Today I have an update for you from a previous millionaire interview.
I’m letting three years pass from the initial interviews to the updates, so if you’ve been interviewed, I’ll be in touch. 😉
This update was submitted in June.
As usual, my questions are in bold italics and their responses follow…
OVERVIEW
How old are you?
I’m 41, my wife is 35. We’ve been married 10 years.
My wife has been the best part of my life by far; I would not be here if she hadn’t come along.
Do you have kids?
7-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter. They keep us pretty busy!
Just like most siblings, they’re completely different. I’m so thankful I get to spend so much time with them.
What area of the country do you live in (and urban or rural)?
Right in the middle of the U.S., in a small town just outside one of the larger cities of the country. When I tell people which city they give me one of two responses:
Response A: They say they’ve never been while looking at me with a quizzical scrunched up face; I’m guessing they’re thinking “why would anyone live there?”
I like to reinforce this one and tell them they shouldn’t move here because it’s so terrible. Just doing my part to keep our housing prices from going Colorado, lol.
Response B: Others say some variation of “Oh yeah! I was sent there for business (no one comes here for vacation), and it was super nice and clean! There was so much to do, and it’s so easy to get around! Your city is amazing.”
I usually laugh at this one. I spent nearly 15 years of my life as a small cog in the machine which keeps this City clean (actually more like sweeping stuff under the rug so the nice areas stay nice).
If they only knew what the rest of the City was like, but then, that’s most places…It’s still nice to hear though.
What was your original Millionaire Interview on ESI Money?
I was interview 219.
Is there anything else we should know about you?
Well let’s hit the big one; I left full-time Cop work about 2 years ago. I had hit my FI number some years prior.
After hitting a low point at work and staring down almost 6 more years on late shift to get a pension that I didn’t need, I decided it was time to go. The past two years have been amazing, weird, and I’m so thankful I stumbled into the FIRE stuff years ago.
I have no plans of going back to full-time work, especially in my old profession.
NET WORTH
What is your current net worth and how is that different than your original interview?
When I started writing this update, we were at $1.994 million. It’s taken a few weeks to get this together, and on a whim, I checked our accounts.
Looks like we just crossed onto the other side of $2 million for the first time.
Weird to get past that milestone, and I imagine we’ll dance on either side of that amount for a while. It is reassuring to think we could lose half our net worth and still be millionaires.
Our first interview was back in mid-2020, and we were at 1.1 Million then. This is good to keep in mind, as our 2 Million dollars of current net worth is great and all, but when you factor in CPI it would be roughly equivalent to 1.6 million in 2020 dollars.
Here’s how our investments break down:
- $1,500,000ish invested 80/20 stocks to bonds. Nearly half of that is her 401k and my 457b. About $160k is in Roth’s.
- $200k in my wife’s equity share, and all the rest in taxable brokerage. All of it is in index funds, following a basic three-fund portfolio.
- $440,000 in our house, which we own outright. I include this in our net worth because A. you got to live somewhere. B it makes me feel better.
- About $100,000 in cash. This is nearly twice what we’d like; just waiting to shuffle some money after our recent house transaction before we dump a big chunk back in the market.
What happened along the way to make these changes?
I worked full-time for another 2 years after that interview and kept on saving over 70% of my income. I then retired from that job, and now barely contribute to any investments.
My wife has continued working part-time; she maintained over a 60% savings rate while I was working (though we have a combined budget, we track our individual spending, saving, and income separately because we think it’s fun that way), and her savings rate is now down to 25% since she’s supporting my bum lifestyle.
In our initial interview, we had a paid-off house worth $230k, thus making up about 21% of our net worth. We just moved last week to a much nicer town outside the city.
The new house cost $440K, despite being roughly the same size. Guess that’s a combination of increased house prices, and buying in a more desirable location.
We sold nearly $200k in stocks to make the purchase, as we had no desire to have a mortgage at 6.5%. Now 22% of our net worth is tied up in the house.
Most of the increase in our net worth was due to the market. Even though my wife and I both had high savings rates before I retired, our salaries were/are not astronomical.
My last year working I made just over $100k, which is the only time either of us hit that six-figure mark. Looking at the spreadsheet, our contributions totaled about $150K between the last interview and my retirement.
What are you currently doing to maintain/grow your net worth?
Keeping on, keeping on.
