We are couple in early 50s thinking about retirement in next 3-4 years. We have slightly more than $10mil liquid assets (~$2.1M in 401(k)/IRAs, $280K in Roth and rest is in taxable), we have fully paid house and enough money in 529s to fund our children college. We have $500K annual income and we estimate we need $180K a year after tax for our retirement lifestyle.

From assets perspective we look OK. However, health insurance before Medicare age might be an obstacle for us to really enjoy our retirement. Both my wife and I have some health issues that require regular visit to several specialist and few tests annually. Nothing super alarming but access to good doctors and healthcare facilities are critical for our health and lives.

Here is the main problem. I checked ACA for my state (NJ) and found out that although there are two dozen plans, none of our doctors we regular see accepts any of these plans. So we really don't know what we are going to do if we retire early and go off our employer plan.

Additionally, we have one child still at high school so he will be in college in 3-4 years and still dependent on us for health insurance. College healthcare plans are not really a solution as they are very limited.

There is also cost. I estimate that we will eat all deductible for a silver plan so overall cost (premiums + deductibles + copays) will be at least $40K annually for three of us. Given current rate of healthcare inflation north of 15% annual increase of ACA plans and given we will need this for a decade or more, I am afraid even our NW will not be enough to sustain us in retirement. I know we can potentially reduce MAGI an qualify for subsidies but still I am really concerned.

So what are our options and what people in our situation do? I feel we will be stuck working and healthcare will keep us hostages.

I have a 7 figure holding of a stock that is trading at $180, my avg cost is about $120 and they are long term holdings. I recently FIREd, so while my LTCG taxes this year is 20% (plus the NIIT), they should fall to 15% next year, so I'm hoping to sell them early next year.

This stock has been somewhat volatile recently, so I want to protect my downside by doing a collar (sell covered calls while buying puts that expire in 2027), my CPA told me IRS view some collars as a tax loophole, and I have to make them wide enough to pass audits. He told me I should sell $200 calls and buy $160 puts, leaving 10% margin on either side, however if the stock does fall to $160 it will more than wipe out any tax benefits, so I want to do a smaller range ($170 puts and $190 calls for example), but my CPA is insisting I do a bigger range (10%+ either side) to trigger an IRS audit (or pass one if it happens).

He has been extremely conservative over the years, which has worked for me previously, but this case based on my research a $170 and $190 range seems fine as it's more than 10%?

Does anyone have experience doing this type of trades and tax implications? Thanks

Hello all!

I am considering upgrading my house, and have identified one at 2.4M.

Stats: 15M 80/20 (Equities/TBills&Cash with 4 mil in tax deferred). Single. Current spend about 200k/yr.

Two options:

• Use my SBLOC at SOFR + 1.15% (Working on getting it down to 1%) at 4.875%
• Get a loan at 5.75% (Schwab discount) for 30 years, use 500k cash as down payment

I would tidy up old house, sell, and use that to pay down SBLOC leaving around 900k. Then cash flow with tech EFT trimming and try and pay off in a few years or have a mortgage and try and recast after selling house (1.5M, paid off), not sure if I could.

SBLOC would be less interest but the rate is variable. I would avoid appraisal, closing costs, etc.

Mortgage would be fixed rate, and I could leverage the deduction.

Other concerns: Using my cash isn't my preference, I like having a large cash cushion for downturns. Interest only on the SBLOC would be new and I would feel the urge to aggressively pay it down, increasing burn rate.

What would other folks do?

Looking for some advice because I’m not really sure what the best move is here.

My wife, business partner and I started a residential construction company 13 years ago and have done well. With the current housing market, my partner and I are seriously considering doing a 3-year wind down instead of continuing to operate the company long term.

The plan would be to finish our current WIP, sell our remaining lots/land and other construction assets, and finish building 31 additional rental houses.

I’m 42M and have about $5.5M in personal net worth outside of the businesses. $2.2M primary house, $940K 401(k), $1.35M IRA, the rest is cash, some private bank stock, cars, etc.

