... you plan to fail. We're grabbling with our financial goals for the next 10-12 years and it's turning out more difficult than we thought. Yesterday, I shared our thoughts about traditional retirement savings and whether or not we should go that route. Today I'm sharing some of our thought on the bigger picture of our finances.

When everything is uncertain

It can feel like everything is uncertain at some stages of your life, but there are always some things to hold onto, your faith, your family, your career field perhaps, whatever it is we can all find something to hold on to.
That said from where we stand right now, life seems very difficult to predict for the next 10-12 years. We were talking about where we would like to be, financially, when we hit 40 (that's in 12 years) and the more we thought about it the more unsure we were. Where would we live? How many children would we have? Would they still be in diapers? What would our household income roughly be?
We ended up faced with two options, a) let it rest for now and return when we have more answers or b) make a plan a be prepared to revise it over and over again. We chose b.

Source

Some rough goals

Here's a list of some rough goals we currently have for the next 12 years. By the time we are 40, we would like to have

1. Bought a house and have paid at least 500k of the principal amount off based on the purchase price (i.e. including both our downpayment, our regular payments and any extra principal only payments).

2. An emergency fund of 6 months expenses (we currently have this, but expenses will go up once we move, have more children etc. so we'll need to constantly be on top of this one).

3. A net worth (what we own minus what we owe) of 1 million DKK (based on house equity, emergency savings and retirement accounts).

4. A paid for car (we don't own a car and never have).

We've also made a plan to have a more detailed plan made when we turn 30. By then we should have an idea of our income and where we're settling. A big income for us will also mean living in a high cost of living area.

Financial independence

I've just recently started learning about financial independence and it's something I want to learn more about. I want to be a good steward of what we've been entrusted with and I believe working towards FI might be part of that. I don't know yet what 'our number' will be, there are too many balls up in the air to do those calculations right now. If you are familiar with the concept then please teach me all you know about it.