When I retired we figured I’d eventually do something else that would make money, but still planned it out so that wouldn’t be necessary. We were definitely FI before buying the more expensive house, but now we would only be considered FI if you use a 4% SWR and include my VA pension.
After the move, we consider ourselves Coast FI. We attempt to earn as much as we spend and allow our investments to keep chugging without us adding more to the pot.
We’ve apparently failed at Coast FI too, as we are on track to save and invest about a quarter of our combined income.
EARN
What is your job?
My full-time job is homemaker. I do most of the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and much of the getting the kids to and from stuff.
I also do a lot of the around-the-home maintenance, though my wife absolutely kills it at repairing our appliances.
My wife is still an engineer and works part-time, mostly remotely. She averages less than 30 hours a week but has a lot of discretion with her schedule.
She frequently works 10-20 hours a week and then crushes it when a project hits a critical point. She also can take off whenever she wants, for as long as she wants, within the confines of the occasional times a project requires her constant attention.
Seems like that’s about 4-5 weeks a year, with plenty of lead time.
I have a few side gigs:
My main source of income is doing Executive Protection (EP). If you didn’t know, EP is a fancy/PC name for bodyguard, though really it ends up being more like a chauffeur and butler.
I spend an average of 6 hours a week doing this, though it’s lumpy. Sometimes I work a few hours a week, sometimes I go a few weeks completely away from the gig.
A few times a year I’ll travel with clients for a week straight and put in 60 hours.
Before I retired I was a police officer, and in the military prior to that. Much of my time in both organizations was spent in specialized tactical units.
The skillset I built there translated into the EP world. As a retired Law Enforcement Officer, I’m given provisions under federal law which makes some aspects of the EP role simpler.
I’d worked for the same EP organization while I was a cop for a few years (part-time work was encouraged). I took a year off when I first retired and ended up missing the social aspect of the job, and also missed protecting people.
So I went back, and it’s been a lot of fun. Working the occasional long week makes me really appreciate my normal lazy life a lot more.
In addition to the EP thing, I do a training contract for the military. This is only one week a year, though during that week I put in nearly 100 hours.
In order to stay current on what I’m training, I have to put in an hour or so a week to maintain my proficiency. The pay is absolute crap, but I really don’t care.
I would do this contract for free, and consider it volunteering. The specifics of the contract are covered by an NDA, but the capabilities we help build hopefully save lives. And it’s a lot of fun, even when I’m up for 36 hours straight!
I also spend a fair amount of time blogging, though this makes me no money. This has been enjoyable and has helped me make sense of the transition away from full-time work.
On the off chance you check the thing out, be forewarned: my writing is atrocious and littered with profanity. I did hook up affiliate links to the blog, but plan on donating the hundreds of cents it might make to charity.
Finally, I do a tiny amount of freelance writing for a Data Annotation company. I only do this a few hours a month, but it’s a fun way to learn and work with AI.
It’s also nice to know if I really needed to make more money, I could ramp this up as much as I’d like.
What is your annual income?
Right now, I think I’m on track to make $17K.
My wife will probably make around $80K. Both numbers are gross.
How has this changed since your last interview?
For me, it’s down quite a bit! But my life is a lot better.
My wife’s income sure has improved, which was part of the reason I left. Hey, what the hell, let’s go ahead and cover that here in a super long, roundabout manner:
Back in my last interview, I said I was in an administrative function at a large city police department. What I didn’t say (because I was still working, and even more paranoid about stuff) is that I was working as the Operations Executive Officer (XO) in what you corporate types would call our department’s C-suite.
I was not a Chief Executive, rather I was the number two for a Division Chief. This was kind of a weird role, as my rank was only Sergeant (one step above the lowest rank), yet I was responsible for the day-to-day operations of a 1300-person division.
I was given this role because my boss and I had built mutual trust during our prior service on the SWAT team. This was important as much of our work involved delicate HR issues.
I also had demonstrated analytical skills which were needed for the role. My spreadsheet ninja skills were atypical in our labor pool, hence me getting the gig.
The XO job was great in that it was the first and only time I had a position on normal person hours (8a-4p, with weekends off), and very minimal on-call. The rest of my career I’d spent on either late shift or middle shift, with rotating weekends off.
The new role was also infuriating, as every task required balancing city politics, inter- and intra-agency politics, and the demands of special interest groups. The position occasionally delved into political operative/fixer territory.
Though all things were legal, this was still a weird murky world to work in, which I reluctantly realized I was good at despite the accompanying stress of tightrope walking across hard-to-define ethical gray areas. I definitely earned my normal person hours.