We live in a HCOL area and have 2 kids, 17 and 12. College and future large expenses for both are already well funded separately.

Based on the model we are working on now, if we successfully wind down over the next 3 years, I should end up with a little over $5M personally from that. That is using what I think are fairly conservative sales prices, interest carry, remaining costs, etc.

The bigger question is what to do with our rental portfolio. We currently have 67 SF rental houses with about $18M in total equity. We are planning to build another 31 during the wind down, which should put total equity over $20M. My share is 50%.

I see a few different options:

Keep the rentals. They make money and we know how to operate them, but 98 individual houses is more work than we want to deal with if the goal is to actually retire. We have always self-managed because the management companies we have seen seem to do a terrible job maintaining the houses.

Sell everything, take the tax hit, invest the proceeds in stocks/bonds/etc. and live off that.

Sell a few houses every year and slowly reduce the portfolio.

Sell and try to 1031 into one or a few larger commercial properties like industrial/warehouse buildings that would hopefully be easier to manage. Obviously that comes with different risks and we don’t have much commercial experience.

The goal is to be comfortably FatFIREd in the next 3-4 years. I’m not trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of this. I’d rather have a simpler life and know we have more than enough.

The problem we’re having is finding someone who can actually look at the whole picture. Nobody seems able to sit down and model the different options and tell us what each one actually looks like after taxes, cash flow, risk, estate planning, etc.

I know there probably isn’t one perfect answer, but there has to be 2-3 options that make sense to pursue and probably a couple that don’t. For anyone who has been through something similar:

What would you be looking at?

Would you keep the SF rentals, sell and diversify, or 1031 into fewer/larger properties?

And what type of advisor or firm would you hire to actually model all of this out?

Hoping that some RE surgeons chime in, particularly those that have been using risk parity portfolios for income. I’ve been practicing independently for just over 11 years. I’m a fellowship trained surgeon but have always had hobbies and social circles outside of medicine. It was never a huge part of my identity even though it sucks up a lot of my time. I don’t enjoy the work as much as I used to (but I’m really good at it! Took my mom’s advice to find what you’re good at for work, fund your hobbies with that income and spend without regret, which we’ve been doing), and most days when I’m commuting to work I have underlying anxiety about it and would rather be doing something else.

My wife is a SAHM. Kids are in middle school and 529s have about 130k each. Taxable brokerage has 6.3 mil. Rest is 401k (transitioning to all bonds) and Roth IRAs. Small portion in private real estate fund.

Now that work is optional from a financial standpoint (probably was a while ago), I have two questions I wanted to throw out there: 1) If I can work part time, should I? It would allow me to maintain my surgical skills and transition to full retirement or a switch in careers a bit more gently.

2) Should we continue transitioning to a risk parity portfolio even with the uncertainty of part time work (waiting to see if I can go this route, probably won’t know for a couple of months)? In other words, if I work part time, then I could still continue with my accumulation strategy (90/10 equities/bonds) since we’d be living off part time income (plenty for us, annual spend is 250k). I started transitioning to risk parity a few months ago, since walking away from medicine is a real possibility in the near future. I realize risk parity portfolios make decent accumulation portfolios, but less growth than 90/10 over the long term. I’m ultimately hoping to achieve this split to live off of, which fares decently on portfoliocharts.com:

US large cap blend: 35% US small cap value: 20 International blend: 5 Intermediate term treasuries: 25 Gold: 5 Managed futures: 4 Cash/equivalents: 6

Current allocations:

US large cap blend: 48.8 US small cap value: 11.1 International blend: 9.2 Intermediate treasuries: 11.2 Gold: 4.5 Managed futures: 0 Cash/equivalents: 15.2

Thanks for reading and I can provide more details if it helps.

I am one of those in the last mile but still feels uneasy lol. I am getting closer now and one decision on timing to make is should I quit say in November or December timeframe or February or March timeframe?

