Goals

Short-Term Goals

What’s pressing on our minds? A lot of things. These are some of the tasks that we want to take care of this year.

  • Get Health Coverage (high priority) – Get enrolled in both GetCoveredNJ and NJ FamilyCare.
  • Reallocate Investments (high priority) – Our investments right now are all over the place and most likely too conservative for our FIRE plans. We need to investigate and change our investments so that we have enough to support ourselves in the future.
  • Set up Solo 401K for Mr. FD (high priority) – We’re planning on making use of a solo 401K to keep saving for retirement, especially as Mr. FD has turned freelance. This will help lower our income to qualify for more affordable health insurance.
  • Come up with Failure Indicators (medium priority) – One of the purposes of this site is to document our successes and failures, only I’m not yet sure what failure will look like to us. I suppose if our FIRE assets drop below 25x our annual expenses, that would be one indicator. I want to come up with a few more so we can better monitor if we’re going in the wrong direction. 
  • Come up with Happiness Indicators (medium priority) – Just like the failure indicators, I want to make sure I can monitor how happy we are with this change. Again, I don’t know what this will look like, or if we can really come up with anything. Still, coming up with these indicators and monitoring them every month seems like a good plan. (This is inspired by Joe Udo at RetireBy40.)
  • Switch Internet Plan/Router (low priority) – This could possibly save us a few bucks every month.
  • Merge Cell Phone Plans (low priority) – Not sure why we haven’t done this already. We kept putting this off. It makes sense for us to save on a joint plan going forward.
  • Replace Stock/Default Photos (low priority) – Eventually, I think I’ll get charged for using all of these default WordPress photos. I probably need to change them out to avoid any fees.

Long-Term Goals

We have a few goals that are less pressing in the near future, but still important.

  • Roth Ladder (high priority) – We plan to use this to fund our retirement, so we need to set this up so that we’ll have enough to live on in 5 years.
  • Education Plan for our kids (high priority) – Right now, we only have the current 4-year in-state tuition to Rutgers University saved for each of our kids, without room and board. We need to think about whether or not this is really enough. If not, we need to come up with a plan to change it.
  • Merge households with the in-laws (high priority) – We’re not sure if this will even happen, but it’s a possibility. If it does happen, we’d probably need to buy a bigger home and one of us would need to go back to work. There are so many variables with this scenario that we can’t possibly plan for it all. However, we can at least start thinking about some of the bigger implications around this merge.