Lazy Man and Money

What’s Your FIRE Score?

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Fire Score

The other day the famous Sir Mix-A-Lot song came on the radio. The lyric about Cosmo made me wonder if the magazine is still around. I admit that one of my guilty pleasures of my early twenties was reading my girl friends’ Cosmopolitan. It was very different than anything I would typically read. It was certainly not close to Money or Kiplinger’s.

I don’t know if it was pioneered by Cosmo, but one of the signature things in seemingly every issue was a quiz. Usually, it was something like, “Are you compatible with your man? Take the quiz and find out.” By answering questions honestly, you scored points and at the end, you added up all the points and gave you the result. I imagine they still have this kind of thing today… if anyone is still reading magazines.

What if we adapted the concept to FIRE? Here’s one attempt at creating a FIRE quiz. It’s only five questions, so it will be quick and easy. Add up your points and we’ll see what your FIRE score is at the end.

What’s Your FIRE Score?

I’m going to be asking you some questions about income and expenses. Answer as best you can and just try to be truthful with yourself. There’s no judgment here and this is all in good fun.

1. Income

What’s your income look like? Are you much wealthier than the average person in your area? Do you make a lot less money than the average?

Give yourself:

10 points if your income is very high
8 points if your income is high
6 points if your income is average
4 points if your income is below average income
2 points if your income is far below average income

Expenses

Income is easy, it’s just one number. I want to break expenses down into various areas:

2. Housing

Housing costs are typically the high expense anyone has. For that reason, I’ll start here and points for frugality are worth more here.

Give yourself:

4 points if your housing costs are very low
3 points if your housing costs are below average
2 points if your housing costs are average
1 point if your housing costs are high

For example, if you live in a tiny house or have roommates or another kind of house hacking, you can probably give yourself 4 points for this. If you might describe yourself as living in McMansion or “house rich and cash poor”, you get 1 point.

3. Transportation

Transportation is the second biggest expense, so you have a chance to earn a lot of points for frugal behavior here.

3 points if your transportation costs are very low
2 points if your transportation costs are below average
1 point if your transportation costs are average
0 points if your transportation costs are high

If you buy a used low-end reliable car and drive it into the ground your transportation costs would likely be very low. If you are a one-car family that’s likely to be very low too. If you use public transportation and/or a bike most places, that’s a low cost of transportation as well. If you lease a new car that would normally cost 6-figures to buy, your transportation costs are expensive.

4. Food

Next up in the expense hierarchy is food. If you live on rice and beans you can score extra points here. If you buying organic, artisan foods from Whole Foods you won’t get any points on this one.

2 points if your food costs are below average
1 point if your food costs are average
0 points if your food costs are high

5. Extras/Adjustments

You may need to subtract points if you have some extra expenses. One example could be student loans. We don’t have student loans, but we do pay a lot for private school for the kids. I’ll have to subtract some points here.

Add Up all the Points

The maximum amount of points you can score is 19, but that’s very hard to do. The minimum score is 2, but that’s a very poor financial situation to be in. If you have a priority of FIRE, you probably want to be in the 12-15 range.

Let’s see what my scoring is:

My FIRE Scoring

Income – 8 points – I gave us 8 points here because my wife does well as a pharmacist. I’m much more average in income. We aren’t doctors or CEOs so we don’t fit in the 10 area. We are better than average though so 6 points didn’t seem right either.

Housing – 3 points – I could have maybe gone with 2 points here – it’s borderline. We bought our house for $400K about 10 years ago. With a fixed 15-year-mortgage at very low interest rates, it is less expensive than it would ordinarily appear. Also at 1800 square feet, it isn’t a McMansion for 4 people. Zillow says it is worth around 600K now, so people getting into the housing market have a much higher expense. That helped sway me towards a lower than average housing cost.

Transportation – 2 points – This one could have maybe been 3 points, but I rounded down on this one to make up for the housing expense above. We have two cars that are paid off, each 7-8 years old. The Subaru Forester (my car) was cheap, while my wife’s Acura MDX was a little more luxurious. We don’t walk or bike or do anything else to lower our transportation costs much. Most days, I just drive the kids to school and maybe go to the grocery store. We put few miles on our cars unless my wife is commuting.