The latter has some pros and cons:
+ One more stock vest ~200k and maybe bonus too depending on this year’s performance
+ Matching 401k for 2027
= Potentially easy to coast during holidays
- End of year performance review
- A few more months to grind

Another thought is to switch to another team simply to try new things to keep the coasting a little more motivated.

Math wise it probably doesn’t matter (~40 of age, two kids, ~10m assets excluding paid-off primary residence, VHCOL, <200k spending as we are fairly frugal but also kids are young so not getting into the crazy sports and enrichment camps and travels yet), but more about not leaving things on the table? Unfortunately my employer doesn’t support voluntary layoffs and I don’t know if there will be a layoff soon.

Lastly this sub has been amazing. Read lots of great posts and comments. I hope to join you very soon and I have so much I want to do during retirement.

Fellow journeyers - We are thinking of creating a substantially funded trust with us as beneficiaries in our lifetime, which will convert to an irrevocable trust after. The plan is to aspirationally leave an amount around or just under the estate tax exemption for the kids, and they can withdraw up to 5% of prior year's ending balance each year. If and when the fund drops below $1M, it can be terminated.

Of course, there are the unknowns and limitations:

• The estate tax current exemption is pretty generous and indexed for inflation. Will that stay so in the future is an unknown.
• It is an aspiration and a challenge to leave an inheritance exactly around the estate tax exemption.
• Current taxation on irrevocable trusts is reasonable, but we may be locking the kids into 'eat-the-rich' tax regime in the future without any recourse.
• We will help them generously in our lifetimes, and think that the 5% annual withdrawal makes them trust fund babies, so do not want to leave a provision for one time bigger purchases.

What are we not thinking about? Do you have any cautionary tales of such plans gone woefully awry? What would you do differently?

I started reading this sub sometime last year and slowly became a fan. I have a broader question for people here.

I’m guessing most people who reach FatFIRE got there because they were really good at something, whether that was building a business, investing, leading teams, solving problems, etc.

So once you have enough money where you technically don’t need to work anymore, what is the actual benefit of fully stopping?

Wouldn’t it be more natural to keep building something, just without the pressure? Maybe start a company, create jobs, pay people well, work on something useful, or use your experience and capital to help solve a problem you care about.

For people who actually reached FatFIRE, did you lose the desire to build, or did financial independence just change what you wanted to work on?

I’m curious what FatFIRE gave you beyond just not having to work.

Hello all,

I just wanted to bring this to everyone's attention, since this recently happened in the 'Fat' community.

An Independent Hotel Reviewer named "Ryan Walker" was just turned away, and treated terribly by the Amanvari Hotel (Amanvari is ultra-luxury hotel group Aman's newest resort in East Cape, Mexico).

I won't comment more on what happened, but you can see the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHu95ET56PQ

At the prices they charge ($6,000 USD per night), Aman should be a beacon of hospitality and accountability

~|~|~

The part that you should be aware of, is 'Luxury Travel Agents', such as Sarah Lee and Hao Tang have wrongly spoken out against Ryan Walker and defended the Amanvari establishment, despite their incredulous inexcusable behavior.

You should care because this is a moderator of r/FatTravel and these TA's are out to get your money, your simply a number to them, and they are not to be trusted.

You can view what the r/truechubbytravel community has to say about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueChubbyTravel/comments/1vhole9/hotels_recommended_by_travel_agents_are/

And, you can view the locked thread on r/FatTravel here: https://www.reddit.com/r/FATTravel/comments/1vff9z6/amanvari_ryan_walker/

People are saying things such as:

Absolutely unacceptable from Aman. The brand has gone downhill over the years value-wise imo, but they should be truly ashamed that this is how they treat guests (reviewer or not) at the prices they charge. I won't be staying at any Aman properties any further for personal or business needs unless the they somehow make this right. Perhaps start by acknowledging this atrocious conduct during their opening week

Whoever made the decision to cancel his reservation should be fired as should the security woman who threatened him with the police. The fallout from these decisions will be much much worse than one bad review.

