How are we thinking through upgrading from a starter home bought when rates were good and prices were low comparatively?

32 and 28 years old married with one year old. Wife took a year off of work but is now going back. Looking to move in next year or two to get closer to her job and be in a desirable school district.

Thinking price range of $500K-$600K but painful with current rates and considering throwing brokerage at it or staying in current house until closer to kindergarten and possibly paying for new house outright. Daycare will be a killer at $20K per year but my initial approach to my wife is if her salary covers daycare and incremental mortgage payment we could do it.

Current Home Equity: $150K
Current Brokerage: $160K
Other Retirement: $370K
Current Savings Rate: 30% but would likely drop to ~20% after move

HHI: Approx $275K

I have a full time job with good pay. My wife also earns well. We can afford rent and our living expenses for the month and every last bit goes to savings which isn't a lot. I want to figure out a way to make some extra spending money so our salary can go fully towards savings for emergencies and then we can use the spending money for other things. I've tried Facebook marketplace flipping but its not reliable and way too slow. What could I do after work hours to make some extra cash? Im open to any ideas. But trust me I've tried many different things but just can't find something that actually works

MY spouse and I are at the stage of life where we're considering becoming parents, and I'm curious what we can be doing now to prepare financially before fully embracing the Messy Middle. We're currently in step 7, saving 25% for retirement (with employer match in that count), and we're building up cash to someday replace my wife's car whenever it goes out. What are some things we should be doing now to be financially as ready as possible for parenthood?

My wife and I are finally getting around to setting up a simple will and guardianship for our kids. I’m seeing quotes from $2-3k for this, which is higher than I expected. I think I recall TMG saying on a prior podcast this can usually be done pretty cheap. Anyone with recent experience setting this up? Is this the going rate?

My employer offers a “free will service,” but after their intake screening they are only offering an expense trust. We don’t really have need for a trust.

Has anyone thought of large IPOs like SpaceX, anthropic, or open AI if they go public how that would affect index funds?

Like SpaceX IPO is Targeting a June IPO .... The Nasdaq 100, tracked by more than $600bn of investor money, was the first big index to change its rules, allowing the very largest newly listed companies to join in as little as 15 trading days after their IPO.

"It will be impossible to not own them"

My parents invested $5k for me as a kid which grew to $15k when I became an adult. It formed the initial base of my investing. My dad also gifted me $5k when I got married and outside of paying for my school that was pretty much it. I thought that was fair.

For a future kid, I was playing around with compound interest calculator and seeing "hey if I just invested like $XXX a month for them, they'd have several hundred thousand when they graduate college! We could give it to them as a gift!" I told my wife and she thought it'd be foolish to gift an early 20-something several hundred thousand as 20-somethings are morons and they have to mostly make their own way like we did. (TBF I think I would have mismanaged a large amount like that myself at that age)

Outside of helping with their schooling, do you currently (or plan to) invest heavily on behalf of your kids? Or is it all yours and they gotta wait for the inheritance?

Edit: Lots of good ideas and views in the comments. Thanks everyone.

I 28 male soon to be 29 in 3 months currently have two debt obligations that I believe would not be considered high interest debt. I currently owe $29k on an auto loan sitting at 6.2%, and have a personal loan about $5k at 6.75%. I do want to note that the car payment does fall within 8% of my monthly gross income, and I did put 20% down but it’s financed for 5 years instead of 3.

Should I prioritize paying these down first before building up the emergency reserves? Or given the interest rate start building the emergency fund and move up on the FOO?

Current situation:

• 25 years old
• 85k income
• 95k in investments
• 1200 in Brokerage
• 45k in roth ira
• 47k in 401k mix of roth and trad
• 2500 in HSA

My parents have been gifting me and my siblings a portion of their income each year as an advance on our "inheritance". Because of this, I have saved a significant amount more than most at my age as they gift enough to max my Roth IRA every year. This was the third year of this.

Normally, the goal is 1x income by 30. I have reached that at 25 partly because of my parents early inheritance gifts.

Any suggestions on what a better metric would be considering I will not have a windfall inheritance in the future, and that the money I am saving is not subtracted from my income? Should I be shooting for 2x income by 30?

What does this idiom even mean? Is it a southern dialect thing like ‘bowling point’? They say this so often in their live shows and I don’t even know who came up with this saying. Is the team “in the wings” a common thing??

I’ll start:

Days until payday: 5

Money left: $81.36

What’s your strategy to make it until payday without overspending?

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Got about 50k sitting in hysa earning 3.5% but i want to lock it in for a year since i wont need it til 2027. whats the be͏st 1 year cd rate u guys are seeing? looking for something simple and fdic insured obviously

I'll try to give a succinct run down of my wife's financial history and how it's affecting us as a team today. We're both 27, married for 2 years.

She's always expressed frustration that her parents never taught her how to handle money. All they would do is say cliches like "you need to learn the value of a dollar" but never actually teach her skills. She never budgeted and before we moved in together, she had no savings and was fairly often in a place of "do I pay for gas or food this week?". She missed bills, got her electricity shut off at least once (that I know of). Fortunately no debt, as she knew a CC would be a bad idea. Throughout knowing her I tried to help her budget (and I myself only started properly budgeting about 7 months after we met). When I tried to show her how, she would get frustrated that "this system doesn't work for my brain". She essentially would try to just mentally keep track of when bills were due. There were details like the fact that she had to deliver a paper check to support this claim that a digital budgeting app wouldn't work. We moved in together and that helped, but she still made no effort to save (IIRC?). We then got married and I encouraged us to combine finances. To be honest, this was a practical step because whether we were married or not, her lack of personal finance effort was going to affect me. At least if we pool our money and I manage it, I can kind of force her to save. This was 2 years ago and since then we've just fell into a routine of me managing the money and her trying to be somewhat conscious of the finances, but in a very abstract way--never about raw numbers, never in terms of expenses vs income vs savings. It's more about if she subjectively feels like she's "doing good" with spending. She doesn't look at the budget, she doesn't consult it.

