Goal: $494,743 by 2019
As a reminder, this is just an incremental goal along the way to 8x income by retirement. This mini-goal aims to get us to a milestone by the time I turn 45 and AS turns 40.
The milestone (which changes whenever our salaries change) is to get me to 3x my current salary, which is now $68,291, so $204,873; NT to 3x his, which is now $62,100, so $186,300; and AS to 2x hers, which in 2016 was $51,785, so $103,570)
Current balance: $344,108
June 2017 balance: $335,025
Progress: $9,083
Man, if we had progress like this every month, we'd be on track to hit our goal! (At least it looks like we'll pass our 2017 mini-mini-goal of $350K before the end of the year!)
To reach the goal by our birthdays in 2019, that's 19 months, so we'd need to contribute (or have assets appreciate) $150,635 -- $7,928 per month -- to reach it.
Retirement goal progress
August 1st, 2017 at 05:46 am
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In theory, since I'm basing it on what we actually currently make, it would continue to become more ambitious as we all continue to make more money, but obviously I know THAT isn't necessarily the case in all instances! If NT and I were laid off simultaneously and we were scraping by on AS's income, I certainly wouldn't think "oh, now we can revise our retirement milestone down to her salary x8 and be just fine."
So basically, it's a meaningless milestone to try and put some meaning on something I feel is amorphous and scary but vital and need some motivation to keep working on.
Oh and interestingly, it looks like Fidelity (who I think invented this rule?) now says 8x is the milestone if you retire at 70. It's 10x for age 67, or 12x for 65.
If in a perfectly predictable future NT and I retired at 67 with 8x, AS would continue working for five years before retiring at 67, which means we'd have income coming in until NT and I were 72. So that adds even more nonsense and noise to the whole thing. This is why I tend to just say, OK, let's go with this simple goal, and see if I can get our contributions up as much as possible. Being that we're so badly behind anyway, and are putting away what feels like a lot for our budget, at least it's helping me stretch beyond my comfort zone.
August 1st, 2017 at 09:46 pm 1501624016