The XO role was considered a grooming role for further advancement in my agency. I never had much of a desire for management, and years before the XO gig I’d only begrudgingly taken the promotion to Sergeant because the SWAT team I was on at the time needed someone to fill the supervisor role.
During the XO years, I worked daily with the upper echelon of our department and the city.
And you know what? They were all amazing, hard-working, dedicated people. And they were also constantly frustrated and frequently miserable.
Look, I didn’t agree with every decision they made, but I at least understood the pressures they were under. And given the political nature of the job, I constantly saw how well-intended policies and decisions got lost in Byzantine bureaucracy.
Having studied the criminal justice system during grad school, I also knew that the dizzying complexity was a feature and not a bug-you really don’t want to give any single person that much power. But it is absolute hell to try and get anything done inside such a system.
This is a long way of saying that anyone’s desire to groom me for upper management backfired spectacularly when they gave me the XO gig. I had no interest beforehand, and after working there I went running in the opposite direction.
Oh yeah, just remembered something I should probably mention so you fully understand the incentives at play:
The compensation within our department had nothing to do with the quality of our work per our quasi-union entity’s labor agreements and city laws. The only way to make more money was to work more overtime or advance in rank.
Those who do ascend to the executive level (above Captain rank) are not allowed to work any overtime, again per city law.
As a Sergeant, I made about $85k before overtime. The Chief of Police rank is capped at $115k.
I know dozens of cops from my old department who hold lower rank than I did, but kill it at overtime and end up making more than the Chief. Again-my motivation to advance in rank was nonexistent.
After working as the XO, I seriously considered asking for a demotion so I could go back to being a detective. Unfortunately, that was essentially impossible due to political factors way outside my control.
Nearly two years as XO had lifted the curtain in a couple of ways:
I had seen the amazing benefits of working normal hours with weekends off. Before I had kids, it wasn’t a big deal to work until 6 am, or constantly coming in on a Saturday.
But with kids, I saw them so much more while on a normal schedule, and when I did see them I wasn’t constantly tired and grumpy from working all night. I’d also seen how futile(for me)advancing my career in the police department would be.
Back in late 2020, my boss was hinting at retiring within a couple of years. Though people rotated out of the XO position every few years, he said I could stay in the spot as long as he was there.
I knew once he left, I’d be shoved into a different position. He could also help me get into a different position while he was still there.
If I waited until after he left, it would be up to the volatile political climate of our department as to where I landed.
At the time, I was dead set on earning my pension, which would have put us over normal-ish FIRE and started edging us into Fat FIRE territory. However, I wouldn’t cliff vest until late 2027.
So I had nearly 7 years to grind out. If I waited for my boss to retire, and continue to enjoy my dayshift gig for 2 more years, I’d have 5 years stuck in a position that would likely be miserable.
The other option was to leave the XO slot sooner and hopefully get somewhere that would allow me to ride it out until I vested. I spent the back half of 2020 looking for a decent place to land.
And they fell within three categories:
- Interesting, professionally stimulating, but horrible hours. Either on a late shift or working lots of overtime on the weekends and evenings.
- Normal person schedules with weekends off, but boring as all hell. Like sitting in a windowless basement doing data entry.
- Interesting, and decent hours.
Obviously, I went for number three. But those positions were exceedingly rare, and already occupied by cops who had no intention of leaving.
I didn’t see myself lasting long doing something super boring, especially since I was already FI and didn’t technically need to keep working.
Then a friend of mine, who’d been my boss on the SWAT team, asked me to help him restructure the K9 unit into a tactical team. Seemed interesting, and I was getting pretty tired of riding a desk.
The only catch…back to late shift. Ugh.
I talked it over with my wife, and we agreed that it was the least-worst option. Since I was going back to the late shift, and we now had two small kids, this would mean I wouldn’t be able to equally share in all the child care.
I’d be sleeping until noon, so my wife would be on her own in the mornings until she got them to daycare.
I’d also be working half of the weekends; again she’d have to take care of them by herself until I woke up-and try to keep them from waking me up! I’d be going into work around 6pm, and getting off (hopefully) around 4am.
This meant my wife would be putting the kids to bed most nights as well.
We agreed this wasn’t ideal. At the time, my wife was working just under 30 hours a week.
This might not sound like much, but her job is intellectually demanding. Though she enjoys that attribute, it tends to drain her.
