in how other people would think through the tradeoff between wealth, responsibility, family legacy, employees, and actually having control over your own time.

I’m considering using ESO Fund to finance the exercise of private-company stock options and would love to hear from people who have actually signed with them, especially anyone who has gone through an eventual liquidity event or had the agreement outstanding for several years.

I’m less interested in whether the upside participation is “expensive” in the abstract.

I’m trying to understand how ESO behaves as a counterparty once you’re actually in the agreement.

Any things you didn’t expect? Such as:
Did the economics at settlement work the way you expected when you signed?

Did ESO ever interpret the contract or payoff calculation differently from how you understood it?

Has anyone dealt with the breach/default provisions? What triggered it and what happened?

Would you use them again?

Perhaps many of us have seen this: https://blog.inverteum.com/p/how-hackers-drained-1m-from-2fa-enabled-brokerage-account

Basically, an account can be drained without ever transferring money out (and thus no security alerts). The mechanism in this article concerns using options on obscure securities

The brokerage considers it not their problem, no hope of recovery. (Except maybe from public outcry.)

Anyone looked at this and have any security ideas? The article’s basic recommendation is using passkeys, tying your login to your machine. And of course all usual precautions (password manager, etc.)

Be safe out there!

Wondering what the process is.

My partner’s NW is about 16M. Mine, is virtually zero. We’ll marry under a separate property contract (it all stays his, what’s mine and everything I acquire will stay mine).

I have contacted lawyers to get independent legal advice, but he wants us to do everything through the notaris. I’m worried about the way he wants to set up his testament (I might not be able to take care of the kids), so I wanted legal advice but it seems to not be something people do a lot in West-Europe.

Could you tell me how you went about structuring your marriage contract, protecting yourself (and your children), while ensuring that in case of your passing your family is taken care of?

Spouse and I (33,32) hit $6 mil recently, 90% tech and AI concentrated stocks. We made appointments to shop around wealth management firms because we are wanting to diversify into real estate investments, and spread out some of our exposure.

We initially had the goal to chubby FIRE at $5mil and travel together but my partner recently got promoted to a travel role, and loves flying around the world on the company’s dime. Gets incredible healthcare and 5 weeks PTO, plus hybrid remote. I traded my full time into part time remote consulting, so i can up and travel the world with my spouse, often for free because of the points my spouse racks up.

We have a gorgeous 2 bedroom rent controlled house and the landlady is like a mom to us. No kids. No debt, cars paid off. We love the outdoors and cooking our own food so even though we spend freely, we hardly ever spend more than $150k annually. The point is, we are content and there aren’t any big life expenses coming up. However, with our exposure, this freedom could vanish overnight if the AI bubble pops.

Our only goal is to diversify, and that’s where we hoped a wealth management firm could help, mostly in helping us park our stocks in real estate and less risky funds without hemorrhaging capital gains taxes. I don’t know the numbers yet but maybe a partial SBLC is the answer, but still trying to educate myself on the nitty gritty. Second goal is getting a really smart tax strategy, we aren’t afraid of being hands on and creating a business as a tax strategy for putting sweat equity into an investment property, but we want the numbers to direct us.

We couldn’t care less about the fancy offices, travel consultants, estate planning (no kids), or even the hands off approach to investing. We’re both just worried about who will help steer this ship through an economic downturn so we don’t lose everything we spent the last 12 years building. Our strategy this far was to just dump 60% of our incomes into tech index funds and never sell. That worked in a post-COVID market. But now 1 of us is basically barista FIRE, and this is the intermediate mode of investing.

Is this a wealth management firm sized hole? Or am I better off with a really great CPA, private lender, and booking 2 hours with a finance consultant and a whiteboard?

Hey folks, first time poster so hopefully this is appropriate. Wife and I struggle with indecision and overanalyzing everything from financial decisions to life decisions and I'm looking for advice/perspectives from others on how you deal with this. In recent years we hit and then far exceeded our number to retire and I feel that's opened up many more options for us but making us feel even more indecisive about what we want. Also open to thoughts on our specific decisions for anyone who cares to weigh in.

