r/fijerk

Income blew up in the past 8 weeks. Went from about $220k to $300-$330k. We are 27M/26F so I think we count as HENRY for our age. Regardless of whether we qualify I would like the advice from this crowd

Wife was laid off. Rebounded very well but now has a 80 mile (round-trip) commute 3x per week.

My car is due. Trade in value is $600 which tells you all you need to know. She drives a 2022 Equinox that we can get another ~150k miles out of (and plan to)

Want to buy a 2026 Tesla Model Y Premium. Test drove, love it. Very safe, less maintenance and gas with all that mileage, and the Full Self Driving is big value for spending 2.5 hours commuting.

58k OTD. $15k down. 0.99% for 72 months. $600/mo.

Looked at used ones (2024) - even considering depreciation savings, its about $10-$13k more to buy new. Over 10+ years I feel thats worth it for the new features.

This is far more than I ever thought I’d spend on a car and swore off buying new. I find that relative to income and savings it’s not very consequential, but I’m kind of uncomfortable spending money like this.

I almost feel like I’m too young to be enjoying nice things.

Is that a normal feeling or should I listen to my gut and stay cheap?

Edit:
$100k annual spend

$250k in retirement
$80k in cash
$75k home equity

$80k/year contributed to retirement ($12k space left in her 401k)
$3,000/mo saved in brokerage before bonuses (estimated to net another $17k - $30k)

When people say they make more than six figures when they make $110,000.

Idiot, that's still six figures. It isn't more than six.

I have 1.1 million in stocks, and another 200k in a pension that will pay at age 65. It’s guaranteed by the PBGC, so I’m not worried the money won’t be there. I make about 200k a year.

I’d like to quit my corporate job eventually and be a full time pianist and piano content creator. The issue is unknowns:

1. No idea if I will get married or have children. 4% withdrawal rate might be enough for me, but not for a family.
2. No house. I live with my mother and pay for all the utilities as my rent. I would think to retire, I’d need my own place.
3. Healthcare. I live in Georgia so maybe there is an ACA subsidy. Still feels like a lot of my retirement income would go to medical insurance.

For all these reasons, I feel like I need 2 million plus a house. Am I being unreasonable?

I guess it wouldn’t hurt to work until 40.

Hi everyone, I'm a 2 week old fetus, soon to be a 3 week old fetus. My future wife is not born yet, but we will be inheriting over $2 million (and growing) when her parents pass. Her parents are currently 25 years old, but I wanted to be prepared with what to do when it becomes MY money. Should I hire a financial advisor?

Hello, I am now a pour.

I retired in 2021 at 19 after my grandpa left me an inheritance of $15mm when he died of gas buildup due to severe constipation. I know everyone usually does 3% or 4% SWR so I decided to be extra safe by upping the security to 25%.

I started with traveling the world. I had lots of fun snorting lines off of Thailand lady boys and buying them bottles of overpriced liquor. After that got old I moved back to America.

In America found a beautiful girl from Atlanta, but she would never let me touch her. She made me sit in the chair of a hotel room and watch her second boyfriend make love to her. I’d like to hope Grandpa was up there watching too. I really enjoyed that though, so I bought her a boat.

I’ve developed a severe sports betting addiction and
lost a few millions dollars, but Grandpa was watching it so it’s okay.

Anyways, I left out some details to stay anonymous, but I now only have $25k but I’m putting it on a huge parlay with +98200 odds so I’ll make it all back and more.

If it doesn’t hit, I might need to go to school. Grandma will be disappointed in me, but it’s okay because Grandpa left me the inheritance and not her haha.

I'm posting this to gauge where I am financially in relation to a more general population. I graduated dog walking in May, and have been applying for pet sitting roles/internships for the last 3 years. I landed a few interviews, even made it to the final rounds for a couple, but was ultimately rejected from everything.