In order to keep from overtaxing herself, she cut her hours even more, with the goal of about 20 a week. We hoped this would allow her to balance work and the additional child care.
Another thing I should mention: I hit extreme burnout on the SWAT team years prior, and was lucky to fall into the XO position soon after leaving the team. But I knew that going back to an operational position on late shift would be risking my mental health.
Many fellow cops either don’t address the job-associated trauma we’re exposed to, or try to self-medicate with alcohol. On the SWAT team, I’d had a front-row seat to how that usually went bad, so I tried to be proactive with using therapy to keep myself sane.
Because of this work, I knew leaving an administrative role for a more traditional cop job was going to again expose me to the extreme surges of adrenaline which had led to my burnout the first time. I hoped that all my proactive mental health work would mitigate this.
We tried the new K9 gig for a year. It did not go well!
Though I was supposed to get off at 4 am, I frequently had to stay at work long after the sun came up. Staffing shortages meant I worked more weekends than not. My mental health plummeted in direct relation to my sleep deprivation.
My wife was not enjoying dealing with grumpy me, nor was she loving her reduced role at work. We quickly realized that her working 20 hours a week on top of all the domestic and childcare stuff was aspirational.
With me essentially out of the picture she just didn’t have the bandwidth to work on the more intellectually demanding projects she likes. She switched to doing the super boring grunt work of projects, which though less demanding, was tedious, to say the least.
At this point, I had my head down and was focusing on just getting through the next shift. The work itself was ok; within a few months, I’d used what I learned in prior roles and quickly developed training and data collections processes which helped bring the unit to its desired level of proficiency.
My boss had already done much of the structural work before my arrival, so this wasn’t a reach. While this was nice, it also didn’t leave me with much to do besides sustain the new capabilities and deal with the normal headaches of management.
I got bored after 3 months, and work turned into Groundhog Day.
Looking back, it’s pretty clear I was miserable, but I was the frog slowly getting boiled. I was so focused on getting that pension, I wouldn’t let myself think of anything but getting to the finish line.
Luckily, having figured that my mental health would be affected by all the changes, I’d stuck with therapy. It was extremely helpful having an objective outside observer help me realize that not only had I sunk to a new level of unhappiness, I was doing so needlessly.
We’d already hit FI, and we didn’t even need to touch our investments as we could easily cover our expenses with my wife’s part-time work. If I were a perfectly rational person, I would have realized this and immediately left.
But alas, I’m only human. Again this is where the therapy helped.
With some work, I came to identify that much of my reasons for wanting to gut it out for the pension were rooted in my own fears about security. Once I got through that stuff, I was finally able to accept that it was time to leave.
So I did.
Having been the guy who coordinated staffing transfers back when I was XO, I knew it would be months before a replacement could be found. If I just gave my two weeks, this would have meant all of my coworkers would be forced to pull my weight until the new guy could come take my spot.
Because I didn’t want to overburden my soon-to-be former coworkers, I gave my agency a few months’ notice and spent them writing all of the stuff I’d done into policies and how-to guides.
Leaving was amazing. I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s not the best time ever to be a cop.
When my coworkers found out I was leaving, they were all incredibly supportive and every single one of them said they wished they could do the same.
When I gave my formal resignation to my boss, I was expecting the worst. Contrary to this, he was the most supportive of my decision.
Leaving allowed me to pick up the majority of the domestic responsibilities, which enabled my wife to seek out some interesting projects she really wanted to work on.
Since I’ve left work, I’ve made it a priority to support her in this, and it’s been really cool to see her reach new levels of professional satisfaction. It’s still a job, so she has the normal frustrations, but she does seem much more fulfilled.
Seeing her happy at work reminds me of the good days I had before I got promoted, and I’m so glad she gets to experience that too.
Well, I think I went way beyond the scope of this question with all of that, so let’s bring this part to a close. Hope you don’t mind the long, meandering journey.
Have you added, grown, or lost any additional sources of income besides your career?
Yeah! As I said in my first interview, I received a VA disability pension. Back then it was $15K a year.
I’d hoped treatment would reduce my issues and corresponding compensation, and dedicated more time to physical therapy and seeing specialists after I left full-time work.
The opposite happened; my issues are generally considered static, and will likely continue to get worse as I age. Also the docs found various other stuff related to my initial issues, so with my extra time, I once again navigated the giant VA bureaucracy to get those covered as well.
