Lazy Man and Money

Our Early Retirement Plan: Obstacles and Expenses (Part 4)

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If you are just starting this, I suggest you start at The Introduction – Part 0. Alternatively, you can jump to Our Early Retirement Plan: Where We Are Now (Part 1), Our Early Retirement Plan: My Personal Income (Part 2), or Our Early Retirement Plan: My Wife’s Plan (Part 3).

In part 2, I explained how I can live a retired lifestyle even while I’m technically bringing in an income. In part 3, I detailed how my wife could retire early. Today, I’d like to go through some obstacles we have in attempting to retire early.

  • Children and Rising Expenses – Right now we are DINKs (double income no kids). We hope to have children some day. Children aren’t cheap, and there’s a whole slew of costs with them that I haven’t even begun to explore. I know that day care is expensive. I hope to be a stay-at-home dad at least part of the time. That would reduce some expenses from the outset. Additionally, there are some options available to the military for day care.
  • Education – With the aforementioned children, there’s going to be an education expense. This is one area where I don’t necessarily believe in frugality. I want to have enough money saved so that if our children can get into a great school, money won’t be a problem. My wife is of the opinion that the child should earn their way through college so they don’t become Lazy like dad. I think we can find a middle ground with this. Again, this is speculation since there are no kids at this point.
  • Health Care – This is one of the biggest reasons why people can’t retire early. Fortunately, the military has a great plan that we’ll be eligible for called TriCare. We haven’t looked at the costs of this in detail, but I think it’ll be a cost-effective solution for us.
  • Expensive Housing – Whether we choose to stay around San Francisco or move back to Boston, housing is not going to be cheap. This is going to be one of our biggest expenses. Though we could look to live in an area of lower cost of living, I’m partial to the two areas I mentioned because I know I can surround with smart people there. Besides the opportunities that brings, it would be good for potential children to also be surrounded by the same smart people.
  • Other Uncertainties – I’m sure there are going to be other obstacles. Life pops up with surprises when you least expect it (of course they wouldn’t be surprises if you expected them).

These are some things that are hard to account for at this stage. Thus any plan that we make has to add quite a bit of padding

Our Early Retirement Plan: My Wife’s Plan (Part 3)

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If you are just starting this, I suggest you start at The Introduction – Part 0. Alternatively, you can jump to Our Early Retirement Plan: Where We Are Now (Part 1) or Our Early Retirement Plan: My Personal Income (Part 2).

Before I start, I should come clean. I’m going to be putting some words in my wife’s mouth. We’ve talked about things a bit and this post is a result of those conversations.

I’ve mentioned in the past that my wife is a pharmacist in the military. As such she gets a few different types of pay. She gets her base pay, a cost of living adjustment (COLA), a housing stipend, amongst others.

Tax Benefits

  • The housing stipend is paid to her tax-free. – This stipend is a pretty huge sum of money because it’s adjusted for home prices in the area of office. Since my wife works in San Francisco, one of the most expensive places to live in the US, she gets a lot of money. This money about 50% more than our actual rent. We pocket the rest – one of the benefits of living frugally.
  • We live in two states – We traveled west to settle in San Francisco, California we went through Reno, Nevada. We fell in love with it. The weather is great. It’s close to skiing, which my wife loves. It’s close to casinos, which I love (I just keep my bets reasonable). You’re wondering where I’m going with this? The military has thing called a Home of Record which can be different than your Legal Residence. It allows for the possibility of living in one state and voting or paying the income tax of another state. It’s a weird law, but we follow the rules. Plus, if the military didn’t move us around, we probably would have lived in Reno anyway. For more information see this About.com article.

Military Pension

Despite what you hear about pensions disappearing, the military pension is still strong. It’s backed by the US Government. I have difficulty imagining a scenario where congress passes something that would prevent the hard-working people of the military earning their pension. My wife is eligible for this pension after 20 years of service… around age 44.

The Military Pension is a fascinating personal finance topic. At that 20 year mark, you have the opportunity to retire, take 50% of your highest base pay (no more housing stipend or other pay). If you don’t want to retire and stay on another 10 years you would then get 75% of your highest base pay. It’s a tough choice, because you stay on your base pay is likely to grow and you get to keep more of it. Of course, you could always retire from the military, take the pension, and work elsewhere – collecting two paychecks. As a pharmacist, my wife should have numerous jobs available to her. This can be a tough decision and one that Plugged in Finance tackled recently. If anyone else wants to crunch numbers on this one, I’d be appreciative.

I should also mention that military pensions are indexed for inflation, so we will truly get the same amount of buying power each year. I’m not sure if other pensions set up that way.

Side Jobs

My wife has expressed interest in having a side job in retirement. She often jokes about having the job with the least about of thought necessary. I can’t come up with an example right now, but she did have an idea for a real job that she would like… chauffer for people visiting Napa Valley wineries. I personally wouldn’t want to be dealing with a bunch of drunk people, but I know I could make a killer blog out of Napa Valley Limo Confessions. It would make HBO’s taxicab confessions look like child’s play. I could also spin that off into a real winery review blog. In any event, the point here is that she is likely to wind down to working less, but not stop working completely. Even if she leverages here pharmacy license, she could make quite a bit of money in just one day a week. Thus some addition income can be expected from here.

Investment Income

Like myself, she’s been maxing out here retirement accounts – both 401K and Roth IRAs. We see no need to change that. It will be $19,000 a year for the next 11 years until she reaches that first retirement decision. That should be a nice nest egg by the time we are eligible to take the income.

Rental Property

I mentioned yesterday that I have a rental property. My wife has one as well. She had bought her’s before we had met. Like me, she barely makes back her expenses on it at this point. However, in 30 years it will be paid off and any income that it earns after that be a nice supplemental income.

Can You Plan for Unexpected Expenses?

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When I think about the unexpected financial expenses the first thing that comes to mind is emergency funds. Most of the experts agree that having 6 months of income set aside for a financial emergency is necessary. In my head, that financial emergency is almost always the loss of a job. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been there when I lost my job in the dot com melt-down of 2001. (In many ways, I think that’s where the “work smarter, not harder” attitude of Lazy Man was born. I had worker pretty hard and rose up the ranks in the company – until the company was bought by another. All the social capital I created was worthless with the new management.)

While job loss is certainly a very valid reason to have an emergency fund (especially so in today’s economy), lately I’ve been thinking about bigger problems. What about health care? I have very good health insurance, but many aren’t so fortunate. What if my mom’s health care is lacking and I have to take care of her? What if my brother hasn’t listened to me about getting life insurance to ensure that his two newborns are provided for in the Worst Case Scenario? These costs can transcend the costs of 6 months of income.

Perhaps I’m becoming a worry-wart, trying to figure out all the ways that my hopes (and plans) for early retirement won’t be derailed. I can’t possibly cover every scenario, can I? I can’t have insurance for every possible occurrence, right? Yet, accepting defeat doesn’t right either. There are people who can withstand unexpected expenses.

I’m starting to realize that I not only have to plan for the security of myself and my family, but I have to plan for others as well. Does anyone else spend time thinking about this before it happens or do they simply react after the fact?