Gr8!!! I shall do it!!! Suck a big one, Apple
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Since this is ostensibly a finance forum 
how are we thinking about brokerage vs 401k investing if we’re likely to retire early, and have a butt ton in retirement accounts already? Is there a good calculator or something for figuring out when you should shift away from tax advantaged accounts?
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I didn’t do any calculations - but was maxing out my tax advantaged options while working and still had investable $, so that was my incentive. Just market index find at Vanguard.
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A long time ago there was a series on this on the madfientist blog. I think it’s still on the website. TL/DR was that it’s better to put it in the 401K even if you take it out early and pay penalties. He also modeled doing a drawdown ladder or not putting it into the 401k to begin with.
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Part of why we’re trying to figure this out is that we want to dial my husband‘s work back. He has the sort of job where he makes the amount of money based on how much he works. And so if we do not have the gobs of excess cash, and need to start deciding how we invest a smaller remainder, that is part of our consideration.
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Thank you, I will look for that. I vaguely recalled that to be the case, but I’m also scraping the barrel of my brain here. The last few years have completely pushed out virtually everything I learned about the mechanics of FIRE.
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I keep looking this up and reddit says that you should keep putting it in tax advantaged accounts because the tax savings are so valuable.
My financial advisor did have me splitting my 401k contributions between traditional and Roth though.
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Part of our challenge too, though, is that he’s with a small company, so the fees in the 401(k) are higher than we would face otherwise. But of course, less than taxes are.
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Alas, Roth isn’t an option anywhere because of his company/our earnings, is my understanding.
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I think part of trying to wrap my head around this, too- don’t you need to completely leave work to do a 5 year roth conversion ladder? What happens if you’re still working a little, to get health benefits, but not enough to cover all expenses?
ETA part of my struggle here is to even define terms of this scenario to research it, come to think of it.
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Here’s the link!
We are in a similar situation this year (spouse’s income has been… mostly not happening) and my first instinct was the lower my own 401K. But every time I ran the numbers it was worth it to pull from other savings instead and keep the 401K contributions.
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There was a Money Guy episode recently with Mindy and Carl from bigger pockets podcast (Money Guy Show - How Elon Musk Made Them Rich But Risked Their Retirement). The title is click bait because they have a good portion of their wealth between spacex/tesla but the conversation was interesting because they have a lot of wealth in pretax accounts but retired early. The conversation was a lot about looking at the tax picture over your lifetime. There were some things about the episode that I didn’t totally agree with but it was an interesting conversation on how to balance asset allocation (in portfolio diversity, risk diversity, and tax diversity). They suggested having 5% of your portfolio in cash which is way more than I expected but it makes sense for FIRE folks to have more cash. It isn’t “optimal” from a returns perspective but it allows you to have flexibility and mitigate market risk.
For me personally I am trying to build a coast FIRE calculator that will help me understand how much my retirement accounts are going to be when I can access them and how much wealth we will have outside of that for a different retirement date.
I have looked into a few Coast FIRE calculators and have found them very helpful. I used them to help decide to become a SAHM and stop contributing as much to savings. I know this isn’t totally early retirement mental math but knowing we only need to make enough to cover our spending and we can still retire on our timeline was helpful. Maybe something like that could help? If you’re coast FIRE maybe your husband can cut back working to only cover living expenses for a few years and you cut back the saving all together.
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People with chest freezers how do you keep them organized?
We recently got one and it is already almost filled to the brim with garden bounty and is total chaos. It’s not too big, but I do have to stand on my tiptoes to get things on the very bottom. I had two random plastic bins so the are in there holding some stuff but they’re not the same size and don’t stack so they’re just sortof floating in a sea of bags of shredded zucchini and roasted tomatoes.
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Well, for one we got a smaller chest freezer and replaced the other with an upright drawer freezer because I never got a great system that didn’t lose food to some degree 
ahem. But otherwise. A critical aspect is my kitchen white board. I keep freezer inventory on there. And then my freezer has plastic dividers to make sections. When we had the big freezer, we did plastic bins like the y weave from Target to make sections for ground beef, pre cooked meals, etc and stacked them.
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We have a regular freezer (above a fridge) but getting the right bins for it has been very helpful. I was not successful at keeping up with the white board inventory of it but I also have less to pull out when I’m looking at one bin of proteins since it’s already smaller than a chest freezer. So basically +1 to the bins.
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I did a free trial to BoldIn and didn’t end up paying for it because they were still in beta for some key things (like penalties if you draw down your 401K early) but it was getting close to something useful and the software developer team responded to my message that it was on the list when I asked about it during the trial. So that might be worth checking out to see if it’s close to what you want now.
ETA this is the software: https://www.boldin.com/
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My mom has the executive functioning of a small nation and she keeps a paper inventory taped to the top of her chest freezer, and crosses things off as she uses them up.
Ex: (3) spinach quiches (4) bags peas (2) tubs vanilla ice cream (1) tub chocolate ice cream
Perhaps this will be inspiring.
Perhaps it will be horrifying.
I did not inherit this functioning.
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lol this is my mom’s exact method except that the lists are constantly a huge scribbled mess that I cannot imagine is actually helpful
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Circling back to this question from early August (I was describing how it feels like my throat gets tight and swallowing feels weird after eating beans). I thought I had developed a new allergy and was not familiar with EoE. After having a virtual visit about the issue, I was sent for an upper endoscopy.
I had that done and just got diagnosed with EoE today. I truly appreciate having learned about the existence of EoE before my visit so I wasn’t completely ignorant of it going into my appointment. I’m not sure I would have left the appointment even knowing what she thought I had if I hadn’t seen the words written down beforehand due to your post!
Also, I have since learned that most people don’t have immediate reactions to specific foods with EoE but that it can happen. When it does, they call it FIRE syndrome. (Food-Induced Immediate Response of the Esophagus). as a FIRE’d person, I am amused by that.
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I’m so glad it was a help! And I’m not familiar with FIRE syndrome, I will learn more about it, Ty! Hopefully you were left with a. Good management plan 
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