This was a weird mental journey, as I never liked the idea of taking ‘government handouts’. Reading stuff by people smarter than me like Nords helped me realize that I was being hard-headed.
While I still don’t think I’m entitled to anything, I’m learning to appreciate what you taxpayers think we earned in exchange for our service.
With all of that, I now receive $24k a year from the VA, up from $15k from my last interview. This is tax-free, with annual CPI increases, and includes free healthcare. Thank you Nords, and thank you, taxpayers!
I still have a hard time factoring this into our retirement calculations, but the more I learn about it the more I’ve come to understand that is likely not going away. As I also learn more about the dangers of being over-conservative in planning, I’m getting better with factoring this source of income into our plans lest we over-save to an absurd degree.
SAVE
What is your annual spending and how has it changed since your interview?
Our spending is up!
Last year we spent about $78k. I used our 2019 numbers for our first interview which had our annual spend at $43k.
Using data.bls.gov, only about $8k of this is due to inflation, so the other $28k is on us. I know inflation is different for specific goods and services, but we’ll just go with that to make things simple.
Here’s how our spending has changed:
What happened along the way to make these changes?
Yikes!
Well first off, in 2020 we had our second kid (and likely last, hope I’m not tempting fate). So….that increased our spending quite a bit.
Our childcare expenses have gone up significantly, even though our oldest is now in public school and we only have one kid in daycare.
Our previous daycare was mid-range when it came to prices, but they pulled some shady stuff back in 2022 which involved us initiating a DCS investigation. All daycares in our area have at least a six-month waiting list, so our friends who sent their kids there felt trapped in a bad situation because both parents worked.
We felt fortunate that I had just retired and were able to pull both kids out immediately. A few months after retirement I became a full-time stay-at-home dad.
I will say that getting shot at was much less stressful than being a full-time caregiver. Look, I love my kids and they’re pretty awesome.
But….yeah, major appreciation for those who are stay-at-home parents. I’m in awe of you who do this by choice, and my heart goes out to those who are forced into it by circumstance.
Our oldest started public school about six months after that DCS incident, and we were able to get our youngest into an amazing daycare around the same time. But the inverse of getting what you pay for means it’s freaking expensive. Worth every penny though.
She’ll be starting preschool this fall, which is at the same public elementary school where her older brother goes. It’ll be about half the cost, which will be nice.
We moved here partially because this is one of the best school systems in our state; hopefully, it works out. If not, I will absolutely pay for a more expensive option.
Our ‘Bills’ category went up mostly because of two things: Our house nearly doubled in value, thus doubling our property taxes after the county reassessed it.
In ‘23 we sold $100k of stocks to buy a new house this year; the federal capital gains tax was negligible due to our low taxable income, but we owed our state a few grand.
Outside of inflation, the rest of the increases in all of the above categories have been due to deliberate lifestyle improvement. We’ve taken a lot of fun vacations, and plan on continuing this.
In fact any money we save when the child care expense eventually drops off will be routed towards vacations.
With both my wife and I working part-time, we’ve also increased the amount we spend on dates. When both our workloads are light, and the kids are in school, we’ll frequently go out for coffee or lunch. Love this!
We also take the kids out to do something fun when they have a day off. Sometimes this involves restaurants, museums, or parks, and we don’t hesitate to spend on this.
You probably don’t remember from my last interview, but I’m super into mountain biking. Don’t worry, the decrease in hobby spending isn’t due to me doing this less.
I actually spent $4k on a new carbon fiber full suspension bike in ‘22 just after I threw my badge into a large body of water and walked off into the sunset. Totally worth it; love my bike.
‘23 hobby spending was down because I didn’t spend as much on bike parts to keep my old hardtail limping along.
Obviously, this shift in spending is nothing new in the FIRE community, what with the popularity of ‘Die With Zero’ and all that. I’ll admit, I was somewhat stressed about spending any money when I first retired from full-time work.
But after many months of seeing that just our part-time income would easily cover our expenses and then some, I’ve finally adapted to being ok with spending money on stuff we value. Mostly.
Seriously though, with much more time on my hands, I’ve had a lot of time to think. And while I don’t think we spend money on things that are completely frivolous, I’ve become better at remembering that the only time we have guaranteed is right now.
May as well do what we can to enjoy it.
INVEST
What are your current investments and how have they changed over the years?
Pretty boring here. Still rocking 80/20 Total Stock/Total Bond.
