Minimize Your Life
I have been reading Frugal Bachelor’s blog recently and it got me thinking… Am I striving to live the Supersized American Lifestyle?
My goal of creating a retirement income stream of 64,236 after taxes is lofty, but is it necessary? Do I really need 5,353 income a month? What is my purpose for attaining that and will I be any happier getting that amount as opposed to getting 4,000 or 3,000 or 2,000? So I decided to calculate what is my minimized expenses per month:
- House: [assume living in house #3 and it is already paid off]
- HOA: 276 [covers insurance, water, gas, landscaping, trash, security]
- Property Taxes: 150
- Total: 426
- Car:
- Insurance: 100
- Gas: 150 [possibly much lower if retired]
- Maintenance: 50
- Total: 300
- Utilities:
- Electric: 50
- Internet: 50
- Cell Phone: 30
- Total: 130
- Other:
- Food: 300 [covers groceries, eating out]
- Misc: 200 [eg. haircut, clothes]
- Total: 500
- Grand Total: 1,356
From these calculations, you can see that once I am retired my expenses won’t be that high. The only wildcard here is health insurance, which if Obama gets his way won’t be a problem. Even if there isn’t universal healthcare, I could get health insurance for about 600/month, not even breaking the 2,000 range. Either way, I don’t “need” the 5,353 monthly stream I previously calculated. I can retire earlier if I decide to no longer live a Supersized American Lifestyle and get by on a lower income.
Furthermore, do I really even need to live in a 800 square feet 2 bedroom condo or should I downsize that even further? The American lifestyle is all about trading up, but to what end? All trading up does is either create lots of empty space or even more clutter (if you can’t control yourself) and waste manpower/utilities trying to clean it up, light it up, fill it up. To me 800 square feet feels amazingly spacious right now and it is a humongous amount of space for a lot of people around the world (eg. in Hong Kong 400 square feet for two people is standard). Maybe I should trade down to a smaller space that has mobile capabilities.
Strangely, thinking about all of this gives me more excitement and hope for my future retirement.
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charming post. upright one detail where I contest with it. I am emailing you in detail.
You may have addressed this in later posts that I haven’t gotten to yet… but I hope you will stick with the $5k+ goal, that way if you decide to spend less or “downgrade”, you will have excess, or if you fall short, you will still be within “livable” standard of living. Just a thought.
Yes definitely. I am still shooting for the stars so that I’ll at least hit the moon :P Though seriously with the inflationary winds looming in the horizon, it’s better to stash a larger nest egg to be safe.