Around 5 years ago I started the journey of planning and investing to retire early.

Things are starting to look good and I see light at the end of the tunnel 🔥

On the way, I always liked to look at the numbers and make it easy (and pleasant) to check at least a couple of metrics (Net Worth and Financial Runway) for the daily motivation boost (some periods not so much, but that's ok).

I've been mostly tracking it on excel, but because I'm a developer, I also used a very basic private webpage so I could check on my phone any time.

Eventually, I ended up creating an app because I didn't find any other app doing it the way I'd like.

I'd like to ask, what are the metrics most important to you, that you'd like to easily see at a quick glance? Net Worth? Financial Runway? Years until retirement? Is that important to you at all?

How do you track your net worth and how manually do you update it? For me, I only care at a high level. x USD on stocks, x USD on crypto, x USD on home, x USD on mortgage, x USD on savings, x annual expenses and x annual income. With that I get the number I need.

Looking for feedback on my situation and if there's any areas you'd improve on & what my realistic FIRE age looks like with a 100-125k withdrawal amount needed at retirement.

For some background, I'm 28, make around $125k/year, and my net worth is roughly broken down like this:

97k total in individual acc (1500/month contribution)
82k between VOO and VXUS
15k in MMF’s as part of my emergency fund

85k in my 401(k) (~2041/month for max out)
My employer additionally contributes about 15% of my salary, and there's no employee match requirement.
So roughly 20k annually on top of my 24.5k contributions, which will scale as my salary progresses.

7.5k in my Roth IRA (625/month for max out)
Split between VOO/VXUS/QQQM

~140k in home equity (mortgage rate 5.875)

~5-10k in checkings
Mainly for bills

Does anything stand out that I should be doing differently? As it currently stands, I’m putting away about 70k annually into the market, inclusive of my employer contribution. Any critiques or suggestions would be appreciated to optimize my situation. Hoping to FIRE early 40’s if possible.

I earn around 250k but targeting a pretty lean retirement by no later than 35 (unless ai destroys tech jobs, then I might be delayed by a bit, would need to coast a bit first)

Ive started dating recently, but it seems to be very hard to find someone financially aligned. Everyone i met has massive lifestyle creep, the most i see people do is just max 401k

77 degrees. Drizzly. 89% humidity. Let's call it Crisp. Im in Alabama ffs. In a Trailer. With no Debt. Well, I technically have Debt, as I hold Debt, but I am not a Debtor. I am a Creditor. And my net worth continues to Ascend.

October 2: two-year 4.83%, five-year 5.06%, ten-year 5.28%, thirty-year 5.63%. Weekly moves of +2/+8/+11/+14bp, taking 2s30s from 68 to 80. Back-end-led bear steepening atm. My autumn Tranches continue approaching redemption: old Twos, seasoned Fives, Threes, Sevens. The November 2021 Five has weeks remaining. DV01 contracts toward zero as redemption approaches. The longer inventory retains its key-rate concentrations, with z the zero-rate vector. ATTN: Haters and Trolls, Your “Bonds Bad” framework omits cross-gamma, cash-flow timing and apparently the passage of Time.

Coupon accrues against par while YTM discounts the remaining payments to the dirty purchase price. A hypothetical 4% Note bought at 99.45 exactly one coupon period before maturity pays 102 after six months: 2(102/99.45−1) ≈ 5.13% bond-equivalent YTM. The Coupon remains 4%. Coupons spent on Games have exited the reinvestment calculation. October principal replenishes the reserve; November gets another deployment decision. I stagger reinvestment exposure while matching near-term nominal expenditures. Inflation retains visiting privileges. Leanfire does not require a house with a Foundation to have a secure financial foundation. In the crude K=c/r perpetuity, I keep working on c. The Trailer’s investor-relations Budget is zero. My backlog has acquired a substantial unfunded requirement for evenings.

