Long time lurker, first time poster. (37M, married, 3 kids, ~800k NW, almost all of which is in retirement accounts, hardly anything in brokerage, and missed the boat on the low interest rates).
Most of my feed from the FIRE subreddits come from people who are either single or married with no kids, with $1 to $5 million, mostly liquid, and are asking if they can retire. This is always a light topic because it feels like low stakes since there aren’t any dependents in the mix.
Living in Southern California, I feel somewhat hopeless about ever being able to retire here, and often find myself imagining retiring abroad like they do here in expat fire. However, there’s the non-monetary cost of either taking your kids away from their home country where they’ve lived for all their lives until this point, or essentially leaving them behind if we wait until they’re off to college.
I grew up in another state over 1000 miles away from my extended family and I miss them dearly. I don’t want to do that to my kids, yet I don’t feel like FIRE is possible here.
If you have kids (let’s say anywhere from 2 to 20 years old) and you expat fired, how did you reconcile this? To not feel trapped by staying for your kids but also not feel like you are undermining their futures by going, whether that’s going with them during their childhood, or going right after they graduate and leave the nest?