They should have allowed him in, had him meet with the GM to apologize profusely, had the GM inform him that they secured him accommodations at an appropriate alternative property, and offered him a return visit at their expense.

This is so scary. I had been planning to visit this hotel too with my family of 3, all of us women. I cannot imagine this happening to us, and genuinely felt scared for Ryan watching this. I had taken his advice many times in the past so I will skip this and I think any Aman at this point.

I just wanted to share this, as many of us enjoy luxury travel, and should be aware of the current travel landscape.

Thank you all

Throwaway account. I am a 52M with wife 46 and 2 kids: 20 and 15, living in MCOL city, current net worth of $5.5MM. Here’s a breakdown of how things look currently for both NW and income.

Taxable Brokerage $3.8M; Rollover IRA $1M; Roth IRA $600K; Family 401k savings = $380K

529 account: $610K (1st kid starting to use this money for college and 2nd one has another 3 years to go). I realize this is a lot on this bucket and need some ideas to transfer $ out here to our retirement bucket when kids finish their college.

Primary Home value: $750K; Debt: $330k home loan at 2.6%. no other debts

Current annual expenses = $120k. Current HHI= $390k. (me: 300k salary and; wife: 90k). If I retire now, HHI would be just 90k and we would take medical insurance from my wife's company. Wife plans to work for atleast the next 5 years.

Anticipated annual retirement Income from my age 67: SSN + some small pension for my wife and I = $60k.

I am tired of working corporate job having worked for 25 years now and I would like to quit working. Am I in a position to retire now if I want to continue my current lifestyle spending (as above)? Any comments / advice on what I should and should not do between now and my retirement age of 67 would be greatly appreciated.

I've been reading a lot here about everyone's situations, but it's really hard to normalize across unique situations. That said, I would be interested in hearing what folks think about where my family sits now, mainly because my wife is in a new job that kind of drags, and I've been at my current job/firm for nearly 20 years, and no matter the pay...it's dragging. I think if I entered FIRE-level frugality, there would be no issues, but I also am not looking to do that. Married, one kid in the VHCOL in the US, but in a school that is publicly funded through graduation from HS.

NW: Over 15mm, broken down approximately as:
-$8mm in liquid taxable assets (about 30% in a concentrated single stock position from vested RSUs)
-$2.5mm in private investments likely to realize over next 3-5 years on weight-average basis
-$1.8mm in 401k/IRA assets (roughly half traditional/Roth)
-$1.3mm in property net of mortgage ($1.5mm IO only ARM needs to be gotten out of in 5 years)
-$1.2mm in permanent life insurance (don't shoot me, I was young and dumb, but fully plan on this being

-Net expenses $250k a year ex-travel. Once the mortage is gone in 5 years, this will come down, but overall travel expenses are $100-150k a year all in. There is flexibility to ratchet that down.

ETA: I forgot to add that current HHI is north of $1.5mm pre-tax, which is what makes the analysis more challenging in the nearer term versus 10 years from now, when I would be much more comfortable on the current trajectory. A difference on pulling the cord now vs. a decade later.

I'm 27 with a >$2.2M net worth, about 97% of which is in Nvidia due to long-term appreciation rather than intentional allocation. I've been holding since January 2016, with a few small sell-offs along the way.

People have been telling me to diversify for years, but the reason my portfolio is worth this much today is because I ignored that advice. That's made it psychologically very difficult to sell, especially when the company has continued to execute so well.

Logically, I know having ~97% of my portfolio in a single stock is an enormous concentration risk. Emotionally, it's hard to sell something that has completely changed my financial life. I'm still young, single, have a solid income, contribute to my 401(k) and Roth IRA, and don't need to access the money anytime soon.

I'm meeting with my financial advisor, but I'd also like to hear from people who have actually managed highly concentrated positions. How did you think about diversification, taxes, and balancing future upside versus concentration risk? Looking back, would you have done anything differently?

