Of course.

10 years out to is longer term than to warrant holding in a high interest savings account only. And yes exactly, the key is to be flexible. We earmark a certain amount in our annual FIRE calcs for one off home expenses (roof, furnace, water heater, etc) as well as the car fund for future cars.

The key is to understand that just because you reach FIRE you aren’t going to suddenly turn into a robot 😉 If you see the market is down, there’s a good chance you’ll cut back on some expenses or even pick up an enjoyable part time gig to bring in $10-20k to fund that car. Very few people never ever bring in some sort of part time hobby turned income in their FIRE years.

Thanks for replying! I feel like the general advice is that you shouldn’t invest money that you might need in the short-medium term, and that counting on 7% is maybe a bit hopeful, but I guess 10 years is on the longer side of things. I suppose you could always buy a cheaper car if you really need one and your account hasn’t performed as well as you would have hoped. This is making me re-think how we structure a few things. For example, for a car you can always spend a bit less, but for a big unplanned house repair you don’t want to be in a pickle and have to withdraw a big chunk of money in a year where your investments are already down if they have not performed well.

Hey Stephanie thanks for this note! Glad you found us and are getting your binge on 🙂

We are not investing in “safe” funds like a high interest savings account for our future car funds. It’s 100% equities as we’re hoping for ~7% average annual gains to be able to double the portfolio every ~10 years so at that point we can withdraw half and keep the other half (original amount) in tack. If we went with the safe high interest savings route we might earn a few thousand over those years if we’re lucky and the future cad fund would be nearly drained after the first future cad purchase. Hope this helps!

Thank you!

I’ll give that some thought. I do like sharing what I’ve learned. I will however wait until after I’ve retired as I’m concerned that the details of our financial situation may negatively impact my work relationships.

Definitely, thanks for letting us know!

Yep! We’ve decided to be less aggressive towards our monthly mortgage payments (15% additional payment + double up monthly payment to now just the 15% additional payment) so that extra ~$1300/mo will be going towards investments instead for the next few months until we see a rebound 🙌

We know we are super conservative with all that cash but like you said, it’s all about sequence of returns risk! We won’t be retiring with this much cash on hand as we have some plans for it this year (mortgage, expenses, making out all tax advantaged accounts). Personally I’m sleeping better just knowing we won’t have to withdraw from our stock portion of the portfolio for years to start off our early retirement.

Ah we’re not too far from Olds (~1 hour from us)! If you do end up there this fall please let me know, we’d love to coordinate some sort of get together. I will say… weather in NE in fall is much prettier than here (I went to school in upstate NY).