We’ll probably go to 60/40 a few years before we both leave paid work for good and follow what Karsten details over at Earlyretirementnow.com to hedge against the sequence of returns risk. But time will tell.
I’ve explored some real estate stuff, including syndications, and what I’ve found is that I have little desire to get into it. Sounds great, but also seems like work. I’d rather go ride my bike.
If I ever have to start all over, I’d consider real estate more. We have a pretty great lifestyle now, and if we continue to follow our boring investment strategy we should be able to maintain or increase it slightly.
So I’d rather focus on being a better husband and dad than optimizing returns. If you can do all three, more power to you. Not for me though.
MISCELLANEOUS
What other financial challenges or opportunities have you faced since your last interview?
Haven’t had much in the way of actual challenges. The biggest one has been psychological.
It was wonderful leaving full-time work, but after a few months, it felt weird. For almost a decade I’d lived on a fraction of my income, which allowed me to invest enough to support such a life.
This life has been pretty great, but as I considered the numbers from the other side of the fence I found myself succumbing to comparison.
Once I left work, I was prepared to cover my side of the expenses with the investments I’d built up. At the time, my side of the expenses was about $36,000.
My investments were generating about $30,000 a year, and I was receiving around $15,000 from the VA. Plenty left over, right?
Sure, but then I realized I’d be living on $36,000 a year, with a ceiling of $45,000 I could spend. This kinda freaked me out, as I’d just left a job where for the first time ever I’d made $100,000 in a single year.
While I never consciously thought about it, having that large gap in income and expenses during my working years had been reassuring. Even more, it was also nice to know in the back of my head that I was choosing to spend less while working, but if I really wanted to I could spend much more.
Before leaving work, I’d see my friends buying expensive new cars and houses, going on lavish vacations, buying boats, etc. I knew what they made, and also knew that many were barely making ends meet to cover such a lifestyle.
I was reassured that I was choosing to invest my money for freedom instead of spending it on stuff that I didn’t actually want.
But then when I left work and I saw the same friends doing those same things, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d screwed up. Because now I definitely couldn’t afford to do any of the stuff they were doing.
I had no choice but to keep living in a significantly more frugal manner. Now I’d trapped myself into spending significantly less than my peers….forever?
Look, I know this was all in my head, and the mental gymnastics I was torturing myself with were ridiculous. Especially since we knew our expenses would easily be covered by my wife’s part time income; I wouldn’t have to actually withdraw anything.
Plus I genuinely like our lifestyle, and have little desire to live like my friends. Even thinking about living like that stresses me out.
Our deliberately inflated lifestyle seems amazing to me. I think we’d go past the point of diminishing returns if we spent much more.
I’d love to say I used rational, logical thinking to Spock myself out of my funk, and within a few minutes of contemplation it was all flowers and rainbows. My wife would laugh at that.
This funk stuck around for months. It would come and go, and sometimes emerge in new, annoying ways.
Eventually though, it dissipated, and it’s been some time since it bugged me.
I think the biggest thing that helped was getting in the reps of living this new post-full time work life. After the first year, I started to relax into it more and found myself enjoying most days.
Now when I see my friends spending big money, I’m back to feeling that I made the right choice. I wouldn’t trade a bunch of shiny stuff for this life.
You know what hasn’t been a huge challenge? Healthcare.
First off, I’m again lucky to have you taxpayers supporting the VA which provides my coverage. Thanks for that.
For my wife and two kids, we use the healthcare.gov marketplace. It can be a bit of a mess to navigate, and we do have to keep on top of it as our income is lumpy.
The rates change a bit depending on our income, but we generally pay about $450 a month for a silver plan which covers the three of them. It’s an HSA plan with a $7000 per person deductible.
Not amazing, but about the same as what my wife’s employer offered before she went part time.
Healthcare was a big concern of ours, and I won’t say getting used to the marketplace was fun. But it was much less of a challenge then we thought.
If you’re worried about it and haven’t messed around with healthcare.gov, give it a spin. The U/I has improved a bunch, and it’s pretty straightforward to estimate how much you’ll pay if you were to leave your employer.
Overall, what’s better and what’s worse since your last interview?
What’s better? I laughed quite a bit thinking about this one.
- I’m not working crazy hours at a job where people try to kill me occasionally. That’s pretty nice!
- On balance I think I’m a better dad and husband because I’m well rested and less stressed. That’s actually better than number one.