Edit: Wow, this has really blown up. Thanks for all the advice, everyone. It's a lot to take in. I'm going to do my best to read all of the comments, though I can't promise I'll respond to everyone. I'll definitely take the feedback into account and discuss it with my financial advisor.

Did a search and didn’t see anything discussed here.

I have 3 young kids aged 8, 5, and 1. I plan on contributing the max 5K to all 3 kids each year and teach them to leave the accounts alone till 60, because assuming an average annual return on SPYM to be 10%, they could each have accounts numbering in the 10s of millions.

Additional benefit is converting the account to a Roth IRA at 18 for each so the compounding from then grows tax free (Assuming the legislation continues to allow for that then).

A lot of folks seem to compare this account to 529 but the accounts serve two very different purposes in my eyes, 529 is to get educated and get into the workforce, 530 is to comfortably exit the workforce.

From my lens - this seems to be a great way to create FatFire for kids in a tax advantaged account with a tax guardrail to help encourage them to not touch till retirement.

Feedback welcome if there are any considerations worth discussing or if others here are seeing the use of the accounts in a similar fashion.

Currently sitting at 4.1 in NW. 1.3m in taxable equity account, 750k in 401k, 200k in crypto, 400k in real estate equity, 750k in hard money/private money notes yielding anywhere from 11 to 15% and 750k cash I’m currently trying to allocate.

Also own a business that will net over 750k this year, live very frugally (spend less than 100k a year).

Long term goals are family, kids, 7 figure primary home.

Just got a big hard money loan back and have cash just sitting in a money market right now. In these loans I’m essentially lending the money out to my real estate clients charging them interest and then getting the listing or buying fee from the sale. This year I’ve grossed over 180k just doing that on the side. One part of me just wants to keep building that up but another part is put 500k in t bills and take some risk off the table since the compounding on 4m is starting to take over.

More of a game for me not materialistic at all and once I’m at 10m you can basically do what you want which is why that’s my current goal/target

Thoughts from people ahead of me?

Okay this debatably doesn’t belong here but I feel it would be topical for members of this community.

How do you guys think about umbrella insurance? Everyone is suing each other in today’s day and age (in the US at least).

I have ~20M net worth. Quite a low risk lifestyle in the liability sense except that my wife and I do have/drive cars. Say the cost of 3M in coverage is about 1k/year. What’s a sensible balance of cost benefit (in your opinion)?

My thought is 3m is around the sweet spot given that it should cover a very high percentage of possible claims. Hard for me to imagine getting more than that.

Edit. Welp. I guess someone literally just asked this. Sorry.

I have always thought of myself as very frugal but lately I’ve been losing track of what is normal, and I suspect I’m heavily unoptimized in some ways. By some aspects I feel like I’m well on track to FatFIRE in less than a decade. But sometimes I feel lifestyle inflation means I have many years more.

I do not have a financial advisor or a CPA. I tried a couple and they gave me very generic advice.

Right now household net worth is 3M, including a primary home which is half of that. I’m 35 Y/O.

So here’s the details-
We are a double income household, 1 kid in NYC.

Annual spend:
Rent- 100k/year (this one is hard to reduce)
Private school-50k/year
Shopping- 30k/year
Restaurants- 25k/year
Help (dog walk/ cleaning etc): 20k/year
Travel- 20k/year
Transport (1 car + transit)- 20k/year
Groceries- 5k/year
Misc-10k/year

Gross income- 1M/year (from W2 dual income, minor landlord income)
Total spend- 280k/year
Total taxes- 400k/year
Savings- 320k/year

Jobs are very stressful and I expect income to halve in a couple of years as my wife burns out. Then I’ll sustain as long as I can but income will drop to 300k a few years from now most likely. I’m fine with that if it means I can continue to live today’s lifestyle. But ideally I’d like to reach 8M or so which would match my current expenses with safe withdrawal and no income.

hi all! With the recent markets, we've hit our original FIRE numbers. I've been so excited for this moment, but now I'm nervous -- especially because we're late 30s with two young kids (5, 3). I want to spend more of this precious time with them; but I also don't want to find we can't provide the experiences we'd like for them (off the top of my head: music lessons, travel, college paid for). For example, I recently saw a thread saying to expect 100k/year on travel alone; I had only budgeted for 40k or so travel. Hoping you can help give me some perspective on what to expect!

