Big Money Dreams – brokeGIRLrich

Once a year I do a university guest lecture on personal finance for an advanced stage management class and one of the things we always talk about is that the first step for sorting your longer-term money goals is to know what they are (I mean, to be fair, this is all money goals but the short-term ones require a little less reflection to sort out what they are).

So rather than being stressed or intimidated by numbers and which accounts to use and where to invest, I always tell them the first step really is to kind of dream about it.

And to revisit their dreams every few years because things can change. When I was like 11 years old, I made a bucket list that now has some really odd things on it that I don’t care about anymore – like for some reason 11 year 11-year-old Mel really wanted to learn how watches work. Learn how watches work was literally a thing on that list. 40 year old Mel… doesn’t really care. Maybe that interest will circle around again though for 70 year old Mel. Who can really say?

In a big money dream world, owning a house has been a goal that has waxed and waned over different seasons of my life. Oddly enough when I think about it now the actual long term goal might be to own two, in two different countries, which was a curveball not on my radar five years ago.

And when that dream last waned in 2020 when I absolutely could not find a mortgage lender during a brief house hunt that money shifted into an account to pay for grad school and while I hoped I would find better funding opportunities or that work might cashflow much of my degree, that didn’t happen after the first year and a sizeable chunk has gone to tuition, living expenses and a fairly reckless summer travel habit that I struggle to regret.

So where are my big money dreams right now?

Emergency Savings Goal – to have $30,000 in an emergency savings account

I figure that amount can cover a year of very conservative spending. It’s definitely a bit excessive but, if you’ve been reading for a while, I like my freedom to freelance and work where I want and leave if it’s terrible. My emergency account helps make that a reality. It’s been sitting around $10,200 for the last several years during this school project.

New Car Goal – Toyota Something (probably Corolla Cross) – approximately $32,000

So I would like to be able to buy my next car new, with cash. I would be very happy to do like an end of season sale when the year rolls over, but I figure that it will be around $30,000.

I also don’t think this dream is going to happen anymore. I’ve got almost $11,000 saved for this goal but this dream was based off of replacing Mona the Matrix in New Jersey when she died.

I got Mona new, as a graduation gift, in 2007. She is coming up on 18 years old with minor repairs but things have gone wrong every time I’ve been home lately, I think in part because no one is driving her when I’m not there and she’s too old for that nonsense. But there is no hope in getting my dad to remember to drive her once in a while. At the moment she’s broken down in his driveway as either her serpentine belt (hopefully) or power steering pump went out on literally my last drive while I was home last month.

I’m sitting at just under $11,000 with this account. While I might be able to funnel $20,000 into a savings account if I’m very careful and lucky with job the year after I graduate, we’re still looking at spring 2027 to be able to replace her.

However it is more important to me to buy a car in England, which I only need for three years (or less if my boyfriend ever decides he’s done with me because I would be on the next plane back to the States). So now I am trying to decide if I go with the cheapest possible Toyota I can find over here that’s automatic (because it is a significant price jump from a manual to automatic car but I cannot pass that test on a manual right now) or do I put in most of the $11,000 for a better car and hope to regain most of it when I sell the car when we go to the States? I’m not quite sure there but it does look like my original buy a new new car is off the table.

And yes, I know a perfectly new car is not a wise investment, a not very old used one is the better money decision to make, but you know? I drive them into the ground. So in an ideal, dreaming world, I’m buying a new Mona 2.0 even though Toyota don’t make Matrixes anymore, which is a crime. They are the best car.

But, if we’re just dreaming now, the car goal seems to have shifted itself to getting a car with a high resell value under $11,000 (or whatever that is in pounds right now, which currently has a terrible exchange rate) and keep saving some hopefully America Move 2029, which will surely be a large expensive unto itself also includes buying a new Toyota.

In the meantime, I am open to suggestions from my lovely readers about your experiences with new-ish but not perfectly new cars. Maybe I can be won ever to that. Or maybe (more likely) my bank account will force it. Because I do know that I’m not taking out any kind of loan for a car, barring crazy unforeseen financial difficulties.

