Our Own 1,500 Days…

That’s right. 1,500 days.

Yes, you read that right. 1,500 days until we can potentially retire.

If that name rings a bell, you’re not alone. There are other more famous people out there who have launched websites based on that number and their own calculations. I only point it out because that number came up for me, too. According to the countdown clock on my enormous financial spreadsheet, 1,500 days from today, in June 2020, we should be able to quit our jobs if we want to.

This is what I refer to as QT (Quttin’ Time), a time that Maeby enjoys all day.

Please wake me up to have my meal

What goes into this calculation?

I project out all of our savings based on our predicted income and where our savings will be saved. We (probably) won’t have $1 million in 1,500 days. But I will be 38 years old and will have put in exactly 15 years at my current workplace.

With that many years, I will be able to claim retirement at age 55 and begin getting 16% of my final average salary. Unfortunately, there’s no accounting for inflation. It will be 16% of what my final salary was 17 years earlier. But as I showed in my classic post pitting a defined benefit pension against a DIY “pension,” having a pension at your job acts like a weak pair of golden handcuffs. Saving on your own, you can make much better returns. Especially if you’re using savings to buy rental properties.

And if we wanted to quit our jobs in 1,500 days, that would be how we (potentially) could do it. In 1,500 days, we probably won’t have enough financial assets that they will be worth 25 times more than our annual expenditures. But bring expected rental income into the picture, and we have enough, between income and assets, to cover our 2015 average expenses of $3,000 a month. After the pension kicks in at age 55, we would have more than enough, and we could sell the rental property.

So… Annual Rental Income of $15,000 + Some Withdrawls From Savings + No Debt + Pension Kicking In At 55 = Ability to pay for 2015’s expenses ($3,000/mo) adjusted for inflation, for all time.

Assuming that we want to keep rental property until at least age 55, which might not even be the case. We could instead pick up income doing different, more satisfying, or at least less stressful and time-consuming, jobs. In other words, in 1,500 days, our options start opening up.

So many options. We might even want to be able to increase our expenses, travel for 6 months a year, and put off retirement until we can do that anyway. What will we do? I guess you’ll just have to wait 1,500 days to find out!

One optimistic variable in there is that we have no debt. Realistically, we would still have  more like $100,000 of mortgage debt, creating about $1,500 a month in payments. In my 1,500 days example, we’ve done well enough to pay that off. That’s a bit optimistic. But we have been crushing debts recently with the auto loan paid off last year and student loans paid off this year. So who knows?

Fun Countdowns!

How long is 1,500 days? For comparison’s sake, I started my first real job after college 4,069 days ago. And in 2,159 days, it will be my 40th birthday. We’ve been living in our house for 2,669 days, almost exactly as long as Obama has been in office. Zero is the number of days that Donald Trump will be in office. And it’s been 5,959 days since Y2K.

I‘m looking into buying a new pair of Doc Marten work shoes. According to Amazon, I bought my current pair on August 25, 2012. So these shoes have lasted me 3 years and 8 months. Will my new shoes last that long? Will the new shoes be the last pair of work shoes I ever buy?

After our massive annual BJ’s excursion, we have three 625-count packages of Q-Tips in storage. By my calculation, each of those boxes lasts us 208 days. That means we will go through about 7 boxes before 1,500 days are up.

How many men’s razors? One frugal tale I haven’t recounted on this blog is my huge score of Mach 3 razors all the way back in February 2009. I bought about 140 razors on eBay because the per razor cost was incredibly low (about 50 cents per razor, shipping included). I am still going through this stash of razors today. I’ve found that each razor lasts me five weeks. That means I will go through 43 razors over the next 1,500 days. Frustratingly, my razor stash will run out by then (I think I only have about a dozen left) so I will probably have to buy more for the first time in over seven years.

In 1,500 days it will be June 2020, and we will in the midst of the next presidential election (yikes), which will be a contest between Hillary Clinton (D), Paul Ryan (R), and whoever the heck is going to lead the third party that splits off of the Republican party.

Maeby – Part of the 47% who are entitled and pay no income tax

I’ve noticed a lot of other personal finance bloggers writing about time over the past week or two. Must be something in the air. Either the value of time or waiting impatiently for time to pass. I fit into the latter group.

So this is basically just an encouragement post for myself. Once you have your eyes on the prize, it gets harder and harder to deal with the drudgery every day. Know what I mean? You head to the office day after day, do the same old thing (I have a post about repetition and memory coming up) and hear the same complaints from the same people every day. And it’s hard not to wonder why are we all doing this to ourselves.

What are you counting down to?

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