[ixacto]

Think about what your actual cash outflow categories really are. 5-10% increase in the price of food or household items is nothing when so much of our income is already going to housing costs (like 30-50% housing), which have in large costal cities been YOLOing to the moon for the last couple years.

This actually brings up a really inconvenient point for the FIRE/All in VTSAX crowd IMO--when real estate is drastically beating the market how exactly does your FIRE plan work if you don't own a home and want to live in the same place?

Having 1.5MM in VTSAX is nothing when you want to buy a house but that is 50% of your total assets. The workaround is to just work longer and fatFIRE, so 1.5MM is no longer ok, it needs to be more like 3-4 to be able to put down a 250k downpayment if one is trying to retire in a desirable area. But then you have 250k downpayment in a 6x leveraged asset with no diversification. if you tried to trade stocks with 6x leverage and no diversification, this would be nuts but apparently it's ok to do for housing.

TL;DR I don't care if the price of cfood goes up a bit. Housing is going up 12%YOY and that is the main expense...

[evanmoran]

Great point that food/goods costs are completely overshadowed by housing in most cities. I’m not a FIRE person, but I’ve always believed the trick to early retirement is to live very very cheaply (it makes all the charts look pretty). I believe this implies you can’t live where you want as soon as your living expense requirements are exceeded by the housing costs. This could be a year or twenty years out, but the risk is there. Curious if anyone has a different take!