All Forum Posts by: Aaron Taylor

@Joseph D Chapman

The calculators help to start but after a while you realize you’re paying a lot for just a calculator. I ended up making my own spreadsheet that does the same thing. If you have a business then the $40 a month is probably worth it, but I wasn’t getting any value outside of the calculators so I dropped back down. Your mileage may vary.

If you want good discounts at Lowe's and Home Depot, get on ebay and buy a 10% off coupon for Lowes or a 15% off for Home Depot.  I've done this over and over to save tons of money.  I've even gone to Lowes, bought the coupon off ebay while at the store, then had the store scan the 10% off on my phone to save $170 on appliances.  You can save so much money on big purchases this way.

 So the options are:

a)  the person may retire early and run out of money and have to go back to work

b)  the person may retire early and be perfectly fine indefinitely

So the worst case scenario is having to get another job.  That doesn't seem like very bad worst case considering that's what most of us are having to do every day, lol (as @Mindy Jensen would say).

I would agree with the others, the people reaching FIRE don't seem to be laying on the couch doing nothing for the rest of their lives...they seem to be doing the things they've always wanted to do but never had the time.  Here's the thing...it's pretty hard to reach FI without being a motivated individual.  And I don't know too many motivated individuals who lay around, they're the kind of people who are never bored and have ideas running through their head at 100mph all day long.

If you won 100 million dollars, would you continue to work at your normal job just because working and productivity is a value?  I doubt it.  Why work on someone else's dream when you can work on your own?  That's what FIRE is really about, the freedom to work on your own dreams.

I think that's key for some people, having a non-stop mind of things they want to do next.  You can kind of tell which people would be ok without a job and which wouldn't.  One group is able to relax, take it easy, but eventually gets bored.  The other is constantly thinking things up and time is huge barrier to their ideas, and they have a hard time relaxing or sitting still.  I think the first group is the group that would be ok with at least some part time w2 work.

I'm more in the latter category.  There's so much I would do if I had more time.  I can't remember the last time I was sitting at home bored by myself, probably was in high school or college (as I was too poor to fund ideas, so was easier to get bored then, lol).  

Health insurance is the single biggest problem with all of this.  Costs are climbing rapidly, options for non-w2 employees are costly, etc.  You just don't know what it's going to be 5, 10, 20 years from now.  College tuition and health care seem to be the two biggest things spiraling out of the control but nobody is really doing anything about it.  At least when you get to 65 you have some certainty with health care costs to a degree.  I know for a long time my dad wanted to retire early but couldn't due to lack of affordable health care options before age 65.  Ironically, he's still working at age 72, but now because he wants to.   

I think 10k is the center point because it's about double what an average family needs to meet base expenses in your average market.  Most people have a $1500 to $2k mortgage, then cars, kids, utilities, groceries, etc take you to around the $5k mark per month.  So the extra $5k is for health insurance and other misc expenses...kind of like the 50% rule, 50% is your base expenses, then the rest is for whatever.  It would be pretty easy to reduce your expenses down by moving somewhere cheaper but I don't think most people really want to do that.

This thread is a huge example of why you should buy Apple stock, lol...they own 6.8% of the market, yet 99% of the comments in this thread.  :)  Nobody is a diehard windows fan, but man Apple could put out some lousy products that people would be defending to their last breath.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm a Husker fan and despite them being not great for 15 years, I still watch all of their games as if they were the greatest still.

I think I've owned 3 macs and a couple pc's over the past 8 years.  We actually were trying to switch to mac due to having iphones, ipads, and everything else.  The problem?  Everything costs like double, and then you have other problems like expensive accessories, kids can't use it for gaming, drivers for some devices are inadequate, etc.

The comments here make me think people are buying a $300 Best Buy Windows laptop that runs like crap, and then buy a $1800 Macbook pro that's amazing in comparison...of course the Mac is going to destroy the Windows laptop in that scenario, it has an SSD drive, faster processor, etc.  It's not an OS problem like people are talking about, it's a cheap hardware issue.  People buy cheap Windows laptops and complain that it's trash.  Apple doesn't sell anything cheap, so you never get the same type of feedback on Mac OS.  If Apple sold $300 laptops, you'd hear the same things on MacOS.

It doesn't matter as much as it used to (windows vs mac os) because everything is in the cloud.  You're going to be successful with either.  But if budget is of any consequence, you can buy an equivalent pc for about 1/2 of what the mac costs.  And generally, the PC is going to be more well rounded...it will get outperformed in certain art/graphics packages, but it's going to be better overall for most things because it has more programs and hardware available to it.  

@Kris L.

It should last at least 5 as long as your tenants don’t destroy it (and then you can use the deposit). Nobody replaces their personal carpet after 2 years.

I've done carpet, LVT, regular tile, etc, and after I've had some issues, this is what I would say:

If it's a place that gets wet and might need to be pulled up, don't do LVT

The lifeproof stuff we have is great in some aspects (looks really nice, easy to clean) but it scratches easy and we had one basement in a split level where it was installed and got some water underneath it...that was awful taking it all apart and putting it back together.  Way worse than carpet, and tile would have been super easy in that scenario.

We put it in some bathrooms, hallways, kitchens, etc.  Appliances scratch it pretty easy, so you have to be careful.  Next time I'd:

Put tile in bathroom for sure

Tile or real wood flooring in kitchen.

Carpet almost everywhere else

I'm not sure I would use too much LVT anymore.  I'd probably just do more carpet and tile instead.  Or at least I wouldn't use Lifeproof, I know there are some other brands that don't scratch as easy.

I agree with the others, make sure you get that match.  Honestly, the first couple years you're employed, the more you can throw into it the better, as it will provide a long term safety net.  7% average stock market return over 40 years is 15x, so getting just 10k in there a year for 5 years will probably net out to $750k eventually.  Some of the best advice I ever received when starting out at work 18 years ago was to put the max allowed (16% at my company at the time, plus 6% matching) in.  I know on this board it's frowned upon to some degree to put money in a 401k, but early investing in that forms a pretty nice base to work with.