Early 30s F primary care doctor married to early 30s F not in medicine. Currently building up my panel, anticipate making about $260,000 annually once full in a year or so. My wife makes about $130,000 before taxes. Im interested in the FIRE movement (at least the FI part, RE to be determined) and we are focused on living cheaply in our apartment now, maxing out retirement, and paying off my loans over the next few years (currently refinanced at 5%).
I find it really challenging to estimate how our cost of living will evolve, making it difficult to arrive at a FIRE number to work toward. We are anticipating a child this year and thinking about 2-3 kids total. But who knows, it’ll be based on so many unpredictable things (how the pregnancies go, if each kid has some unanticipated need, which school they will go to, will one benefit from private while the others are fine in public, how many IVF rounds will be needed, do we end up adopting some and how much will that cost). We also aren’t going to live in our small apartment forever. We could buy a “starter home” for 400k vs wait and buy a “forever home”. How much home can I afford or will I be able to afford is another question that feels difficult to answer as it depends on how much the rest of life costs and how long we want to work for.
My wife loves her job and feels certain about wanting to keep doing it for a long time. I like my job and anticipate feelings about it shifting as I settle into having a mostly stable panel of patients and a few years of experience. But how long I want to work for also feels unknown and difficult to predict and I wonder how having kids will effect it (do I want to stay home more days of the week or do will work be a life raft as some describe it). I guess all of the unknowns is also what makes me interested in FI. I want to maintain flexibility to be able to react to life’s unknowns in the way that seems best to me, not pigeon-holed by expenses.
Are we just too early on in life and/or too undecided on our path to reasonably come up with a FIRE number? Or am I going about this the wrong way? Having kids feels like a sea change that makes everything else hard to reasonably predict. How do people realistically arrive at a FIRE number at this stage?
It’s hard to pinpoint at this stage as you are young in your career and planning all the expensive things (kids, house). Maybe you only have one child, maybe one of your three children has a special need or one of you goes part time. Too many variables in this equation.
I would just save for now without sacrificing your quality of life in the present and you’ll likely have a much clearer picture in 5-10 years what your expenses are.
My personal spreadsheet/budget changes my FIRE number in relation to my spending. It sometimes goes up and sometimes go down. But it is just an estimate.
The best advice, is save as much as you can early career while balance all the wants. Saving rate is one of the most important thing to the path in FIRE and early saving is worth more than saving g later because of compound interest.
Step 1 is sitting down and doing a budget. You sound like you’re just waving your hands in the air and coming up a list of “what ifs”
I would continue to save as much as possible. Personally, it makes sense to rent bc renting is the highest you’ll pay vs mortgage is the lowest. Homeownership is overrated and you’ll get to experience it someday. Renting is more predictable and flexible.
You say anticipate making 260k. So I assume you are making less right now.
You say a starter home is 400k so it sounds MCOL location.
The best thing you could do is increase your pay.
Otherwise, I would just save as much as possible but with a low salary, student loans, IVF costs, etc….it will be tough to be FI any time soon.
You current make less than 400k combined. So you could set your fire number at 10mil. Just as a starting point but obviously you spend much less.
I thought mine was 5 million but then all my social network was 50 million so I just leveled up