It definitely feels premature to be celebrating with so much current and potential chaos in our country, but we had a second good month in the markets, almost as much as last month, and hit an exciting milestone: over a million in our nest egg!
We're Coasting along with a $106K surplus to our CoastFIRE number. I tinkered with the calculator and it says we're at Coast even if I retired at 63 instead of 65. Aiming for 62, we'd be supposedly able to reach Coast in 3 years with just the tiny amount NT is putting in his 401(k).
This is all good to see, because we just booked a European vacation for this fall that we can only partly pay for, so we're going to be carrying a bit of it as debt for a while. So that felt like a reckless decision (though I did contemplate it for months, it wasn't exactly impulsive) and I'm glad to see proof of my more sensible side as well.
(A note about the "loan from friends" item, which I explained in comments a while back but is worth mentioning for anyone who's confused... we had a very informal agreement with our friends (who rent the bottom half of the duplex) that we would let them gradually obtain part ownership of the duplex. They helped out in the early days of ownership with a bit of money for the down payment and for some urgent repairs, and we were going to put that toward their portion of the house. For various reasons, that plan sort of stalled over the years, so I consider that money they gave us to be a loan. I'm not sure they even do, or if we're still planning on revisiting that co-ownership idea, so I just kind of let it hang out there as a "loan" in case it ever comes up. I would pay them back if we definitively decided we weren't doing the ownership thing.
One reason I'm in no hurry to settle this one way or the other is we do each other lots of favors. Their rent is basically 2/5ths of the mortgage payment and 2/7ths of the utilities, so it's WAY under the going rate for a 2-bedroom in our neighborhood. But then again, they pretty much gave us their old car (it's in their name but we have primary use of it). We've been friends for decades so there's a lot of gray area in our arrangement. Like I said, they might not even consider that money to be a loan so much as a gift, but to me it could go either way so I keep it classified as a loan.
July 2nd, 2025 at 04:35 am 1751430906
And I think you guys will be just fine, despite having to carry debt to fund your trip. I think the biggest problem for most people is that they don’t always grasp the impact of their debt, and how they would go about remedying that, but that’s not the case for you guys.
July 2nd, 2025 at 04:13 pm 1751472799
I don't think taking on the debt the bad thing. I am not saving at the rate I could be because I am spending more money than I probably should. I now consider it part of the reason why we saved so hard earlier to enjoy it more now and later. We lived so frugally for so long I've loosened the purse strings.
Things that are a priority now seem important. Things I wouldn't have spent on before. But more than that I've also changed my mindset that we aren't going to spend all our money for sure by death. We might as well scale back and stop saving to enjoy some of it now.
July 4th, 2025 at 12:36 pm 1751632586
LivingAlmostLarge, I have to agree that I'm not saving as much as I did, but starting to enjoy the fruits of my labors.
July 4th, 2025 at 04:35 pm 1751646958