Tim,
Congratulations on your progress, and best of luck to you. This is the first time, in this thread, that you have mentioned that you have a wife. She is obviously on board with your plan, or you would not be having such success.
Having a good partner is a huge help in keeping your finances under control. Being encouraging to each other is very important.
This thread brings to mind a now-deceased friend of mine that lived a very frugal life. Too frugal for my taste, but I did learn a few things from him. He was educated and had a good long career. After college he went into the Air Force for a few years. When he got out he stayed in the Reserves for 20 years and acquired a retirement pension from the Air Force. The money that he got for his drill weekends went straight to savings. He didn't consider that pay as part of the regular family budget. He said the military pension was his extra insurance to fund his retirement if his regular career didn't work out too well.
He had saved enough, living frugally, while in the military to put down a very large down payment on a very modest house, that he paid off within ten years. His wife did not work outside the home, but was an excellent, and thrifty, mother to their four boys. They lived the rest of their lives in the same house, for decades after it was fully paid off. Any onlooker would have thought the family was rather poor, looking at the house and old cars. He didn't care what anyone else thought.
Ed, (his name) worked for a large corporation for thirty years, earning a very generous pension, on paper, that he never got. Three years before he was due to retire, his company went bankrupt and liquidated everything. The pension plan was wiped out and Ed got pennies on the dollar, made worse by the fact that he was still three years short of full retirement.
Ed did fine, and went ahead and retired, because he had a personal portfolio of at least a couple of million dollars, in addition to the military pension.
A couple of the tricks that Ed used were buying used vehicles and, of course, paying cash for them, and then driving them forever. Remember the lowly Chevy Vega? That was Ed's commuter car for many years. I think he had one of the last ones still on the road. He didn't scrimp on maintenance, but the paint and upholstery were sad-looking.
Another trick: When Ed got a raise at work, he didn't necessarily give himself or his family budget a raise. Other than well-considered cost-of-living increases to the family budget, any excess went into the retirement fund portfolio and savings. His wife wasn't interested in the family bookkeeping, and I remember once Ed said that sometimes he didn't even mention a raise to his wife. He just upped his allotment going straight to savings.
Now, I am not saying that we should all try to live like Ed, but he did provide for his family and protect them from unexpected contingencies, like losing most of his company pension. He told me that any job could end at any time and he lived his life with that in mind. That is another reason he stayed in the Air Force Reserves all those years, to have a backup. Many of his peers had very little savings and were planning on that company pension to fund most of their retirement. Ed would never count on having all of his eggs in one basket like that.
The epilogue to this story is that Ed only enjoyed a few years of retirement. In his mid-sixties he went with a friend to a reunion in Las Vegas. They went by car. On the way home, late at night with the friend driving, and Ed likely dozing in the passenger seat, the driver presumably fell asleep. They were both killed instantly in the crash.
But even with his passing, he had left his family very well provided for. Ed enjoyed his life, his family, his service to his country, and his work very much. I do miss him. Rest in peace, Ed, my friend.
Last edited by nifty-two-fifty; 03/12/15.
