Aimless personal finance

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk these days about FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early). I’d followed folks like Our Next Life for awhile. Then there was the controversial interview from Afford Anything with Suze Orman. And most recently some other personal finance pals Liz and Stephonee were featured in a story about FIRE. And reading that last article made me realize something: I’ve never actually considered FIRE as something I would do. I always assumed I’d follow the “standard” path of working my whole life and then retiring in my 60s.

To be honest, I haven’t really thought about any money related goals in a while. Ten years ago, I talked about how I felt like I just save for the sake of saving. We used savings for our big life changes (getting married, buying a house) and, for now, that savings is sitting there as a big emergency fund. And we did start 529 accounts for our kids, and have been putting a little bit in there.

But right now, I feel like I don’t really have any financial goals or plans besides “keep growing net worth”. And even then, I’m not being super aggressive or focused on it. Just putting money in our retirement accounts, paying our bills.  I haven’t been trying to do anything different or save or pay off a certain amount.

As I mentioned in my review of The Index Card, I feel like I got all of the early personal finance tasks figured out (start automating savings, pay off debts, etc) but now that those initial things are figured out, I feel a little lost.  I feel like I don’t know what I’m supposed to with our money to make sure it’s growing “enough”.

It doesn’t help that our net worth is stagnating now that we have two kids in full time childcare. I know that in a few years we’re going to feel so much richer when the kids start going to public school. But for now, even with good incomes, our monthly expenses are pretty high when you combine our mortgage and childcare payments.

I guess when I started on my personal finance path the unspoken goal was financial independence but I didn’t really realize it. My first step was getting a handle on what debts and assets I had. Then I had to figure out what to do with it. All I cared about initially was a positive net worth. Then I hit that goal and kept going. I read an article that lists the many steps to true Financial Independence. According to that article, we’re only at Stage 2, Stability, since we still have debts (our mortgage). So, it looks like we still have a long way to go before we reach financial independence. We make good money but like I said before, our high monthly expenses mean we’re not saving nearly as much of our income as we used to before becoming parents and homeowners.

So where am I going from here? I’m trying to figure out what we need to do to grow our wealth and limit expenses where possible. Trying to do #1GoodMoneyThing to improve my finances. My main need is to learn what to do with the money we already have saved: what’s the best way to invest without too much risk? That emergency fund I mentioned earlier? It’s all in cash (in a savings account). Even as I’ve heard countless people saying most of it should go into low cost index funds. But my fear was that it would lose money right when we might need it for a big repair or other emergency (yes I know, we’re “losing money to inflation” but I still feel better knowing the amount isn’t dropping).

I don’t think we are going to be part of the FIRE community. We enjoy our work, and still don’t have the amount of money to “live off of”. But we do like the idea of Financial Independence (the FI of FIRE). Knowing we’re secure financially is good for peace of mind.

So: help me! What resources have you looked to to get a better understanding of moving beyond the original personal finance steps? How did you learn about investing? How do you get past the mental hurdles standing in your way of making the right financial decisions for your family?

What goals did you set for your financial life? And how are you reaching those goals?