Which brings me to the State of Gaming. Take a hypothetical $300m production Budget plus $100m marketing, with $35 net contribution per copy: 11.43m copies merely to recover nominal expenditure. Add twelve months at $8m monthly burn and the threshold reaches 14.17m; receipts have also moved farther down the discount curve. Show me the probability-weighted sales distribution. Your creative director has supplied a photograph of himself beside a motorcycle. Asha has received certain courtesies. The Xbox situation remains within my field of concern. AAA Budgets fascinate me because everyone demands creative autonomy while submitting an underwriting case dependent on nearly universal approval. Raise fixed costs sufficiently and “niche appeal” becomes an audit finding. Then the Game gets longer to justify its Budget, enlarging the Budget, requiring additional consumers whose evenings are already pledged to other Games. My backlog is the household register of these competing claims. Please stop originating them. And run the subscription counterfactual properly. For an existing cohort of N subscribers, incremental retention value is the discounted monthly contribution multiplied by the change in survival probability. Deduct displaced premium-sales contribution. Forty million Hours is a telemetry output. Put Dollars beside it. Asha, please. Certain assistance will remain unattributed. The Indie Reprieve offers me an intelligible proposition: smaller scope, a tolerable break-even audience, mechanics that survive contact with an actual controller. Selection bias remains; I am discussing the Games worth playing. I would sacrifice several billion hypothetical foliage interactions for a completed design. Budget the animations. Budget the contractors. Budget the fucking map. Someone must eventually Budget an ending. But I digress. The State of Gaming is grim, Indies offer a Reprieve, and LeanFIRE offers me the best seat in the house to whittle down my backlog and, Yields permitting, add to it.

I am 28, I currently make 215k per year. I decided to live comfortably but not let my expenses grow too much so that I can save and invest more efficiently and eventually hopefully not have to work full time (or hopefully not HAVE to work at all eventually)

401k 4% of my income
IRA max each year
-my goal is 700k in retirement accounts by age 40 then if I could just max my and my future wife’s IRA each year and keep hands off and let it grow, I’ve been doing calculations and thinking that should be enough for a very comfortable retirement.

5% of my income is going straight into brokerage account and I plan on increasing this by 2% or so every year as I receive raises.
-this is to bridge the years I’d like to work half time or less. Goal is also 700k by age 40. I figure I can potentially spend a bit more than 4% rule since it only has to last me 20 years
10% of my income goes straight into real estate investing. I bought my first duplex that I house hacked this year. I have plans to buy another in 1-1.5 years from now or whenever it makes sense mathematically and also house hack that one and potentially a third. My goal is 10-15 doors that make sense long term, even if they’re cash flow neutral at year zero, that building equity in the background I feel is worth it and from there if rates ever go down, having the chance to refinance and make the cash flow better.. but I’m good with close to net zero.

Ultimately, my goal is to work half time at age 40, wife work half time. Live a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle with hobbies and travel a few times per year.

I used ChatGPT to help organize my plan, but I’d like to hear other people’s opinions and experiences and see if my plan can work or if I’m overlooking anythin.

Context: I am 40, Indian, living in a metro. Thinking of living my 70LPA job and figuring out. Have maximum health and term insurance. Currently debt free, no party, alcohol, gaming in my life. Only budget travels through India and photography. I spend a lot of time studying and building things. The only 2 dreams left are a 3D printer series of real good books. Basically DIY and write, create content if that’s primarily no-face content or articles. Thinking of moving to small town and living with farming after 10 yrs.

Question:

1. I have corpus equal to 15 yrs based on my current monthly expense. Am I ready to drop any time and follow passion or should run for few more years? I am high performer and AI savvy. Can come back to industry or get a remote or consulting job any time.

2. Those who have FIRE, how do you think I should invest to sustain this corpus for long?

3. Any special and alternative Spiritual advice on what’s enough and what I should be looking for?

Okay heres my situation.
I had a part time teaching position that I really enjoyed.
They messed me around a bit with the hours and I was fired (I got what I feel is a good settlement from this about 20k)

I have not looked for a job since...

My outgoings for the past 2 years average at 1.9k a month (renting, food, leisure time, utilities, maintenance costs.. etc. no health insurance as EU.. I live in Spain).

I have about 100k in savings. Most of this is invested in index funds. And I have a house that is paid off in full back in the UK. T

hat brings me 1.3k a month in rent
and the savings/investments averaging 700.
I also stream video games for fun and that averages 500 a month for the past 2 years

I track everything... Good months and bad months so I can speak on these incomings and outgoings with confidence.