Food – 2 points – I’m the master of shopping for cheap food at Aldi and the military commissary. With a chest freezer, if I find a good deal on meat, I can usually stock up for a long time. We don’t eat a lot of organic foods. For health reasons, we should probably be spending more on quality, but that’s a topic that is outside the scope of this quiz.

Final Total – 15 points

But wait, I didn’t add in the adjustment for the kids’ school expense. I think that’s going to cost me a couple of points, so my real final total is probably closer to 13 points.

This will also change over time. When my wife retires our income will be average (she’ll get a pension). When we finish paying off our mortgage in about 5-6 years our housing expense will drop to a very low number earning us another point there. When major life circumstances change, it may be worth revisiting and seeing where you stand with this quiz.

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of limitations with this quiz. For example, I didn’t include a lot of expenses. I also didn’t include investing. It’s a Monday, so I wanted to make it light, easy, and (hopefully) fun.

I think five questions were about the bare minimum that was needed to get a meaningful result. If you leave some suggestions on how to make it better, I might make this more comprehensive with a FIRE Score version 2.0.

How to Become a Millionaire by 30

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Millionaire by 30
How do you become a millionaire by 30?

How do you become a millionaire by 30? That’s a question I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I was cleaning out my basement recently and I came across an old book Millionaire by Thirty by Doug Andrew and sons. I reviewed it several years ago and I didn’t give it high marks.

Nonetheless becoming a millionaire by 30 is an intriguing concept. It’s extremely aggressive and not feasible for most of the population.

Putting Your Millionaire by 30 Plan Together

I’ve found that success relies on two things, having a plan and executing that plan. I’m going to tackle the easy part by giving you a millionaire by 30 plan. That’s the best I can do from my side of the keyboard. You have the difficult part: executing the plan.

1. Start Early

You simply can’t hope to make a million dollars on the last day before you turn 30. It’s important to have compound interest work for you over the last ten, and especially 5 years.

(I’m sorry if you are reading this a little later in life. If that’s the case, it may make more sense to set a goal such as how to be a millionaire in 10 years or how to be a millionaire in 20 years.)

2. Earn a Great Income

This can be a double-edged sword for millionaire by 30 race. Usually, to earn more income, you have to spend more time getting an education. I’m always in favor of great education, but you could graduate college with a lot of debt. High-earning post-college degrees like law school or medical school add more debt, and little time to become a millionaire by 30.

While this exercise is a race to an arbitrary finish line (30 years 0ld), your life is not. Earning a great income after 30 is critical to your financial success, so don’t let this race prevent you from reaching more important goals.

3. Save Money

I know people who make great incomes, but they spend all their money. I think they are happy with their spending, but it’s hard to know for sure. It’s common sense, but if you spend all your money, you won’t be a millionaire, right?

4. Invest

Saving money is good, but investing and compound interest is going to help. Because becoming a millionaire by 30 is so difficult you are likely going to need every advantage you can get. It’s unlikely that you are going to be able to work out 20% raises every year as in the example above, but investment gains can make up the difference.

My two favorite ways to invest are in stocks and real estate. Real estate is more work, but you may be able to use leverage and appreciation to get a million dollars faster.

5. Be Lucky

To be a millionaire by 30 you need a lot of luck. Hopefully, you were born into a good supportive family. Hopefully, you were born into a good environment (region of the world). Hopefully, your investments went well. Hopefully, you’ve been healthy. Hopefully, you get the idea here.

There’s a lot of hope and luck that goes into becoming a millionaire by 30. Not everyone has all that luck, so it may be important to adjust your goal. Some people have more luck. I like to say that Paris Hilton was effectively born a millionaire due to her parents’ great wealth. Not everyone starts life on an equal playing field.

If you’ve done most of these things and have some bad luck along the way, hopefully, you’ll still have a nice six-figure net worth to get on the path of being a millionaire by 40.

Millionaire by 30 in Reverse

One way to see if you are on the right path is to work backward from the goal. To get a million dollars by 30, you should have a certain amount of money by 29, 28, 27, etc. That is unless you are expecting some kind of huge financial event (stock options at a big company). Even if you have a big goal that requires aggressive gains, it’s best to look backward and see if you are on pace to have a good chance.

Here are three models. One shows 10% net worth growth per year, the next shows 15% growth per year, and the final one 20% growth per year. I picked these numbers because they are somewhat reasonable if you are a high-income earner and have good investment luck. Outside of lucky breaks, being a high-income earner is a prerequisite to becoming a millionaire by 30.