Graduate Visa – £3985 (approx. $5500)

My student visa ends on 2 June 2026 and my studies are, hopefully, going to finish by 2 February 2026. This was originally my house savings account, that then became my paying for school account***, with the remaining amount of just over $6,000 pretty much the perfect amount to make this the graduate visa savings. Another large expense I could not have foreseen five years ago. And, in my partner’s defense, while I do think I probably would’ve headed back to the States after my studies, a not small part of me is curious about stage managing on the West End and I might be able to do it with this visa, so I may have gone for it anyway.

House Down Payment Savings – approx. $60,000

So, you can definitely put down less than 20% but I would like to get it close to 20% and I feel like I might have more success looking for a house in the areas that interest me in the States around $300,000 since I was looking around $150,000 in 2019-2020 and it wasn’t going great.

On the one hand, I’d pretty much consider those savings at $0 these days, on the other hand… I do have a brokerage account that I sort of consider retirement fun money or maybe down payment money.

Buying a house is well off on the horizon these days though. I imagine we will rent here in the UK. And who knows if there will even be houses in the States by 2029 or if we’ll be living in underground bunkers Silo style. Maybe that will be the whole world. Who knows. Or maybe a tiny townhouse will cost $3 mil. by then. It is not impossible that I will never own a house and I think that’s probably ok. But I also don’t want to decide I do want a house or find an appealing one and not have the down payment money.

Especially because of mortgage lenders hatred of freelancers.

Retirement – approx. $1,500,000 – $2,044,851  

A quick retirement calculation tells me that I will need the number above to clear $45,000 (and 3.30% inflation – I used 1 point higher than the suggested average) a year with my investments. That number is kind of a guess, but I find a really comfortable spending level for me is between $3000-4000 a month. The same calculator told me that if I contribute $830 a month I am on track to be able to retire at 57 if we have average markets through retirement and I will be fine till I’m 98 or 65 with poor markets, assuming social security is still a thing. If it’s not, that’s 74 with poor markets and 57 with average markets.

So I suppose, I’m on track, as long as I continue to max out my IRA and HSA every year. This also doesn’t include that brokerage account mentioned above. And to be honest, some of my retirement ‘plan’ is connected to my PhD as I’d really like to lecture a class or two a semester as an adjunct as long as my mind and body hold up through my 60s and 70s.

Revisiting this particularly big money dream does sort of light a fire to up my savings whenever I can because even though I’m at the beginning of my 40s now, there is still enough compounding time that it’s helpful to keep pushing money into these accounts. A little will grow quite a bit. Money usually roughly doubles in retirement investments every 7 years.

But also, what do I dream of this looking like? I mean, at the beginning, I’d like there to be a fair bit of travel. I’d like to do the teaching I mentioned and maybe some volunteering. It might be cool to be involved in the board of a local theatre.

I also do have a particular retirement dream. I want to build a friend enclave. Everything I’ve read about aging says that the worst part is being lonely. I’d like to build safeguards so we are not. I’d like to find a retirement community in South Jersey or Delaware that is also appealing to my three best friends from high school and convince them all to move into it. I think we need a decent sized community so that we are not right on top of each other – we definitely all need our own homes and two of them have kids, and by then, maybe grandkids, they will need guest rooms for. And then we also invite others we love to the enclave. I can see two possibly inviting their sisters/sister-in-laws. I have a cousin I’d like to invite (FYI – I am talking to you Billy and I know you read this blog sometimes). But I’d focus on the 4 BFFs (with significant other input) selecting the community and the others can come or not. But I think a lot about how much time my dad spends alone and this feels like a fixable problem if we are proactive about it and find a retirement community we all like in our mid-60s that is setup for us to age in place and help each other until that is impossible. This probably warrants its own series of blog posts.

…I should tell the other three this is the plan first though.

Well, that’s it for my really big money dreams these days.

What are your big money dreams?

 

*** Paying for School – because of careful planning and reevaluating, this happened. There is no more school to pay for. There is merely the actual doing of the school standing between me and that big life goal. But it was an expensive undertaking – even if I had a funded position, it still would’ve been an expensive undertaking because it’s a humanities PhD and no one is throwing money at us. Everyone is paying their own maintenance.