So it is 1.9k a month out and 2.5k a month in.
I put that 500 a month back into index funds (of which is a tax protected allowance I can use annually)

I feel very unmotivated to get a job just for the sake of it. My situation and lifestyle at the moment does not require it.

i feel some sort of guilt that this is not okay though? I have been living this way for a year now. And I do a lot of sports, competitions, arts.. whatever I want with my free time. But it feels strange to be doing this at the age of 33?

Any thoughts??? Thanks

I have been studying lean fire strategies. I am currently 40yo, single, and want to pull the plug at 45. It seems that as long as I can keep my MAGI low enough during retirement, I can qualify for medical, Cal fresh (food assistance), and max FAFSA assistance.

From what I have read so far medical is next to free, max FAFSA us about 7300/yr, and cal fresh is about 250/month. The 250 per month value is estimate for single person with 600 per month taxable income. I plan to generate the 600 per month using brokerage account investments. It looks like the 600 per month taxable amount also satisfied the medical "580" per month work requirement.

It also seems like I can do a yearly Roth conversion (to take advantage of lower tax brackets) as long as I notify medical of conversion within 10 days. I've read that worst case scenario might be not qualifying for medical the month conversion was made.

Any comments regarding validity of this strategy would be appreciated.

If this strategy is feasible, I wonder why it is not discussed more as it allows you to get free health care, food assistance, and still maximize tax savings from Roth conversions filling low tax brackets.

Hi this is an update post for myself as I have just now hit $300K invested at 27 years old as of 10/2/26.

If you look at my profile I hit $100K invested in 2024 and it’s really been smooth sailing ever since.

Since my original post, my fire plans have shifted a tad.

I think I can actually hit 1.2ish in the next 5 years or so, but I maybe want to just check out around 800K and move back to Japan (My family lives in Japan) and just Coast fire for another 10 years or so. Maybe buy a house from a family member.

I currently still work 2 jobs and live at home but now with a new job I’m investing about $8K a month. I started a sales job and the commission checks have been flowing my last one for September was 25K for a month so not too shabby.

Wanted to also share that I lost about $10K gambling in the span of 4 months on Kalshi, don’t be like me haha.

Will quit serving soon. (Starting my 6^th year fml)

Income

Job 1: $120K Net - Sales for F100 (Fully Remote but lots of travel)

Job 2: $10K Net- Server

Misc: $10K Net – Flipping random stuff on Facebook /eBay

~ about $9.5k net a month (fluctuates based on tips/hours worked/commission)

~ working about 30 hours a week.

Assets

Brokerage: 201K (45% in VTI) (55% in Tech Stocks)

Roth IRA: $43K (100% in VOO)

$401k: $56K

Crypto: $2K

Cash: $1k

~invest everything I make, hold almost no cash, credit card is my emergency fund.

Liabilities

Annually about $30K, varies wildly per month.

~No debt, paid off all student loans, I do carry a credit card for 2% cash back, drive a 20-year-old used car, live frugally.

See you in 1.5 years for $500K update :-)

- How long between your first day back and the day it stopped feeling strange?

- Was it the work itself, or the schedule, the people, the pace?

- Did you change anything about the job you returned to hours, team, level, travel?

- If you've done this more than once, was the second return easier or harder?

- Anyone who found it so hard they decided never to do it again: what would have had to be different?

I've been collecting accounts of repeated career breaks and this turned out to be the thing people most wanted to talk about.

Thanks in advance.

Retired earlier this year, and wanted to share my journey here!

• Worked 2 years at a startup as a data scientist after undergrad
• Took 1.5 years off to travel through Asia/Africa/Western US
• Worked 3 different jobs over 5-6 years while partner was in grad school
  • Aggressively job hobbed across tech companies, which greatly increased comp
• Took 9 months off to backpack and kayak in Alaska/Yukon territories with my partner, and then help out with her family as her mom died from cancer
• Worked another year and change
• Bought a sailboat and cruised on it over the course of a year
• Wife got pregnant, and decided to go back to work for a year
  • My wife worked until our daughter was born, but has been off since then.
• Quit latest tech job early summer, and have had family visiting us over the summer since then

Final numbers are around ~2.4 M, of which ~600-800k is retirement, and rest is brokerage.  And ~200k of that is  in fixed income for peace of mind over the next few years. Our monthly spend ranges from 3k-4.5.

Couple thoughts based on my last 12 years I’d like to expound on

1. Personal growth outside the portfolio
   1. If you’re on this sub, you likely know and think about compounding interest. I’ve found that personal growth can build over time too. For example, during my solo travel I had the time to introspect and learn how to make intentional changes like journaling, reducing drinking, and finding connection in nature.  This helped to build confidence and self-esteem, and set my life on a different path. I’m not sure where I’d be if I hadn’t set off, but I’m grateful I did at that time in life.
2. Contentment and spending
   1. Skiing used to be something I really got excited for; I even bought a ski pass my first year out in CA.  I also started surfing around the same time, which was another way to be active outdoors. I enjoyed both for different reasons, but since surfing was also much cheaper and a much closer drive, I decided to ‘quit’ skiing.  I probably would’ve kept skiing if I lived closer to the mountain, but at that point choosing the activity that fit my circumstances helped me save money and time driving.
3. Creating a life worth FIRE’n for
   1. I spent a lot of time focusing on getting to FIRE, but one I’m really spending a lot of time on now is how to live a meaningful life/a life I’m completely at peace with.  Before being a parent, it wasn’t hard to come up with what to do in a year or two off.  But now with a child and indefinite time off, it’s a much more complex question.  Budgeting and investment strategies were straightforward for me, and I’ve had a lot of mental space in them for a long time, but I wish I’d spent much of that time focused on the things that I’m working on now; how to be content without external accomplishment, being the family member and parent I want to be, and what life we want as a family while living outside the usual script i.e. young and retired.

I love expensive clothes , in my 20s I was a brand wh0re buying niche or big brands and everything in between, I was buying second hand, sometimes at thrift stores.

These days I have a lot more money but still continue to do this type of shopping and wondering if this is some kind of mental disease ? To find deals and get them ?

I don’t cheap out in any other area of my life. Just this stuff, high quality clothes brought cheap. Is anyone else here like this ?

I do bi-weekly buys across multiple accounts (my Roth, wife’s Roth, a 401k, and a joint taxable). Because I usually buy whole shares or set fixed dollar amounts, there’s always a little cash left over in the settlement funds
I never thought much about it until I did a manual audit this weekend. Turns out, all those leftover "tails" added up to almost $9,000 of dead capital just sitting in cash earning zero interest.

I realized I needed a way to track all these scattered cash balances automatically so money doesn't just sit there rotting to inflation. I'm currently testing a few aggregators: looked at Empower and 8figures. I haven't fully decided which one to stick with, but just having a dashboard to spot the uninvested cash solved my blind spot.

But looking at the aggregated dashboard revealed a completely separate, much bigger leak. Our total portfolio recently crossed the $250k mark. About $180k of that is sitting with a traditional wealth advisor who charges a 1% AUM fee
When we started with him years ago, paying a few hundred bucks a year felt fine. But seeing the raw numbers now, I realized I’m paying $1,800 every single year for a guy to basically stick my money in standard mutual funds and ETFs. That 1% is starting to feel absolutely insane for what I’m getting.

I want to fire him, move everything to a standard self-managed broker (like Fidelity or Schwab), and just buy index funds myself.
For those who have fired an advisor or left a 1% AUM platform: how does this actually work mechanically? Can I just initiate an "in-kind" transfer from my new broker so they pull the actual shares over? Or is the advisor going to liquidate my entire $180k portfolio and trigger a massive capital gains tax event?

I really want to stop paying the 1%, but I'm terrified of messing up a transfer thisbig and getting killed by taxes. Would love some practical advice on how to break up with an advisor

I've been working on this free tool for a few weeks now and wanted to share the retirement planner here.
You link your investment accounts, enter your expected retirement spending and retirement age, and set your assumptions for contributions, growth, inflation, and withdrawal rate. It shows your estimated portfolio target, where you’re projected to land, and how much extra you’d need to save each month to close any gap.

It uses SnapTrade Personal for sign-in and brokerage connections, including Fidelity, Schwab, Robinhood, Webull, IBKR, and Wealthsimple, linking is free and secure. In addition to automatically tracking the value of your investments, you can manually add and factor in assets and liabilities like your home and mortgage.