After graduating with no offer, I networked with close friends and relatives, and managed to get a role at a big consulting firm with an hourly rate of $100000 (40 hours per week, no overtime). I've been here the last 3 months and life is great! Work is only sometimes stressful, I mostly listen in on meetings and have small tasks related to the end product, fully remote (with 2-3 days a month travel required). Managers and team are very chill and have reasonable workload expectations.

I live at home with my parents, have no bills or expenses (except for a one-time $40000k splurge on upgrading my home PC setup, maybe $4-500000 dollars misc per month) and expect to save/invest 80% of my income for as long as I can.

I know I am incredibly privileged and lucky to be in my position. My own family is not in a stable or comfortable financial position (Dad is disabled, Mom works 40 hours a week making $15 an hour) so I want to ensure that I maximize this opportunity to secure financial freedom for my family and my own future. I wanted to see if anyone had advice for a young person coming into a huge amount of money after being effectively broke their entire lives.

My wife has a 20 hour a week job that pays 180k. I make 150k at my job. We have 800k in investments. She got an offer for a 40-50 hour a week that pays 25k more. She loves the work life balance at her current job; including getting to spend more time with the kids. She wants to reach her FI goal of 2.25 million so she can switch to working a part time job. She already works a part time job. Should she switch jobs so she can reach FI sooner and swap back to a part time job? She'll lose her company's 401k match for leaving sooner too. But its more money. She should take it right?

Curious if anyone else does this.

I’ve started tracking how long it takes my net worth to go up by each additional $100k, kind of like a Garmin for compounding.

Last $100k took just under 2 weeks, which was fun, but honestly I’m a little disappointed because one of those days was flat and I had to experience working class emotions again.

I’m thinking of making a spreadsheet with splits:

$0–100k: hard work, discipline, sacrifice
$100k–500k: boring middle
$500k–1M: “trust the process”
$1M–2M: market starts doing my job for me
$2M+: every green day is a small business acquisition
$3M+: accidentally make a teacher’s salary while microwaving oatmeal

Does anyone else celebrate when their portfolio casually adds another household’s down payment in the time it takes normal people to get through two Mondays?

Not trying to brag. Just trying to stay motivated during the long, difficult journey from rich to slightly richer.

The Sauce

Ive been hustling hard in five remote jobs, each job each overseeing 20 AI agents hustling hard, while living rent-free with my parents and going to school.

When I broke through $10 million NW I finally pulled the cord and FIRE’d.

However now I have the problem that my teacher at school says I’m not allowed to retire yet, even though I already have.

Can anyone please advise?

Also do I tell parents Ive FIRE’d or will this just make them greedy and stop giving me pocket money?

I spent the first 3 years of retirement significantly under my SWR, year 4 was close to it and now in year 5 I'm predicting that I'll blow right past it.

I retired in Jan 2022 with 3.6M @ age 36, I'm now at 5M @ age 40

My original idea was to use the Trinity method with 3% for my SWR. That put me at 120k for this year and I'm likely going to be in the 130k-145k range for this year due to needing a new roof, major car expenses and other major home expenses.

Looking at other calculation methods:

• Trinity with 3.5% gives a SWR of 141k - GK guardrails starting at 4% gives a SWR of 150k
• A full reset (pretending I'm retiring now) with Trinity gives these values:
  • 3% - 133k
  • 3.25% - 144k
  • 3.5% - 155k

Originally I was freaking out because I was blowing way past my original 120k budget, but after looking at these methods and seeing that other methods put me in the 120-155k range, the upper 145k spend doesn't seem too bad especially since a bunch of costs this year were one time expenses.

I'm curious what other people would think / do in my situation?

The things I've been thinking:

• Don't worry because it's in the range of all of these models & SWR is uncertain because we can't predict the future
• Don't worry about it because my spending was 172k under budget for the first 4 years with the conservative 3% rule
• Worry a little bit and commit to a lower WR for next year to make up for it
• Stick to the original budget of 120k and pull the remaining amount from my credit line at 5.5% interest where I'd do interest only payments until a year where there's >15% return and that's when I start paying it down back to a comfortable level
• Cancel upcoming vacation to save maybe $6k if I can recoup my sporting event tickets, the hotels are refundable. Also try to change from not checking my spending to scrooge mode again like during the saving period. No eating out, no entertainment, etc. I can probably save 12k+ if I go into hardcore saving

Any other options?