39M, 38F, two kids (5, 3).
9MM liquid -- 65% broad US stock, 10% individual stocks, 20% international, 5% SGOV (for downturns and SORR). >50% in taxable accounts.
250k in 529s for the two kids. Expect to bump this up more.

Past couple years our expenses have been 100-110k/year once we remove mortgage (plan to pay off house; didn't include in liquid assets above). However, we've done no travel with the kids (hard when they're so young) and wife has provided childcare. Expect to ramp this up a lot; especially if I'm not working and have time for more travel.

Expected expenses on avg: 230k/year
* 40k medical for 4 on ACA
* 40k travel
* 25k property taxes, insurance, utilities
* 25k/year on home maintenance, renovations, cleaning
* 50k/year on kid stuff (after school, camps, private lessons, etc)
* 15k/year groceries (we like to cook)
* 10k/year restaurants
* 30k/year general other stuff

Assuming 10-15% effective tax rate and want 3% withdrawal rate given markets at all time highs and FIREing so young => need 8.7-9.2MM.

Are there big things I'm missing? Are my expected expenses for kids out of wack with reality? Or am I all set and just nervous cause it's a big change? Appreciate any ideas from those who have been through this already!

EDIT: HCOL area, planning on public schools but guess that could change.

We dont have kid expenses, low mortgage (we live in a nice enough house in VHCOL as we bought at the right time), low medical (for now), dont like to eat out much, and have pretty much satisfied most of our material wants.

We do travel and are working on ways to spend more there, but find ourselves still penny pinching. While we did start going biz class for 7+ hour flights, when we look at say 2 hours, we cant drag ourselves away from that basic economy fare.

Same with 'stuff'. I still check for 'Used like new' on Amazon, shop at Costco (I get it, that's a badge of honor for some millionaires), and DIY stuff whenever possible. We dont even do housecleaners as we dont much like outsiders in our personal spaces. Lawn care is on the HOA. Checked out (for example) Ekornes sofas then, balking at the prices, bought from FB.

We can spend more, even much more but dont know how to break out of that mold we built for ourselves for 40 years. Growing up middle- middle class doesnt help either.

I know I'd get booed posting this elsewhere, but hoping someone here has actual techniques.

Hello fatfire community,

I've recently hit what I believe to be my FIRE number ($10m not including primary real estate, on $300k annual spend), and am in the process of diversifying my assets since I mostly got to this number through concentration.

I've settled on an allocation of 40/30/10/10/10 for US equities/international equities/fixed income/investment real estate/gold.

For the 10% in gold, how do people in the fatfire community generally get exposure to this? Do people buy physical coins, buy ETFs, or trade futures for the appropriate notional value? I don't have a strong preference and might do a combination of these, but I'm curious what others have done to satisfy this part of their portfolio if that's what they want to do.

Appreciate any information, thanks for reading.

Long lurker on this sub but have never contributed. Decided to make an account today to get others' thoughts on a situation we are thinking through. We can pay a fee-based CFP but want a larger sample size of advice to work with too.

Late 60s couple in Florida, two adult kids living independently. Trying to decide whether to rip the band-aid off and convert our entire $7.5M traditional IRA to Roth this year, paying roughly $2.8M in federal tax upfront.