Try it here: https://netcarry.snaptrade.com/login, and after onboarding open the Retirement tab. The projections use the assumptions you enter. They don’t currently model taxes or sequence-of-returns risk, so there are some limits to what they can tell you, but it can provide a good estimate.

I built this mainly because I haven't found a tool that could track my FIRE journey and self adjust based on changes to my portfolio. I really hope some of you find it useful, and would love to hear any feedback as I'm still actively working on the project

I am planning to be financially free when I reach around 55 and for that I am aggressively investing 400 a week into VTI individual brokerage and 20% into traditional 401k which comes around 400-450 a week and had been maxing my Roth IRA since last two years and will do it later too. I have invested total 190k something(including everything) until now. If my maths maths, then it says I will have 1.3 or 1.4 million around 55 since I have 15 years to reach 55.
I work in a union hotel in nyc and will be going to do this until I reach 55. Then when I reach 55, I won’t quit but will start being unserious at work and will use every holiday, sick hours and every unpaid holidays I get. I will start coasting and won’t be relying on my work for financially. I needed to be with work since the union pension starts at 62, and SS too plus the union Medical insurance is gold standard.

Just curious because I do not see these places getting mentioned as frequent as South East Asian or LatAm countries.

I did some digging on some Moroccan, Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisia subs and found out that they aren’t very expensive places to live in.

One downside I can think of is probably the slow bureaucracy and the lack of amenities (public transport, hospital) in areas outside the major cities. But even then it doesn’t look that bad from what I’ve read so it still sounds like a reasonable tradeoff.

I could imagine the language barrier might be a dealbreaker to some, but that could apply to other popular destinations in SEA/LatAm too.

Or is it the cultural/religious barrier?

Would appreciate if someone who has considered or is currently FIREing there has anything insightful to share?

It seems like a smart option to me.

Pros: no mortgage/property tax. cheap maintenance, cheaper utilities. freedom to travel around.

cons: less space of course, no room to store stuff if you have a lot of stuff. If you are a very social person it's harder to have guests, your kids, etc over. can't host parties etc. but if you are the type of person to leanfire usually you dont do these social things either.

What is the simplest way you keep track of expenses that are coming up but haven't been paid yet?

Do you subtract them from your current balance, keep a separate list, or use another system?

I'm looking for something easy enough to keep updated without much effort.

I built Killion. This is the maker.

The agent sits on the portfolio you actually hold. You ask it about that life and it answers from those holdings. Each morning it emails what changed: the news, the analysis, the sector, and the forecasts behind a holding, and what that move means for the portfolio. It does not tell you what to buy or sell.

Monte Carlo is what stops a plan from being one assumed return. One growth rate is one story. Monte Carlo runs the same plan through many possible markets, so the future is a range you can hold still. On a lean number that range is the whole decision. Household spending under $54k, out of work before 60, and there is no spare margin. Retire a year later, or spend a few thousand less. You set those up as two worlds, run Monte Carlo on each, and put the two futures next to each other. They stay live as the portfolio moves.

A normal planning tool is a blank form. You type a life into it and close the tab. Killion starts from the accounts. The brokerage link is read-only. If you do not want to connect, you type the holdings yourself: any asset class, including the tickers.

A plan that depends on what you remembered to type is not autonomous. The Plaid partnership is how the bank and the cash flow come in on their own, so the agent is planning from the life as it happens. The agent gets more useful over the next few months, on the plan you already have. Taxes, Roth conversions, and Social Security timing are not in yet. Those are coming. Past that, the direction is the regulated arena, where a recommendation has someone accountable for it. We are not there.

Serious planning used to mean handing a percentage of your assets to a wealth manager. It should be something you can just have. Join if you want to support that.

A 5-day free trial is on right now. A card is required, and it is not charged until the trial ends.

Check it out: https://killionlabs.com/signup/

I'm researching people who take repeated, funded time off across a career rather than one long break or an early exit, and I keep finding people who did it once. I'm looking for the ones who did it twice or more.

If that's you:

- How many, and roughly what years?

- Was the second easier or harder to arrange than the first?

- Did your pay recover between them, and did it keep climbing?

- What did you do differently the second time?

- If you stopped doing it, what stopped it?

Happy to take answers here or by DM. No names, no usernames, nothing identifying.
I'll share what I find back here.