yenahmik @ yenahmik @lemmy.world

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Question of the week: Would you take a 25% pay cut for a dream job?

If I want to do nothing on a vacation, I prefer to do it at home as a staycation. When I travel somewhere, I prefer to pack my trip with new experiences and sites to really explore the area.

Granted, I am also the sort of person who probably needs a vacation to recover from my usual vacations.

Just got back from a week at an all-inclusive resort in Cancun. Frankly, not my jam, so I just went and did a quick calculation of what it would have cost if I had planned it like my normal vacations (the resort was chosen by the inlaws). We could have had a way more interesting week, IMO, and still have $2000 to spend on food/drink to have the same cost of vacation as what we paid the resort.

Honestly, I don't get the appeal. If we had just hung out at the pool and beach, like everyone else we went with did, it would have given an even more luxurious food budget. There's no way we ate enough food and drank enough in a week to make up for the cost difference.

And that is based on the Black Friday deal we got when booking the resort, which was 40% cheaper than what the rates would be if we booked today.

Nice! My company went to 3 day weeks for a few months of 2020 and it was the perfect amount of work IMO. Enough to keep a decent schedule, but plenty of time off. If I'd been closer to leanFIRE, I never would have wanted to go back to full time.

We have a felony stick...I'd tell you what it's for, but for obvious reasons.... 🤫

• Mardi gras in New Orleans
• Southern Arizona is lovely that time of the year
• Florida
• Carlsbad canyon/white sands NM
• California (San Diego, LA, Joshua Tree, or Death Valley?)
• Las Vegas
• St George/Zion NP area

Some rough suggestions since I don't know what you're into, but maybe it'll spark an idea

What sort of weather are you looking for? Interested in winter sports? Or would you prefer escaping the cold?

The best part is that even if you won't retire early, just by following to principals of FIRE, you will be better off for it.

The librarians?

Mid-30s, >$425k, ideally 40 but that could change based on if I have kids. I will certainly be more than set by standard retirement age.

I think it depends on what you want your investment philosophy to be going forward. So you would want to answer why did you initially choose to be overweight in REITs? Do you still agree with whatever that reason is?

Another thing to consider, if you had $xxx in cash today (where xxx is what your current value is in VGSLX) would you buy VGSLX with that cash? Or would you choose to buy VTSAX instead? If the latter, then yes it would be worth cutting your losses.

VGSLX was certainly hit hard by COVID and the shift to remote work, and high interest rates have also impacted the value of VUSTX.

So all the gains you would have seen from VTSAX and VTIAX were counteracted by the underperformance of the other funds. I personally don't see the value of being overweight in REITs as they are already represented by their market value in VTSAX. You may want to consider the proportions at which you allocate your money to the various funds.

Edit: So I went in to compare your results to mine. I started investing in Jan of 2015. I keep roughly 60% of my money in VTSAX, 25% in VTIAX, and 15% in VBTLX. According to Vanguard, I am up 6.2% since I opened my account.

Happiness is fleeting. You should seek contentment over happiness.

Oh man. This caused a flashback to that time I had a 3 day long cold that caused me to cough non-stop for the next month until I went to the doctor for steroids to make it stop.

While I believe Social Security will still exist, I definitely fall into the category of millennial on track for a comfortable retirement.

It's good to see that so many people are saving for retirement, given how often you see news about how low people's savings are.

I haven't gotten a raise in a few years. I did one of those inflation conversion calculators and now make less than when I was hired accounting for inflation ☹️

If only I could find somewhere that doesn't seem like a step down in terms of work life balance...

I think the most likely outcome is that they will remove coverage for wildfires, which would likely have to be purchased separately like flood insurance works today. You are correct that if it is covered by the terms of the insurance they pretty much have to pay out at that point, as it is a contractual obligation.

Yep. I can only speak to my experiences that occurred over a decade ago. I will say that everyone was shocked at how relatively easy to deal with they were at the time. I imagine as wildfires become more common and hit more populated areas that insurance will refuse to pay out more often. In our case, it was the most expensive fire that had ever hit our state, since most previous ones had occurred in remote areas.

We were actually lucky that our house wasn't ruined because my parent's policy actually changed at midnight the night the fire destroyed the neighborhood. I can only imagine the insurance trying to get out of paying up in that scenario.

My childhood neighborhood got hit by a wildfire shortly after graduating college.

For evacuations, your best bet will be to stay with friends/family outside of the evacuation zone. I stayed at my boyfriend's (at the time) family's house. If you don't know anyone, usually there will be shelters set up in places like school gyms that you can go to. The problem with these is that there will be no privacy and you won't be able to take any pets.

I'm not sure who pays during the evacuation period, but if your home is uninhabitable, insurance should pay for any accomodations while you are waiting for your home to be fixed.

For smoke remediation, your insurance will evaluate what is necessary and should write a check to fix it. We got ~$4000 for carpet cleaning, special duct cleaning, some sort of ozone treatment for the attic and then these special sponges that absorbs soot from the walls. My parents were able to DIY a few of the things and put the money towards installing AC.

The thing no one prepared you for in this situation is the uncertainty. Pulling away from your house and seeing the fire barrelling towards it is awful. The next few days, you don't know if you'll be homeless or not. Your stuck in this state of wanting information, but the bureaucracy won't say anything (it also doesn't help in my situation the govt officials straight up lied to the media about it).