Age20% Growth15% Growth10% Growth
30$1,000,000$1,000,000$1,000,000
29$800,000$850,000$900,000
28$640,000$722,500$810,000
27$512,000$614,125$729,000
26$409,600$522,006$656,100
25$327,680$443,705$590,490
24$262,144$377,150$531,441
23$209,715$320,577$478,297
22$167,772$272,491$430,467
21$134,218$231,617$387,420
20$107,374$196,874$348,678
19$85,899$167,343$313,811
18$68,719$142,242$282,430
17$54,976$120,905$254,187
16$43,980$102,770$228,768
15$35,184$87,354$205,891
14$28,147$74,251$185,302
13$22,518$63,113$166,772
12$18,014$53,646$150,095
11$14,412$45,599$135,085
10$11,529$38,760$121,577
9$9,223$32,946$109,419
8$7,379$28,004$98,477
7$5,903$23,803$88,629
6$4,722$20,233$79,766
5$3,778$17,198$71,790
4$3,022$14,618$64,611
3$2,418$12,425$58,150
2$1,934$10,562$52,335
1$1,547$8,977$47,101

Getting a Kid to be a Millionaire by 30

I have two kids (ages 7 and 8) and it’s really difficult to get them motivated to do anything but watch YouTube videos about Pokemon. If there was a career in that, they’d already be millionaires. Maybe they’ll make their own videos someday and become the next YouTube stars.

In the meantime, the kids are helping me with the dog sitting and earning a little money in their Kids Roth IRAs. I started investing their birthday money at ages 2 and 3 and the great stock market has worked well.

It’s a good head start, but they’ve wasted so much time learning how to walk and talk ;). They’ve used up 25% of their time to be millionaires by 30 and aren’t even 1% of the way there yet. What am I going to do with these slackers ;)?

Is It Worth Trying to be a Millionaire by 30?

I can’t tell you what is worth your time. If you really enjoy high-earning careers and entrepreneurism and you are great at them, more power to you. Most people have outside interests that don’t revolve around the singular goal of getting to a million dollars by an extreme, self-imposed, deadline.

However, there are benefits to being a millionaire by 30. For example, the odds are very good that with investing compound interest you can become a young multimillionaire. That gives you the freedom to do a lot of things later in life such as choosing to retire early or do some space tourism (if that happens any time soon.)

I find it’s better to have balance in my life, but I recognize others might benefit from setting the goal and having a plan to drive after it. In the end, you have to do what’s best for you.

Two Motivational Ways to Start Saving and Investing

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motivation start saving investing

Last week, I saw a Tweet from someone lamenting that their relatives could have made a few million dollars if only they invested their money. Instead, they saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank for decades earning little interest. I don’t know all the details of it so I don’t want to get into the specific situation. Instead, I wanted to share that it inspired me to make this Thanksgiving reflection:

I realize that I’m in the minority… a tiny fraction of a minority of people who learned about saving, compound interest, and investing very early. I live at the intersection of Nerdy and Boring, so those topics interested me. I know I’m weird.

For everyone else, getting started investing is tough. It can be confusing. But before you can get started investing you need to save some money. That’s a huge obstacle for many with student loans, child care, expensive housing, health care costs, stagnant wages, etc. (I’m sure I missed a few in there.)

If you are anything like me or anyone else I know, life keeps you busy. It’s easy to put saving and investing to the bottom of the priority list. You can always find time to save and invest later, right? (Unfortunately, wasted time investing can be costly with to how compound interest works.)

I think it’s a mistake to put off saving and investing. Today, I wanted to present two powerful mental hacks that motivated me to keep saving and investing.

1. “Retire” Expenses for Life

We all have monthly expenses. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t? Who wouldn’t want free Netflix, a free car, or a free home?

Well it’s all possible, but you have to start small. There’s a thing in personal finance called the Rule of 25. It’s the inverse of of the 4% Rule. The 4% Rule can get complicated, but it roughly says that if you have $1,000,000 invested you can spend $40,000 (4%) a year and retire. I cover some of the more complicated parts in the 4% Rule link above, but for now we’ll rely on it as if it were proven fact. The inverse of this means that if you have $40,000 in annual expenses, you should save 25x… or $1,000,000.

