Today my hubby went back to work after spending 7 weeks with me and the baby.  He is a really hands on dad and he calms the baby down better than I can in some instances.  In these weeks he also got a lot of gaming time and he loved it and needless to say he didn’t want to go back today. I think having the baby and this break made us  reaffirm our desire to reach financial independence as soon as possible so that we can enjoy our time the way we want to.    So here is a quick review  to where we are and where we need to be.

Since we got married we have been, and right now I think we are still on track to “retiring” in 7 to 10 years as long as we both work and continue to save and invest.  Last year I wrote that I only , and that makes the deadline 2015.  That is an extremely stretch goal now that we have a baby and  a house.  However, if we pay off the house as soon as possible we will eliminate a pretty big fixed expense and it would be easier for us to retire since housing costs the most after taxes.  I have made a budget for us if we stopped working and paid off the house, and assuming that I still have my current blog income we would only need to withdraw around $25000 a year from our nest egg to live fairly  comfortably.    That means we don’t really need $1.4 million in our nestegg.  A smaller nestegg of 650,000 to 750,000 would be enough as long as we stick to a safe withdrawal rate of 4% and manage it carefully.  This would be what Jacob at calls a “25 year emergency fund”.  Of course, if you include a paid off home the entire portfolio would be worth over $1 million.  Essentially, the money we pay into the home will essentially be generating the rent money we would have paid.  In the long term of 50 to 60 years paying off the home and living in it is still worthwhile since rent will go up.  In California property taxes cannot go up by more than 2% a year due to proposition 13 so according to my calculation it would take around 72 years for our property tax to go up to an average rent price now.  By then we are probably dead anyway.

There are also a couple other advantages to “retiring” early.  First of all, we will still have some income, but it will be a lot less than what we earn now.  This means we will pay a lot less taxes and qualify for more tax credits.  Additionally, having less income is advantageous when it comes time for our baby to apply for college financial aid.  The current FAFSA system looks at parental income to determine how much a student should receive in aid, and some private colleges give large grants to low and middle income families.  As I wrote in , sometimes the same scholarship offers huge discrepancies in monetary award just because of parental income.  As long as we raise our kid well, then we could possibly save a bundle by retiring before he applies for college because we would have financial need based on income.  Don’t get me wrong, we are saving for his college fund, too, but we would rather spend more time with our baby and let him work for the bulk of his college financing since he will be an adult then.

Anyway, we are really in love with our baby now, and hopefully we can achieve financial independence in less than 10 years because he will still be a kid then.  We might have another kid, too, but that won’t happen for a couple years.  I really feel like I’m living in that Nationwide tagline “life comes at you fast”  because so many life changing things have happened since I started writing here.  It is pretty awesome, and I am thankful.

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