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Daily FI discussion thread – Monday, April 20, 2026
byu/AutoModerator infinancialindependence
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been lurking here for while and finally hit that first 100k milestone last month at 35 – feels weird how slow it was getting there but everyone says it gets faster from here
A few months ago I started decreasing my MBDR contributions temporarily to improve cash flow while I was paying for wedding planning. Well yesterday I found my wedding dress!! (You can see my post history for pictures.) I’m very glad I allowed myself this financial leeway. My wedding is quite small and modest, city hall ceremony followed by family dinner at a restaurant, so I really didn’t want to feel like I needed to compromise on my dress. It’s one of my only expenses, darn it! Once it’s paid for I think I’m ready to bump my MBDR contributions back up. We also took a very short vacation to Edinburgh to go to the designer’s workshop. It was a bit of a whimsical splurge but we desperately needed a short vacation. Both of us are working the most intense, but the most highly compensated jobs of our careers, and at this point the best thing we can do for our long term finances is do whatever it takes to avoid burnout and keep vesting stock options. Our lives will look very different in a year or two, we just need to keep going. In the meantime, life happens, including our wedding! Thanks to everyone who convinced me to unclench a little bit. 🙂 I’ll post in here when I officially bump the MBDR contributions back up for accountability.
Friday was my last day working. I am officially retired. I was originally aiming for the end of the year, but I was able to get six months of severance and health care through October due to a specific situation that happened at work.
The numbers:
54M, married
$5.2M net worth
$3.7M in investments (35% VTI, 35% VXUS, 30% BND)
$600k equity in primary house
($435 in a 2.99% mortgage that I can’t bring myself to pay off early)
$100k in a 529 (still paying for daughter’s college)
$800k equity in a rental/summer house that I will likely sell eventually
I use the VPW and the ERN spreadsheets to estimate spending, with a highly variable approach based upon current market conditions. In both, I account for Social Security at the optimal withdrawal strategy ages (70 for me, 67 for my wife), as well as the eventual sale of the rental house and the ending of my primary mortgage.
VPW models my current spending, and what I would need to immediately be able to cut back to if the market crashed 50%. ERN uses the Cash Flow tab to model what I can currently spend, as well the spending level for a 0% historical rate of failure. My current spending is less than both of those lower boundary numbers, so I feel really good that in the case of a market crash, I could make those numbers work, especially with 30% BND.
However, I also want to enjoy my money while I’m still relatively young, and I want to balance spending and making sure I have enough for the future. So I made a version of the ERN spreadsheet where I pretend the rental house equity vanished, and that I had 10% of my portfolio as Final Value target at the ripe old age of 105. Very conservative assumptions. Currently that puts my monthly spending at about $15,700, which has to include any tax bills. And I do plan to spend that, especially on travel.
I’ve also modeled my withdrawals for the next ten years, and will probably be able to stay under the 400% FPL limit each year for ACA subsidies. There might need to be one year that I pay full cost in order to maximize some capital gains realization, as well as some Roth conversions, but that’s a number of years down the road, and totally depends on what the stock market does.