Our first child is due in December and we're still not quite sure what she's going to do as far as work (we'd both prefer her to be a SAHM). Regardless, expenses will go up and income will go down, which means being on the same page financially is vital. But this is hard when she has such an aversion to numbers, nitty gritty details, budgeting, etc. She kind of does personal finance off of vibes. If I say, "hey, we overspent on X this month". She'll say, "I thought I was doing good!" -- she doesn't ask or talk about the objective numbers. I tell her, "It's not about good or bad, it's about having a certain amount of money and staying within that budget". Eg. she wants a nice chair for the nursery. I also want this chair, and I know we'll need a chair. But that doesn't mean we can just like that drop over $800 on a chair while we have other things we need to plan for. There was also a sale from some online baby clothing site. She wanted to buy an $80 PJ set for herself that kind of matches a baby outfit she likes. She also wanted to buy multiple $30 sets of newborn outfits. At this time, with us needing to practice frugality to see how well we can handle it, I have a hard time agreeing that those are good uses of our money. Because she refuses to look at the numbers, we can't have a meaningful conversation where we evaluate if buying this chair or those clothes is realistic right now. It's just based on vibes: "we need it eventually so let's just get it now".

Yesterday I tried to go through the budget balancing process with her to pull her in more and help her have more awareness about our finances (maybe if she sees the process for covering the constant overspending it would help create awareness?) This process is monotonous but not that hard if we do it weekly (it's something that up to this point only I have done; I think I've tried to do it with her in the past but it never sticks). It involves squaring up the transactions in the budget with the bank's transactions, then "rolling with the punches" and moving money around in the budget to cover overspending. Which, unfortunately, is a constant thing with my wife. Usually in the form of eating out. Which, to be fair, she's currently pregnant so that's expected.

When doing this with her, I tried to start by having her do the process. I would walk her through each and every step since she's a very visual learner and budgeting is unfortunately not very visually stimulating. I figure we all learn best by doing. She got visibly frustrated and was irritated by trying to walk her through it instead of just doing it and having her sit there passively. I know this isn't the first time I've shown her so I thought she could handle doing it with me guiding (I know she can, but she thinks she can't therefore she can't).

At one point she said, "My brain doesn't know the difference between this and something like public speaking". It's like budgeting triggers her fight or flight.

At this point I don't know what else to try. She refuses to be involved in the finances. She budgets based off of vibes instead of numbers. She doesn't look at the budget before spending. If I didn't take over the finances, she wouldn't save. She blames her parents for not teaching her how to handle money, which is fair, but she also makes no effort to teach herself now that she's an adult.

Techno riche (noun)
The newly wealthy class created by AI, crypto, startups, and digital platforms, characterized by engineered minimalism, private technology, optimization culture, and status expressed through access rather than traditional luxury.

That embarrasing new nouveau riche who try to buy their way into culture (see Met Gala and Cannes sponsorship).

I know that Brian has talked about taking the foot off the gas pedal and it becomes more of an option the closer you get to retirement.

I am a 39m government employee with a strong pension, high retirement savings rate, and young kids. My wife and I are probably on pace for a retirement income that exceeds our current inflation-adjusted spending, but I’m struggling with determining when “more saving” stops materially improving life outcomes. Especially since the “tax savings” may be more and minimal in tax advantage accounts. My wife looked at her 401k and wasn’t excited just sort of glum that it is all this money she has no access. I think at our next family meeting I would like to talk to her about decreasing our saving rates to allow more bandwidth for life style. This may not be tax efficient, but I feel that dollars spent today would provide more benefit than the difference they could make tomorrow.

I think my questions are:

- When did you intentionally reduce savings?
- Did having a pension change your approach to Roth vs pretax vs brokerage?
- Any regrets either from over-saving or under-living during your kids’ younger years?
- What were you willing to sacrifice retirement contributions for?

Interested particularly in perspectives from pension households or people who reached Coast FIRE earlier than expected.

I am currently keeping my health deductible in cash in my HSA and invest any interest it makes monthly. Do you keep cash in your HSA?

Emergency fund will be at 6 months later this month.

My (32M) wife (27F) spent the last 8 years aggressively paying off our mortgage ($280K) and our vehicle loans (totaling $60K) and we finally became debt free on March 17 this year. Started building our emergency fund (crazy we never had one or had to have one during this time) and saving for our adoption fund (somewhere between $40-50K - private adoption). Wednesday our AC (central air) started messing up. Had someone come check it out and fix it, messed up again yesterday, he came back again. $1400 later, messed up again today so had a bigger company come in and they showed me pictures and the duct work is really bad, both inside and outside units severely leak refrigerant. Overall, a very bad system. So…here I am financing a $30K system at 9.99% over the next 10 years. A minimum payment of $352/mo. I could have gone with a 5.99% for 5 years, buuuutttt did I mention we have to come up with all that money for our adoption fund before the end of the year (6-7 months) because we will most likely have our future child placed with us at that point? It’s usually 12-18 months, but the agency we are working with told us they were super excited for a young couple to adopt so it’ll probably happen at the end of the year. I just feel so defeated right now. Probably going to have to take out another loan for the remaining adoption fees. Just opened a Roth IRA on Thursday too 🤣