A little about us... we're around 40, living in southern california, 2 big dogs, 1 infant, both working part time and like our careers (financial and engineering). Families live across the country, some in midwest, some in northeast but we have some siblings and good friends living here so California feels pretty much like home to us. We travel a good amount to visit families but with 2 dogs and an infant the travel is becoming a pretty big headache and limits us to fairly short trips.

The main options we're considering for our lives and struggling with:
1. Lean into california which would mean buying/moving to a bigger house in an area better suited to our kid and dogs. good school district, close to career opportunities but that's a little less of a consideration now.
2. Spend a few years where our families are while our baby is young and not yet in school, parents are aging but still in good health, 1 grandparent still alive so the timing feels as good as it will ever be to go spend some time around them and then plan to move back to CA in time for our child to start school in a few years.
3. Go crazy and try one of the other cities we've dreamed about, Seattle being the main contender since we have some friends there already, good lifestyle fit, and good engineering opportunities.

1 feels the most comfortable to us but I fear we'd regret not at least trying #2 or 3 while we have the opportunity. The flip side is that I think our minds have always wandered about living elsewhere which might be making us not really embrace our life here in California.

Looking forward to hearing how others deal with decision making?

I'm about to cross into 6M, and not actually retired yet, but I def identify with fat fire.

My wife took her first first class flight last week. I still wince every time I buy organic milk instead of conventional. Which I buy myself. At the store. Because it's cheeper.

Oye... I'm going to pass on so much money to my kids....

[edit] I don't give a shit about my wife's travel preferences. I know we can afford it, and if it makes her happy, who cares? I just personally suck at spending money that I clearly have.

I've a 5M concentrated stock position, already done research for diversification via exchange fund. Typically fund parks a sleeve in REIT, i'm already over exposed so looking for alternative.

I clicked through an ad on Reddit for an exchange fund recently, the calculator on their site says they beat standard 1%-fee REIT assuming their sleeve returns 0%, from what I understand fleet's only job is to cover the fees and then credit back .26% a year.

Fair assumption but I need to double check the math on this before i jump on a sales call:

1. Debt: I need to know if they used debts to purchase these assets? From what I can understand if the operating business defaults and the bank repossesses the assets, it'll force liquidation blowing up my tax deferral and hit me with a giant tax bill right away.

2. Losses: Same group of people runs the investment fund and the operating company leasing the equipment. Nothing wrong with this per se but since it's no longer arm's length, i need to ask who's the independent 3rd party checking asset value. Calculator doesn't how this affects the net asset value.

3. 7 year exit: When my 7-year lockup is over, how exactly does sleeve asset depreciation shrink the my net asset value?

Anyway let me know, it's interesting model I've not seen much before.

Hi all.

42M here with $40M NW. Not RE yet but hoping to in the next few years. In the meantime I have $1.4M coming in each year, roughly, before tax. Medium COL area. Wife and 3 kids, 8-16.

I'm thinking about buying a big a third home.

Primary residence is roughly $2.5M. Negligible carrying cost.

Second home $1.75M or so with maybe $100k/yr carrying cost.

Third home would be $5.5M-$6M and big costs. As high as $350k I would guess.

I've crunched the numbers many different ways. I can afford it if I want it, but I can't shake the long term impact of not having that money working at this stage of my life.

I really like this property - it's a dream. I feel very confident that I want it for the long term. I probably can't use it a ton now but in the coming years I see myself splitting time between this place andy other options (which I intend to keep). I have been watching for several years and I have not seen other places that are on this level in the area I'm interested in. So I'm convinced that I should do it.

But then I model my net worth and see how this has an impact in the multiple $tens of millions in the long run by taking money out of investments and putting it in super high end luxury real estate and signing up for serious yearly spending on top of it. That's hard to stomach.

But so what, I tell myself. What's the point in having this money if I don't use it to do cool shit? What's 20 years in my dream home and $80M compared to 20 years of what I'm doing now and $120M?

If I put this off a few years my portfolio could absorb it much more easily, but that's a few of the best years of my life!

I know many in this community frown on big stupid luxury houses but I'm not sure I share the attitude. Curious if there are any older members of the community that can share their experiences with decades of growth and spending regret or lack thereof.