Over the past few weeks this has had me super stressed and worried sick. I think I'm finally seeing it in a healthier light with some of these options above, but yeah still stressed about it.

What would you do?

The situation

40M, married with two kids, 4 and 2.5, living in a VHCOL area in the US. Wife is Asian, I’m European, kids were born in the US. We’re dual US/EU citizens.

$2.5M NW, mostly in taxable brokerage accounts:

• $2M VTI
• $270k in tech companies I’ve worked for
• $150k VXUS
• $70k cash

I work in tech and make ~$400k/year. WLB is actually fine, but I hate the job. It’s high stakes, with constant layoffs and the ever present fear of PIP.

My wife works in finance, makes ~$150k/year, and has good WLB.

Financially, we’re obviously very fortunate. But day to day, life feels like a grind. Between work and two young kids, we’re always busy. Everyone around us is equally busy. We have a handful of friends but rarely see them, and we have no family nearby.

We make good money, but beyond the occasional vacation, there isn’t much we actually want to spend it on. At this point, more money mostly feels like numbers going up on a screen.

The plan

Get to ~$3.5M NW and move to Southern Europe, where I’m from, ideally before our oldest starts elementary school.

The idea would be to find two lower stress remote jobs and essentially CoastFIRE. Send the kids to international school, have more time for ourselves, relationships, family and hobbies, and generally build a life that feels less centered around work.

We’d leave the $3.5M invested for retirement and aim to cover our living expenses entirely from whatever we earn. No need to maximize income anymore.

Then see where life takes us. Maybe we keep working like that indefinitely. Maybe after a few years we realize we have enough and quit altogether. Maybe we start a small business or do something we actually enjoy.

Has anyone here made a similar US → Europe move with young kids after reaching FI-ish territory?

Anything you think we’re overlooking? And does $3.5M feel like a reasonable point to stop optimizing for income and make the jump?

Well, I just accepted my first big boy job. I will make around 400k. I went from 60k to 400k in about 7 years. I have been around I went from:

1.60k
2.65k
3.100k
4.110k
5.120k
6.150k
7.400k

I like to think I am good at investing and saving, but I am not good enough to know what I do not know when you enter this world. I have always followed the basic rules. have 1x annual salary saved by 30 was the most crucial in my mind. This has become virtually impossible with my raise happening when I am 28, so having 2 years to get there is just impossible in my mind. This is just an example of one of my thoughts.

Anyways. What do you have for advice on this kind of pay jump? Has anyone gone through it in their 20s? What can I no possibly know coming into it.

I've been following this sub for a long time. For context, I also grew up poor as in food scarcity poor. My wife was lower middle class. So some monetary anxiety factors in here. Additionally, I've had a rough go of health over the past 25 years. 3 spinal fusions, 3 shoulder surgeries. Testicular tumor. Brain tumor.

Both 52. $6.7M net worth. Breakdown:

Currently in high COLA because of jobs but kids are out of college and flexible to move.
11k monthly expenses but we'd likely scale back a little.
850k combined annual earning. Also roughly150k per year in equity grants in a late stage VC IT company.

650K home equity. $250k remaining on 15y mortgage (8y remaining) at 2.5%

$2.2m in IRAs
$2.1 investment accounts.
$1.7 in 401ks

About 90k cash on hand.

Fire calculators say we have a 95% chance of hitting our retirement goals, even if we live to 92, and probably leaving life changing money to our kids

I think we're good. Maybe beyond good. I'm ready to be done, wife says she's not ready to retire. I'm ready amd worried that I'll be restricted in my travel abilities early because of orthopedic issues.

Any advice on how to help your spouse accept that we can retire and we will be okay?