I'm 24, single, debt free, have $40k in retirement accounts, $70k in cash/savings accounts. I'm going to max out my 401k and IRA contributions this year. I've been living with my parents since the pandemic started, so I've been able to save a fair bit on rent/food. I have a car, no car payment. Nothing fancy, but it gets me from A to B.
I recently got a new job paying $90k base, $106k gross with expected bonuses, and I'm going to be moving to a new city (so no more rent free with parents). For ~9 months though, I will be in training with this new company at a different location with major expenses (read: Housing) paid for. So, I think I'll still be saving quite a bit for the near future.
I'm interested in FIRE, and I feel like $70k sitting around in cash is high. If I only max out 401k and IRA this year, that cash number will only get higher. I'm thinking about starting to invest in taxable accounts, but I don't want to end up with too little cash. A nice safe emergency fund would be ~6months, but I'm finding it hard to come up with a monthly expense estimate in a new city when I haven't even been paying for groceries in my current city.
I can estimate rent easily enough by prices online, but it's everything else (groceries, phone, car maintenance/gas, internet, utilities, entertainment, etc) that I'm having a hard time coming up with a good number, just because I have so little data on my own expenditures right now to base it off of.
Any recommendations for figuring out how much to keep in cash/how much to invest before I actually live in this new city and can figure out my real monthly expenditures?
Submitted March 20, 2022 at 11:04PM by actual_toaster https://ift.tt/k2Oqund