Your total expenses are made of many little ones – things like house, car, utilities, and even that streaming subscription.

Let’s take Amazon Prime as an example. Prime is so popular that I’m guessing most of you can relate. It’s $120 a year, which makes the math convenient for us. If you save and invest 25x or $3000, you can have Amazon Prime for life. It seems like a lot of money to save for that expense, but compound interest can really help you out. You don’t have to invest $3000 at once.

2. Track Your Net Worth by Percentage

You may see some bloggers posting about how their net worth jumped 2% for the month making them $40,000. That can happen when you have a $2 million dollar investing nest egg. I’ve got good news and bad news about that. The bad news is that $2 million nest eggs is not very normal. Fortunately, you already knew that bad news. The good news is that the story behind the nest egg is usually saving and investing over a number of years. That’s doable if you have the right mix of income, frugality, steady investment, and some market luck.

When you are starting out, the large numbers can seem either inspiring or scary. I could see people going in both directions. I see it as inspiring, but I’ve read comments from people that say, “I could never do that kind of thing.” Everyone’s situation is unique. I’ve read stories about a 9-year-old who is worth over a hundred million dollars from his YouTube success. I’ve also read stories about the low-income janitor who died with millions of savings. There’s a lot of room for financial success anywhere in between.

When you are starting out, try to focus on your monthly gain of net worth. Hopefully, you are saving some money and because your net worth is low, you can make big gains here. When you have $2 million dollars, it’s hard to grow your net worth by 10% (unless you are a 9-year-old millionaire YouTuber). You are at the mercy of the investment markets. When you are starting out, you might be able to grow your net worth by 20% simply by saving $2000. Saving $2000 may not be easy depending on your situation, but hopefully sneaking $40 away a week in a bank (or investing) account is something reasonable for you.

Final Thoughts

I hope that these tricks help you. The biggest thing is to get started and realize that it is okay to start small. Do you have money hacks that you use to movitate you?

Designing a FIRE Community: Housing (Part 2)

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While this is part 2 of the series, part 1 was a very brief introduction to what you could have guessed from the title. I’m imagining a FIRE community. A place designed to allow people to be financially independent as early as possible. It certainly won’t be for everyone, but it could be ideal place for many in the FIRE community.

Today, I’d like to explore the characteristics of housing in my ideal FIRE community. Housing is a natural place to start. Most people spend roughly 1/3 of their income on housing. If the average work career is around 45 years, everyone can retire in only 30 years if we just give them free houses.

Hmmm, in the off-chance that my free houses for everyone plan doesn’t work let’s come up with a plan B… cheap houses!

What’s the Cheapest House You’d Want to Live In?

That’s the question we have to answer. Unfortunately, most people will have a variety of different answers. My hope is that those who are focused on FIRE are willing to have more flexibility than most people when it comes to this very big expense. Let’s explore what characteristics some of these cheap houses might have.

1. Tiny Houses

Perhaps the best way to save money on housing is to have a little house. Not only are small houses cheaper to build, but they are cheaper to heat and cool. They also fill up faster which means less stuff to buy. You can’t hoard tons of Beanie Babies (or whatever your collectible of choice is) if you have no place to put stuff.

Here are some examples of bloggers who have talked about their tiny house lifestyle:

  • Two Cup House – A whole blog built around tiny house FIRE. Here’s the story of their tiny house.
  • Think Save Retire – They travel in an Airstream vehicle as their home. It’s hard to imagine tinier living than that.
  • Retire by 40 – Joe used to live in a sub-1000 sq. foot place (if I remember correctly from his blog), but now is in a bigger place, but not super big.

Personally, we live in an 1800 sq. foot home. I can be on the small size at times, but it’s not too bad.

In this community we’ll have places of different sizes, but nothing that would qualify as a McMansion. To help make the smaller house sizes work we’ll have an onsite self storage bin.

2. New Planning

One of the benefits of starting from scratch is that we wouldn’t have to support house design of decades or centuries old. There’s a lot of research going on to make cheap, quality houses. For example, this 20K House Project has be around for years. These designs are an amazing rabbit hole to explore.

While most of the 20K houses are also tiny houses, we can use elements of the design in any size house. Of course, we’ll include elements like solar panels to mostly eliminate electricity bills. We’ll also have rain water barrels and things like that.

