I love this thread.
I finally posted on the credit card forum today for the first time. Now I'm going for the double-dip!
I hadn't even heard of FIRE until a couple of months ago when a post on another board referred to something from MMM. I poked around over there, then read through a few dozen posts to get a sense for what it was all about. Holy smokes. This stuff is amazing.
I've always been keenly interested in budgets and spending, vastly preferring to hoard cash than spend it. For the last year before I got married, I lived
extremely frugally...and it was great. As it turned out, it was also necessary: my wife and I moved to Michigan for my graduate school shortly after our wedding at a time when Michigan was in a one-state recession as the rest of America recovered. We ate through almost all of what I had saved prior to the move before she found a job, one that turned out to be very fortunate as she got the gig when she was seven month's pregnant with our surprise DD (she knew that she was pregnant - the timing was just a few years ahead of schedule). We made things work throughout grad school as we both worked and paid the onerous part-time daycare bills, then I got a job in Florida (her home state). We relocated in 2013 and made a solid, middle class income for a few years. During this time, we were WDW APs since they were dirt cheap as every Florida resident can attest as well as occasional DVC point renters. Nevertheless, we returned to Michigan in 2016 to an improved job market complete with a better job for me that included more benefits and a notable raise. We still weren't saving much, though we did make some money on the sale of our Florida house and used our time in Florida to pay off all of our student loans as well as my modest car loan (we had the cash for it, but when the loan is at 0.89%...come on). We put a few thousand dollars into retirement accounts each year, but that's obviously no way to move the needle in a big way. After about a year and a half in Michigan, my employer offered up another sizable (unexpected) raise, pushing our income higher in the middle class bracket and presenting us with a chance to spend big! Or save.
I had been investing some money on the side that did quite well and we had a good year of bonuses combined with a few months of house hunting (which meant living with my folks - me (32), DW (31), DD (7), and DD (4)). Add it all up and we had a nice pile of cash. Looking back on it now, I probably would have plopped it all into a couple of IRAs. Instead, we poked around the DVC resale market, in the process becoming (I think) the first resale purchasers to have a PVB contract snatched up in the ROFR process. That's a badge of honor for us - the deal was simply too good for Disney to pass up on it! A couple of months later, we tried again and found a similarly good deal that got through. I crunched numbers for hours to see if it really made sense, and given our travel habits, I kept coming to the same conclusion: we're ripping Disney off!
That last paragraph is about the least FIRE thing anyone has ever said. I get that. I also get that this thread is a space for people who love frugality, efficiency, and saving with their personal finance while having an illogical desire to spend time at WDW. Here, I can be me.
I listened to The Millionaire Next Door last week (loved it) and I'm in the process of working my way through The Millionaire Mind. The basic principles don't do a ton for me because, for the most part, they're principles about which I already abide. There are improvements to be made, to be sure:
- I have taken too much control over our financial management; as a result, my wife feels somewhat left out. We've discussed this recently, and while I continue to meticulously track expenses, I'm involving her more in the summaries and budget reconciliation. She appreciates frugality, but she also grew up in a family where shopping was a hobby/leisure activity so there are so implicit barriers that we work through together.
- We pay extra on our mortgage and don't have any desire to "upgrade" to a newer and/or bigger house in the future, but we spent a bit more than we initially wanted to spend when we bought. The investment portion has played out nicely so far -- the expected valuation is up about 20% since we bought in late 2016 sayeth Zillow -- but that doesn't do much for us since we don't plan to sell for a few decades. I'd still love to put more money against the mortgage to rapidly accelerate the repayment timeline, however...
- We're in a tax spot where we really should be hammering Roths. My work involves the tax world and there's basically no way that tax rates will be this low in the coming decades - the numbers just don't work. This year, we'll likely put enough into Roths to fill up one of our two maximum contribution slots. That's good. But it also feels like a missed opportunity. Then again...
- We're finally putting a sizable chunk of change into my 401(k). This is a wonderful feeling and obviously an efficient use of resources as that money will grow tax-deferred for decades. But I'm not quite all the way there to maxing out my contribution.
DW transitioned out of the workforce back in 2014 when DD #2 showed up and she hasn't yet reentered. We've been blessed that we haven't needed her to work. But with DD #2 nearing full-day schooling, we've started tiptoeing around the conversation of her going back to work and it has me thinking about stuffing retirement accounts, aggressively paying down the mortgage, etc. I've never dreamed about being a big-time spender, but now I'm dreaming about being a big-time saver. With my HSA maxed out and the 401(k) nearing that spot, I'm pretty confident that the Roth is next. If she goes back to work, we can make that the Roths.
I'm not sure that there's any particular point to this post other than this: I love that there are so many people interested in living a genuinely frugal lifestyle that also recognize the value in making the WDW exception. I also imagine that most of you apply your frugality to your WDW planning; I certainly have in the past and I took things to new levels of efficiency for our upcoming trip, but it's all within context.
Thanks for having this thread and for pursuing these seemingly diametrically opposed goals!
Aw shucks 