- No one tells me what to do anymore (except my 3 year old, but I only do what she says maybe half the time, lol) and I get to do what I want most days.
I could go on, but they’d all be variations of the above.
What’s worse? Essentially the inverse of those three.
I used to get a big sense of purpose from my job. These days, when I’m not the best dad or husband in the world, it’s my fault-I can’t blame it on being tired and stressed from work.
And no one tells me what to do; I’ve got to figure it out for myself.
These things aren’t actually worse. In fact, they’ve made my life better.
Before leaving work, intellectually I acknowledged that my job provided direction and identity in my life. But I didn’t fully realize how much. Leaving work opened my eyes.
It is more difficult to build my own sense of purpose, and it’s taken some work to take responsibility for my own well being, and push myself to improve. It was easier when the job provided all of this, but easy isn’t always better.
While a lot of this can be a struggle, it’s so much more rewarding these days as I work to be the best version of myself for me, not some organization.
What are your plans for the future?
It seems like every time I make a plan for anything past next Tuesday, I’m just ensuring that the desired course of action will definitely NOT happen, hahaha!
I’ve made a lot of plans in life, and few of them panned out. Something different usually happened, and most times I adapted and things worked out better.
Even when things went worse, I learned something which was useful later down the road.
There’s a lot of things I’d like to do, and maybe I’ll get around to some of them. Mostly I want to continue to be around my family and enjoy life.
On top of that, I’d like to help make the world better, even if it’s in some small way.
I’ve considered a PhD program, especially since I enjoyed grad school so much. Maybe I’ll do that when both kids are more self-sufficient. Or not.
Given that you have a bit more wisdom and experience, what advice do you have these days for ESI Money readers?
I have more experience, but wisdom may be a bit of a stretch.
Let me try with this: Work on yourself now, no matter where you are on your financial journey.
About one quarter of the US currently reports they’re suffering from mental issues. That’s likely an undercount since most people don’t admit their problems. The US has some of the worst mental health in the world.
If you look around the FIRE space, it seems like you can’t swing a stick without hitting somebody who’s using the goal of FI as a distraction from their issues. I know I did.
And I’m extremely grateful a friend convinced me years ago to put in the work to improve my mental health. Ultimately it helped me retire earlier, and smoothed out the post work transition.
I’m not saying everyone needs therapy, but I do think most people could benefit from educating themselves about Mental Health in general, as well as the simple data-driven self-care practices that exist.
Even if you don’t ever use any of it, perhaps it’ll allow you to help someone down the line. To that end, some amazing people helped me develop a Mental Health Resources Guide; it’s free, and any profit made off the affiliate book links go to charity.
Maybe check it out. If you’ve made it this far, you must like long, rambling posts, so the guide will be right up your alley.
In Peter Attia’s phenomenal book Outlive, he relays Esther Perel’s question to him: “what’s the point in living a long life if you’re unhappy?” To put a financial spin on it, what’s the point of having lots of money if you’re miserable?
BSue says
My husband and I each took 3-year sabbaticals when our two sons were in middle school. We both were spoiled having more at-home help. We considered it a good investment in hands-on parenting while the boys were still somewhat impressionable (i.e., before teenage angst set in). It was a great decision.
Financial Fives says
This is incredible that you were able to accumulate such a net worth at a young age, all while being in law enforcement! And with two young kids. I’ve heard of a lot of people getting VA disability, and apparently the VA is paying more in benefits despite less veterans/less claiming disability. Of course, not all disabilities are visible, so I wonder how they consider that when many who receive it work full-time, six-figure income jobs.
Congrats on your success nonetheless!
JSD says
Hey Gary, thanks for the comment! Your side hustle is still one of the coolest I’ve heard about. Totally get your curiosity about the VA stuff, much of the mainstream content (as with many things) is built for clicks. I emailed you a link to a WP opinion piece that explains some more of the nuance involved.
Nords says
My congratulations on your win with your VA disability compensation, and I’m sorry that the symptoms continue.
I’m glad to help. We’ve already paid the price, and now we’re just trying to get some money back.
JSD says
Thanks Nords! The symptoms aren’t wonderful, but the memories of earning them are a kind of compensation. Know several guys who have similar chronic injuries from playing golf or sitting at a desk for decades. Feel lucky that at least I got to do some unique, fun stuff to think back on.
Sylvie says
Really enjoyed this one! Thanks.
MI 343 says
Thank you for sharing. I especially liked the storyline involving your police department work.