Retired at 33. I'm here to share some financial wisdom with everyone.
Right now we are rushing to pack the last few items in our backpacks so we can hit the road for our seven week adventure in Mexico. I’m sure we’ll all have a great time while on the trip, but travel fatigue is also a possibility.
Before we leave, it’s a good time to reflect on how great our lives at home are by thinking about the things we’ll miss the most. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, as they say. Even though we don’t spend a lot of money, I recognize by world standards that we live a luxuriously bountiful life that offers everything we need and then some.
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May has come and gone. Financially we are much better off with a huge amount of income during the month and only a tiny bit of spending. Our net worth continued its upward march and currently sits at $1,550,000.
In one week we leave for our seven week summer trip to Mexico, where pesos are cheap and the tequila is strong. The favorable exchange rate combined with generally low prices in Mexico should let us continue our low spending ways in June and July (especially since we have already pre-paid all lodging expenses for the trip).
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“But what will you do all day?” they ask when they hear you are going to retire early. “I could never retire, I would get so bored” they proclaim. Thank goodness there are tons of employers in this world who will gladly tell you how to spend your free time if you let them.
Don’t get me wrong – I get bored easily. The prospect of sitting in a waiting room for an hour without any source of entertainment or external stimulus scares me. It’s even scarier if I’m forced to watch day time TV while I wait.
Fortunately we live in the twenty first century, a glorious time filled with entertainment overload, instant digital connections, and unlimited choices of pastimes (indoors and outside).
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For long time readers, you probably recall that Mrs. Root of Good is still working even though I retired over a year and a half ago. Maybe you’re wondering how we’re able to jump on a plane and head to Mexico for seven weeks if she’s still working full time?
The answer is a three month paid sabbatical.
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This week I’m dipping into the mailbag to answer some questions from a reader named Don about the Affordable Care Act subsidies and the income limits to watch out for if you don’t want to lose your subsidy or face an unexpected increase in health care costs.
In the past, I talked about the ACA (or “Obamacare”) making early retirement a lot easier where I went over two case studies. One case study was for an older couple approaching traditional retirement age. The second case study was my own situation of a family of five including three children.
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In April, we spent quite a bit of money. We are ramping up for our seven week summer trip to Mexico which led to many expenses in excess of our routine monthly spending. As a result, our income of $2,125 didn’t quite keep up with our $4,549 of expenditures in April. In spite of that shortfall, our net worth climbed another $30,000 primarily due to investment returns.
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I want to tell you a story about accessing tax-deferred funds in an IRA or 401k before age 59.5 without paying a penalty. But first I’m going full out White Fang on you.
A trapped animal will do just about anything to get free. When you get caught, normal rules of comportment and demeanor are sloughed off to make room for the demands of the primordial will to live. It’s all about survival. Adrenaline rushing, pumping through arteries and veins, clouding the judgment and dulling the pain, the wild animal will chew it’s own leg off to disengage itself from a trap. It’s all about survival.
You’ll have to keep reading to figure out what this has to do with accessing tax deferred accounts without paying a 10% penalty.
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Mexico – the land of kidnappings, drug gangs, shoot outs in the streets, massive criminal organizations in armed conflict with the corrupt police. That type of sensationalism works well if you want to sell newspapers or get clicks on a “news” website. The reality is that most of the country is very peaceful. However, the states bordering the US tend to have the most security issues along with a few other areas of the country.
I took a look at the US Department of State Travel Advisory on Mexico and checked out each state we might visit on our trip. The result? All states we intend to visit have no listed security concerns except the Estado de Mexico.
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March has come and gone and left our net worth largely unchanged from it’s lofty heights of a month ago. We brought in a bunch of income yet spent a relatively modest amount in spite of focusing a lot of time and effort on spending more money.
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What does a seven week trip through Mexico cost? For us, it’s just over $1,000 per week. The budget comes to $7,668 for all lodging, food, transportation, entertainment, and miscellaneous expenses.
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