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I would love to hear these responses - my husband is a house husband, so he effectively is retired, but we never thought about it that way. It was more playing to our strengths and what makes us happy.
How do you feel about that arrangement? I would probably feel some resentment if it were me because we are working on our goals together but they could work a little bit longer and help you both retire early if they wanted to. We are doing our FIRE as a team.
I don’t have any resentment- they’ve made professional and personal sacrifices so I could excel in my professional career. Ideally, they’d like me to retire with them but frankly our child’s private school and current lifestyle wouldn’t be achievable off of $3.3M at 3/4% withdrawal. I have no desire to adjust our lifestyle and so long as I continue to do what I enjoy I’m okay to continue to work. I do wonder once our child is in primary school what they’ll do with their time and then if boredom or me missing on family activities (due to work) will change their perception on me continuing to work. Hence, question #2.
I’ll be retiring before my husband. Primarily because he owns his family business so difficult for him to retire early. I imagine it may be 10 years before him.
I’ll still be managing our STR properties when I retire, which brings in more than his W2. I imagine we will life off a combo of the two.
I still have to figure out what I will do with my time but I can’t imagine I’ll still sit still long!
I don’t consider it RE. I work externally for pay. She stopped working FT when our older two kids were in preschool. We live off of my earnings (and are still accumulating). The system works well. I am able to do a lot more because she handles much of the family’s work. She did some PT work for a while but not anymore. I wouldn’t worry so much about your spouse having too much time on your hands if you have kids living at home. Problem tends to solve itself. Between taking more of a role handling real estate, dealing with house projects, being primary on school issues, including volunteering, my wife has no spare time.
This is not retiring early. Taking care of kids and the home is a full time job.
I don’t disagree in the sense of if they leave the work force at 40 they’ll naturally end up as the primary parent and homemaker. They were pushing for this path regardless of if we have children so in my mind that’s why I listed as RE. If they choose to leave the workforce before 40 it would be because we absolutely need them to for family management not because they just want to be done working.
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1. They RE’d 5 years before me at 33; I followed 5 years (and 2 kids later) at 37
2. Whilst we’d initially agreed that they’d retire first and have a couple of years to do whatever they liked before kids (they agreed to be the stay at home parent); it was tough watching them have fun pursuing their dreams in different countries while I was stuck at work. I traveled every week for work so we met up on the weekends. I’d fly from client site to whichever country they were in and meet them there. At first it was exciting and fun but after a while it became tiring and I also started feeling resentful that they could spend their time in all these exotic places while I’m not. We worked through it though and our relationship improved. When kids came it was the other way around and they more than did their fair share as the primary parent - especially during COVID when everything was shut
3. We lived off my working income while I was still working so that we could stockpile our investments and build up our passive income streams. Now we’re both retired and living fully off our passive income. No plans to touch retirement assets (currently living off investment income)
We’re now in our late 30s / early 40s with 2 kids below 5 and enjoying retirement life - no regrets!
Sounds like you have more than enough to retire whenever you want. Having your spouse retire when your first child is born would be ideal if that's what they want because then you won't have to worry about daycare or nanny and you really get to build a close relationship with your child. They can always choose to work again later if they want to, so it can be whatever works best for you both. Childcare is a very full time job, so I doubt your spouse would have an abundance of free time. But it's nice to be able to plan vacations around just one person's work than two.
At this point we’d have to make too many lifestyle changes for either of us to stay home. We plan to hire a full time nanny which will alleviate some stress but of course not all. My spouse working while our child is young is critical to achieve their goal of work optional/RE by 40.
How’d you get this amount of money by 30?
Btw, I am probably similar to you but further down the path. If you are working in many types of consulting careers and have multiple kids you will either need the other spouse not working or a good bit of outside help. We don’t have a lot of outside help and even with my wife not working I could probably match a good bit of Uber drivers in time spent driving people around.
Sounds like a plan. Everyone has a bespoke solution.
I did leave the workforce but then realized all these kids need private school and college educations. Kids are kind of cheap until they get older. My income pays for that now. I’m working until that is paid off. So life takes turns you don’t even realize are ahead.