3. New Processes

In that 20K project, they put a specific focus into keeping home builders in jobs. They mentioned that they could have saved money using “pre-fab” parts. I like home building jobs, but I’m fine using pre-fab parts. I don’t think we’ll be building enough homes to make a big dent in the home building job market.

We can even explore 3D printing for houses. I haven’t done much research on this, but it seems that making a 3D printed house cost between $4000 and $10,000.

Adding it all up

I think some of these housing estimates are a little extreme. I don’t really think we’re going to 3-D print houses for $10,000. If we can, that’s fine, but I’d like to budget quite a bit more. I’d like to think that we could do some pretty amazing things with $50,000.

Of course, we’ll have to cover the cost of land as well. That will vary tremendously depending on where the community is. That’s a discussion for another day. We’ll definitely not be choosing Silicon Valley for our location.

If we can limit our total costs of housing to $70,000 on average, I think we’ll keep either rents or mortgages sufficiently low. For example, a 30-year mortgage could be just a few hundred dollars. Working on this one thing alone could allow everyone in the community to retire 10-15 earlier than normal.

Designing a FIRE Community: Introduction (Part 1)

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I want to preface today’s article by asking for a quick favor.

Could give this blog a vote/nomination for a Plutus Award? The annual awards are decided by a nonprofit, the Plutus Foundation, that supports community-based programs that enhance financial literacy. In short, it’s the personal finance awards show.

My blogging career is a lot like Jaime Moyer’s Baseball Career. He played a long time, but usually just a little above average. I’m in my 13th year as a personal finance blogger, but I’m still the Susan Lucci or Ash Ketchum when it comes to winning an award. I was nominated for a lifetime achievement award once, but it was such a crowded field of much better bloggers that I’d be surprised if I got a vote.

Lazy Man and Money may be different things to a lot of different people. For example:

  • The main objective from the very first post was to explore ways to reitre early through financial independence.
  • Since my wife is in the military, I also cover some military money issues.
  • That military career directly lead us to become accidental landlords, so we’re big real estate investors now
  • I’m firmly in Generation X, so one could say that Lazy Man and Money deals with many Generation X issues
  • Over the last few years I’ve written a lot about being a Stay-at-Home-Dad to our boys (ages 5&6), so this could be a family blog
  • I often write about investing, probably more than most blogs, so Lazy Man could be an investment blog
  • My focus on helping people avoid MLM scams could be seen as deserving for a Biggest Impact award

If I had to choose one, I think the best fit is family blog. So if you’d like to nominate me with this one click I’d appreciate it.

However, if you want to nominate here for other categories are some easy links for those (roughly in order of how I view Lazy Man and Money):

Now, let’s get to today’s article…

Nearly 12 years ago, I wrote an incredible article around a grand idea. That was my memory of it. In reality, it was a laughable 260 words of unpolished slop… and it still got 14 comments.

The idea: A community designed around frugality

The goal of the article was to figure out how cheaply you could live. At the time, we had an expensive $2000/mo. rent in Silicon Valley. I wondered about whether we could live in Texas with solar panels. I thought that we might be able to telecommute for work and have one cheap used car for transportation.

I then came up with the idea of a community that was specifically designed for cheap, frugal, sustainable living. The idea was to live in tiny houses with Murphy Bed like furnature. The community would use some kind of car share like ZipCar.

My concluding thought:

The community I describe could be extremely cheap to live in.

Imagine how much money you could save with a normal salary.

How soon could you retire if you could really keep your expenses in check?

I would have called it the Lazy Man FIRE community, but back then personal finance bloggers never used the term FIRE. However, you can see that back in 2007, Lazy Man and Money was indeed a FIRE blog.

None of my article suggestions would qualify as rocket science. It was simply looking at what we typically spend most of our money on, housing and transportation, and trying to hack it to be frugal. Eliminating our energy expenses with solar panels is another easy win. I think telecommuting is much more common now.

Of course most people use Uber and Lyft instead of Zipcar now. Of course the Uber gPod isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. That’s what I’m calling a futuristic self-driving, solar-powered electric, on-demand car fleet.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to dig deeper into various aspects of what this FIRE community could look like. I’ll look into possible locations, housing styles, transportation possibilities, food, and utilities. I may do a supplemental version on college costs and health care. I’ll hopefully try to put some (very rough) real numbers into what expenses in this planned community would be.