The Dividend Family Guy

Recently I was reading a post by Dividend Life regarding his expenses .  There was one sentence in particular that caught my eye and finally got me thinking about how much I really need to save if I am ever to become FIRE.  I have been blogging about my FIRE approach through dividend growth investing and frugal living for a couple of years.  I even claim I want to retire by age 55.  What I never really did was figure out what I need to do to get there. Let's start with what Dividend Life said. " Note that based on my $3,900 budget, one Work Freedom Day requires about $128 of dividend income which in turn requires about $4,000 of capital." So based on that if there are 365 days in a year that would amount to total capital (including reinvested dividends) of a mere $1,460,000.  Wow that is a lot of money I need to save!  Currently I can't even support the family on $4000 a month.  My base 2016 budget is $4975 a month.  Sure I could squeeze TV, Inte

Expenses I can never say I had a normal month with my budget.  It has been over a year since we had to do any work on my wife's 10 year old minivan.  Time and the salt of winter finally caught up and we had to do some repairs.  On the bright side the van broke down on a street and not the highway.  With that said the repairs exceeded what I pay on the house.  Given the age this is accounted for in the budget at $444 per month for things like repairs and gas. Regarding the rest of the budget we went over in the "Wants" category by $66 as I purchased some Groupons to use later in the year for some events we like to go see.  Also food went over by  $242.   We usually go shopping on the weekend for the next week so the last weekend in February was for food for the first week in March.  It all evens out in the end since January was under budget in this category. Last but never least was the budget category of childcare.  This is the amount of money I spend on t