Hi! We are a married couple in our late 30s with 2 kids, ages 7 and 2. We live in pretty much the highest COL area around, NYC.
I've hated living here for a while, but stuck it out because of proximity to my husband's job and because he likes living in the city.
Well, that job (finance) was pretty much killing him slowly, and he had basically a breakdown 4 months ago and was fired. As an aside, I have been trying to convince him for a while to find something else less stressful and with more humane working hours and coworkers.
We have had a lot of conversations these last few months over what we want out of life, and we've decided that for our happiness and sanity, we need to get out of NYC and live somewhere happier and much cheaper. My husband wants to live somewhere that will be affordable enough that he won't ever have to work again, if he doesn't want to.
Now I've made us a detailed budget, but I'm having trouble figuring out if my math is reasonable. The only retirement calculators I can find online presume a retirement age in your 60s or greater.
Here are our numbers: $1.8m savings (all liquid investments or cash), $800k retirement savings (don't want to use these until we are actually retired). We literally don't own much of anything else (no house, no cars). I also get $30k per year from a trust set up by a deceased relative I never met (I am not from a wealthy family as far as I can tell). I have been told by the attorney representing this relative's will that this payment will continue for my lifetime but there will be no large principal payout ever.
Our plan has been to buy a house in cash in a suburb somewhere South with a good public school system and a low COL. I've picked out a few places based on where we have visited (for example, Southlake, Texas).
I am presuming we pay around $700k cash for a house. Our expenses would be property taxes, home maintenance, healthcare, food, kids activities. I calculate these to be around $45k/year, although that may be high as I have only NYC like reference points for things like groceries, electricity, etc. With those numbers, assuming say $10k investment gains per year and the $30k check from the relative I never met, it seems we could go for... 220 years before we run out of money. I am just taking the $1,100,000 we have left after buying a home and dividing by $5,000 annual expenses ($45,000 annual expenses - $10,000 investment gains - $30,000 trust payout). And I'm not factoring in our $800k at present retirement savings. Am I missing something here? Is this a terrible idea?
Submitted January 31, 2021 at 12:51AM by shar081 https://ift.tt/3pzTMaM
