For all those considering buying vs renting into retirement:
Owning a house is freaking expensive. Last year we spent ~15k on a new HVAC system. I figured this year would be cheaper, since we didn't have any major repairs that high on our priorities. Until this weekend when my spouse realized the pipes to their shower were leaking. Considering the general state of the shower, we're leaning towards ripping it all out and just getting a new one.
Then my spouse fell for a door to door sales person and we ended up getting a quote for new attic insulation. They want >20k for everything or ~13k for their most basic install. While we do need to upgrade our insulation, best case scenario is a payoff in over 16 years, likely way longer as well.
The insurance also rejected our claim for roof damage saying there were just some shingles needing to be replaced which costs less than our deductible. So if we want a new roof, that cost is on us as well.
We've lived in our house for 4 years now, and I think our cheapest year we only spent ~5k on repairs (new tankless water heater install after our old water heater died).
Huh, I've owned our house for 9 years now, and my most expensive year was $2k (furnace and fireplace needed repairs)? Most years have needed very little maintenance, like maybe $100-200 for new sprinkler heads and some other stuff. We haven't needed new HVAC or a roof yet, but that's probably coming in a few years.
On the flipside, we save a ton vs renting. Our mortgage payment plus taxes and insurance is more than $1k less per month than renting. So I could do that HVAC replacement every other year and come out ahead. Yeah, we had to put a bunch down, but we've saved more on rent than the down payment in that time (not sure about counting gains if invested though, but I think we're close).
You'll need more in savings with a house, but less ongoing costs. So if you amortize it, it's probably better to buy in most cases. But location matters.
I too have found home ownership to be a money pit, but mostly in a self inflicted way. We bought a 100+ year old house in an expensive neighborhood and elected to do some large renovations. Though we did get hit with some fun (expensive) surprises along the way that weren’t our fault.
How has your experience with the tankless water heater been?
I absolutely love it. Granted I have a ton of hair, so I end up taking fairly long showers. I would quite often run out of hot water when we had a tank. It probably does encourage wasting water, since it takes longer to heat up and then you don't have a sudden influx of cold water to speed you up at the end of the shower.
Yeah, the time to heat has been my only real complaint. I know you can get point of use solutions to eliminate that too but that’s even more $$. Going tankless and remodeling one of the bathrooms to be a wet room was a big value add now that we’ve got two little kids who splash everywhere and have to be dragged out.
I've been working on a passion project over the last couple weeks, and I really wish I could do this full-time, and it's one of my biggest driving factors for FI. I don't want to monetize it though, so it's not something I'd be able to just commit to if it gets traction (it's open source though, so maybe a sponsorship?).
Anyway, what projects do you all want to spend time on once FI? Are you working on them now?
I know what you mean. I quit my job in 2022 and took four months off, and I realized three things:
I have so much more energy than I realized, because my career just drains the life out of me.
I never need to worry about wasting away in retirement, because I have so many interests and projects and many of them are not passive. I never had enough time during those four months, to the point that I wondered how I found any time at all when I worked a job as well!
I need to become debt-free again as quickly as possible. I had achieved that shortly before I took that time off (coming from an apartment, having previously owned and sold a home some years prior), but bought another house afterward. I decided one of my top priorities would be paying off my mortgage as quickly as possible so that I would never again feel anxiety about quitting a job without having another one lined up first, and therefore could never be owned again by a corporation.
This would change my entire relationship with work. Just seeing my continuous progress toward this goal energizes me.
The amount of safety I'll feel from knowing that I could survive on just $30,000 a year if absolutely necessary—enough to pay for my food, utilities, and property taxes—is enormous.
That's cool, I hope you can make it happen. My pipe dream is to build a small timber frame cabin for myself and a canoe to go with it. I'd also like to contribute more (time-wise and monetarily) to some non-profits/environmental causes I feel strongly about. And about a dozen or so half-finished fullstack projects I'd like to pick back up on. Oh and read a lot, maybe try writing.
Lately I've been investing more in my hobbies rather than socking it all away for retirement. I want to develop the skills for them now (before fitness and dexterity become an issue) and make use of them as I get older, even if it means delaying FIRE a bit. Plus it gives me something to look forward to during the week.
I've started a website to try to document my family history from my great grandparents on down. So far it's mostly been digitizing obituaries and VHS tapes, and putting them in a wiki style format. I haven't figured out the best way to scan thousands of pictures. Overall, it's been fun so far and I'm learning a lot about web hosting and video hosting.
Most of my hobbies so far have just been time-wasters. It's nice to be involved with something that'll (hopefully) be around after I'm gone.
For scanning, have you tried an MFC printer/scanner with a scan bed? I've only used it on documents, but it might work on photos as well. Theoretically, you could just place a stack on the feeder and scan them all at once.
Yes, my scanner works fine for the few pictures I've done so far. The only problem is that there are tons more to do. Plus some of them have been in photo albums for decades and I'm afraid to peel the plastic page cover off because it could peel a layer off the photo - I've already had it happen. And my scanner is a cheap all-in-one model designed for documents, so when it feeds anything in, they curve around a pretty narrow roller, which could damage some older photos.
I'll probably send the albums off to a pro, since they have large format scanners. They can just scan a whole page at once and crop out the photos individually, that way they don't have to worry about damaging anything.
I'm not too worried about the money, the toughest part is figuring out how to organize and catalog all these pictures of mostly people I don't know. AI would be a huge help with organizing the images, but I can see a lot of people having a problem with it.
You could use AI to do the initial tagging and cache the results in a SQLite database or something. That way everything remains pretty static while also saving you time.
I've already got a setup for tagging my own images, working on getting it GPU accelerated. But my family (us being people of color) are really adverse to anything involving AI, even if it's local and right here on my own computer. No worries, though, I can make do without.