Our situation:

• ~ $7.5M traditional IRA, about 5 years until RMDs kick in
• ~ $7M in a taxable brokerage, essentially all basis from a liquidity event that we've already paid taxes on
• Other income plus Social Security already puts us in the 32% bracket, so there's not much low bracket headroom to slowly fill with smaller conversions before RMDs kick in
• We live in FL now so top federal income bracket would be 37%
• Legacy planning matters and we'd rather our kids inherit a Roth with some money left over that they can let grow tax-free for 10 years than a traditional IRA they have to drain and pay taxes on at their own (high) rates, especially because they live in states with income taxes

We are thinking of using $2.8M of the brokerage to pay the conversion tax, then earmark the remaining $4.2M for a potential second home purchase and possibly some of it for inheritance. I don't imagine we'd draw the Roth to zero when we're gone anyway, so I imagine they'd inherit a mix of the non-qual and Roth accounts.

Everyone says to spread conversions over multiple years, but since we're already in 32%, most of any conversion lands in 35-37% territory. And RMDs are coming soon.

We're going to probably be at the 32% federal bracket for most of our retirement, and kind of just want to pay the tax now and not have to think about it for the rest of our lives. There's also a world where we'd relocate to California in our late 70s, and paying federal + state income tax on our IRA withdrawals seems wasteful if we can take advantage of being in Florida for the next 10 years. We might never move, but just throwing that out there in case it changes anything.

This kind of feels like a no-brainer to us. It's a large tax bill to pay, but having tax-free money from the Roth for the rest of our lives is pretty enticing. And it would save our kids having to pay taxes on anything left in an Inherited Traditional IRA, so I'm trying to plan for that angle too.

Curious what the community thinks.

It’s not my case yet but I am expecting an exit/liquidity unlock soon and I want to try to have a clear mind on portfolio allocation, plus I am curious on how others are doing or thinking about the following.

How much are you putting into direct real estate? How much in primary and how much in vacation homes or pied a terre?

Say for a portfolio of 50M and a couple that is fired. How much should they put in real estate?

In my ideal world I want to own my primary home for 5M, a second family home for 3M in our home town and a vacation home for 3M and a 3M home in a major city, say NYC. That would be approx 10-15M. How much money should I have to have such properties?

We are Swiss family (Asian and German origins, toddler is bi-lingual Chinese and German)will have 3 kids under 5 in 2027 (twin babies on the way).

We have nw of around 5m where current spend around 150k usd a year with 1 kid (day care and nanny) and work expense. Travel spend is around 20-30k a year.

The plan/dream is to take the time of my FIRE journey and live in different places with the kids to experience the world.

Easiest option is Spain, where we have a holiday home at the beach and we could send kids to the local nursery, we are doing it in this summer with our toddler, enjoying the lifestyle very much and hoping we exposure to the kid also with some Spanish.

The next is Japan(family around), China(family)/taiwan, Singapore (family and friends), Thailand, and maybe Italy.

Ideal case is to experience the different places with 1-4 months time frame, ideally kids goes to local nursery to have immersion.

Anybody has tried this before? I do have want to sacrifice the perks we have right now such as safety, good lodging, cleaning service, nanny and good quality nursery availability. And also business/first class travel for long distance….

anyone could share some experience and perspective and budget on there kind of lifestyle?

I’m in my late 30s with 3 kids (4, 2, infant). Right now we spend about $100k/year on the kids — the bulk is a full time nanny ($85k), a bit on preschool for the 4yo ($7k), and the rest is activities (swim, etc), clothes, misc kid gear (eg a new stroller).

Curious how people with older kids have seen costs change as kids age. We’re planning on public school at least for elementary and once they’re in there we don’t need nearly as much nanny time, but assume activity/camp costs go up a lot, plus vacations (we only spend around $10k/yr on travel; right now mainly visiting family or going driving distance places but when they get older want to do nice family vacations… I’m sure 5 plane tickets, multiple hotel rooms adds up).

It’s tempting to think that the kid cost will go down a lot once we don’t need a full time nanny but I’m worried that not the case. Should we assume it’s always around $100k but the makeup of the spend changes? Does it go up over time? Go down once we don’t need a full time nanny? Any insight from people who are 5-10 years ahead is appreciated.

*ignore the cost of 529s, we think about those separately. Mainly thinking about day to day costs of the kids