Darka wrote:
I am tempted to up the cash a little so might get closer to 3 years in total, which would be:
1 year income float
1 year reserve (hopefully never touch in premium bonds)
1 year sporadic spending reserve, new kitchen/bathroom, etc. (some cash, some premium bonds)
Another thing I meant to offer up in my earlier reply is that I think it's very important to have a good feel for
our own short, medium, and long-term spending, as it's likely that improved FIRE situations can be delivered when they're based on our own
personal situations, rather than what might otherwise simply be well-intended 'estimates'.
The problem with well-intended 'original estimates' is that when we then start to add our own safety-margins on top of them, they might turn out to be well away from any margin-capable situation that's actually
appropriate for our own personal needs...
I've got 14-years worth of
Microsoft Money records available to me, that precisely tracks all income and expenditure that has been processed through my wages and various accounts over those years, and I'm confident that I've got a relatively good handle on both short, medium and long-term
requirements and trends, and I fully expect those figures to feed very well into what will turn out to be my margin-enhanced final cash and income-requirements.
Without those 14-year figures being available though, the whole exercise would turn into so much of a 'finger-in-the-air' job that I'd quickly lose confidence in the whole situation, and either end up working for longer than I need to, or end up piling additional margin onto crude-estimates in a way that would paint me into a corner of excess-cash relatively quickly, I imagine, so I did want to mention that as with all these types of situations, having a good foundation of long-term
personal financial history available in a
flexible and easy-analysed form (Microsoft Money data can easily be exported to spreadsheets for downstream investigation...) is highly likely to reward downstream tasks like the ones we're discussing on this thread...
I was a late convert to MS Money, but incorporating it into my financial processes has both saved me a huge amount of time over the years, by removing what was previously a rather crude paper-based process of account-consolidation, and also helped to provide the ongoing source of all that useful financial history then being available in a fantastic granular form, and ready for some spread-sheet inspection whenever it's required...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess