Hi all,

This is my first post here.

I've started on this journey after making some costly investment mistakes in 2020 (the pandemic wasn't kind on my mental health). I thought there was a massive crash coming, so I sold my Tesla stocks. They shot through the roof right after, and I missed out on $100k of returns…

One thing became clear at the time: I couldn't trust myself with managing my investments, let alone my wife's. So I decided we should get a financial advisor and joined Empower.

It was very helpful to get all of our accounts in the same place for the first time. And what they were selling us made sense at the time. The usual "your investments won't lose as much, it will be a smoother ride."

I had already read some books about FI and was skeptical of Empower's approach. So around the same time, I opened a UTMA at Vanguard for my baby daughter and bought only VTSAX in that account. The plan was to compare the Empower-managed portfolio against a straight up VTSAX portfolio.

Lo and behold, three years later, my daughter was outperforming us by a lot!

This and the exposure from listening to multiple Choosefi episodes, reading more FI blog posts and books, and even Warren Buffet's biography, fully convinced me that low cost index funds were the way to go. Adding up the monthly AUM fee debits from all our accounts and realizing it was over $8,000/year was the last drop.

So we fired our Empower advisor and moved to Vanguard and Fidelity, with an exclusive low cost index fund strategy. We still have a ton of random stocks we need to get rid of and are slowly selling when it makes sense. But it feels really freeing to be paying only a modest expense ratio of 0.04% instead of 0.89% of our investments.

This year, after tax optimization strategies, such as maxing out retirements accounts, we were happily surprised to pay $0 in federal taxes. However, there was still FICA, property taxes, and LLC taxes to pay, but at our second highest income year of all time, we paid the lowest taxes ever, percentage wise.

This is a long-winded way to share that this stuff is working. Our net worth went from $1.3M in 2022 to $2M at the end of 2025.

While my wife has been somewhat reluctantly on board with our strategy so far, she's not fully convinced about FI yet. Mostly because my freelance work is inconsistent (even though my income ends up being very similar each year).

I actually love my job and although I make less than her, I do not want to retire early at all. My wife does want to retire early. Very soon, actually.

We live in a condo and my wife was hoping that at this point we'd be living in a house. Thanks to refinancing during covid, we are blessed with a mortgage interest rate of 2.758% and should not give that up. But we live in a HCOL area and it kills me to think we'd be buying a ridiculously expensive yet completely average small home for $1.25M. It would kill our FI progress.

If we were to stay in the condo, which is getting crowded for a couple and a child (we all share one big master bedroom…), my wife could stop working in about 3 years. My income and 4% withdrawals would cover our expenses (but we'd no longer be saving, we'd be coasting). We have an option to split our bedroom so our kid has her own room and so do we. That's the cheapest option for a roughly single time cost of $15-20k to split the room (our neighbors have done this).

Another option is renting out the condo and renting a house instead. This is the second cheapest option for an upgrade. We could rent the condo for about the same as renting a house, so we'd take a hit of $20k a year, putting a bit of a dent in our savings rate. But it wouldn't be the end of the world.

My wife is very anxious about money in the long term. Even though our projections look unbelievable (compound magic) and on top of very solid Social Security income. She's an only child and her parents have been insanely frugal and straight up savings Jedi. There are a few properties that she'll inherit and her parents have told her she "will be fine".

I'm in the early stages of a startup business that I'm hoping will help me get the stability that my wife needs from me. So she can feel like she doesn't have to work as hard. Keeping my fingers crossed for that. After her having given me the freedom to keep pursuing my artistic dreams, it's only fair that she gets to lay back more.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Thank you.