adambr2

No, it really not. As I mentioned your mortgage would be paid off which for most is a substantial monthly bill. You would also be able to supplement that money with social security once you reached your 60s. It really depends on a number of factors -- your cost of living for one. Where I live in Central Wisconsin -- 40k a year will go a long way. Obviously as someone pointed out that 40k was just an example because it worked well as a round number. Most importantly, it depends on your priorities and what they are. If you need to have that vacation home, if you need to wine and dine, yes that will be a sad retirement. If you can find a way to live within lesser means and value your time more, it can be a very happy retirement. Others brought up the idea of having one spouse retire while the other continues working for health insurance, a great idea. Ideally you could simply have one spouse work part-time, but part-time jobs with decent insurance are hard to find. Obviously insurance is the million dollar question, and not an easy one. I don't know much about the government marketplace for insurance, never had to use it. My dad retired in his 50s from a modest job. He owns his home and makes enough in retirement to live comfortably. For extra side cash, he earns $300 per month from donating plasma twice a week, which takes about an hour each time. He actually enjoys the hour to just sit there and read or watch Netflix. This plan isn't for everyone, but it works fine for him. Retirement, or timing retirement, is nothing more than a choice between time and money. Every year you have less time and more money. I won't make 45, but I won't work a day into my 60s -- I've never heard of anyone on their death bed saying they wished they had less time and made more money.

I'll give an example, albeit a rough one. Say my wife and I marry at 25 with no retirement savings and buy a 100K house. We make a combined 50K net per year and want to retire at 45. We want to live off 25 net, just over 2K a month, which is difficult, but feasible. Its more feasible because mortgage payments will not figure into this for most of the exercise. Now with cost of living it gets a little tricky; obviously 25K doesn't buy you 20 years from now what it does today. So for simplicity I'll figure in neither that nor raises and promotions. Figuring in taxes and health insurance in retirement, we want 40K a year in retirement, which is partially taxable and partially tax sheltered in a Roth. So with the 4% rule, we'll need 1 million dollars for that. My wife and I combined contribute 10K to our respective 401Ks, fully matched dollar for dollar -- some companies as Homer mentioned are even more generous. This leaves us 15K annually for other investments. We'll spend the first 7 years aggressively putting all 15K toward the mortgage in extra principal payments, guaranteeing we own the house outright within 7 years. We'll delay having children until age 30-31 so the kids and the added expense they bring hit around the same time the house is paid off. After this, we'll put the extra 15K into a Roth IRA up to the maximum limits with the extra going into a traditional IRA. Assuming 6% returns on an average for all accounts we would hit our goal in exactly 20 years, accumulating 1.08M by age 45 and retiring.

Most people with a decent income can retire early if that's truly what they want. We've been conditioned to believe that you work til you're 65, hopefully have enough then and hopefully enjoy 20 years after that, but it doesn't have to be that way. Basically just comes down to how much in the short-term that you're willing to sacrifice to slash your monthly budget to the bone and invest everything into an early retirement. I wish I had had the same financial mindset when I was 18 that I do now because that would have definitely been a goal. Now I'm married and my spouse and I don't really have the same financial vision in that regard or it would certainly be still feasible.

If you're investing for retirement and have the proper stock/bond/cash mix for your age, you have nothing to worry about. Short term market volatility is and will always be a part of the market both high and low. The key is being less vulnerable to volatility the closer you get to retirement. I lost about $7,000 in the last week or so and could not care less because I'm 35 and have about 30 years before retirement. If you're investing for the short term or day trading that's an entirely different scenario, but why 401K investors panic time and time again when this happens or carry an inappropriate portfolio mix after decades of these simple lessons really amazes me.

I really do want to be wrong on Braun. I want the Brewers to win way more than I want to be right. It does not matter what I think of him personally, if he can contribute 25 HR or so and around an .850 OPS with 500ish ABs for even 2 of the next 3 seasons with at least passable defense, I'll gladly say that I was wrong and that he was still worth having around.

I summed up my feelings on the difference earlier. Cain is a FA signing, either you pay or don't get involved. Braun we paid at a time when we still controlled him for 4 years. I wouldn't like us signing Yelich to an extension right now either. As far as WAR goes, I'm pretty confident Cain will be worth his deal. I'm far less confident on Braun's extension, although there's still a chance (4.8 WAR in 2 seasons).

Yes, exactly. I can't understand why it's ok that Braun is overpaid, because we can still do things. Ok, great, we can still sign Darvish if we want. Maybe if we didn't have Braun, we could sign both Darvish and Arrieta. I'm not saying we would, or should, but maybe we make some other moves instead. My point is there is always a limit on how much we can do, and every penny we spend counts toward that limit. Why people must try to rationalize that Braun's contract is not bad because we can still spend, I don't get. Come on, Braun would not touch 3/60 in this market and we all know it. We took a chance on his later years and lost. It's not a bad thing to admit it.

The reason it hasn't stopped acquisitions is that they've been carrying a very low payroll because of the rebuild. If they made some moves and stretched out their payroll like they had it 5 years ago, then of course it costs them that much more in buying power. Their payroll limit is whatever it is, Braun's $20M obviously contributes to that and if they approach that limit as they have in the past than that flexibility is gone. Seems like a pretty fundamental concept, but no one is forcing you to agree. But the fact that you don't doesn't make it cute, nor old, nor tiresome, nor wrong.

It’s been overstated so many times that Braun’s contract hurts us. Well it didn’t stop us from adding over $20M to our outfield for years to come a few days ago. Not only that but if 1WAR = $8M, I think Braun will probably do alright in getting the value out of that contract. Also you may want to check out who the Cardinals are paying money to over there in St. Louis. Lol Sure it does. Are you saying if we had the chance to be free and clear of Braun's contract in exchange for not having him anymore, you wouldn't take it? There would be no reason to trade Santana, you would still be loaded in the OF, and you'd have more than enough money to go after Darvish or Arrieta and still have a ton of flexibility to make other moves. Right now, they could probably still make such a move but would be approaching the limit of what they'll probably be willing to spend. Any way you slice it, $20M spent is $20M less in spending power that you have. I am not saying Braun's contract is a disaster, although I disagree that we're going to get the value out of his remaining 3 years and $61M. He's projected for 1.5 WAR in 2018 and that number is certainly trending downward.

You don't think the Cardinals have given out FA contracts knowing full well that it's going to be a bad deal on the back end? That's fine if that's your philosophy, I can certainly understand it, I'm just saying, you can go ahead and take Cain, take Darvish, take Arrieta, take all these guys off the table, they are not available to us if you're not willing to overpay on the back end. How a contract is structured, at least as far as how the money is spread out, means nothing to me. $80M guaranteed is $80M guaranteed. Their accounting department understand their budgeting process, the time value of money and all of that a lot more than most of us do, so as far as that goes that's between Mark A. and his accountants as far as I'm concerned. I do agree about the Braun contract. They still had control for 4 years, not sure what the hurry was to lock up his 30s years, and it's certainly a deal we'd rather be without now. It would be like us extending Yelich for 2023-2026 right now. Still, they had a chance to get out of it as recently as 18 months ago, and they'll likely have a chance to get out of at least some of Cain's on the back end if they choose.

But again, we don't know how much those 4 year offers were for. Could have been 4/70 and maybe he just preferred the 5th year for $10M more. Also, if you're going to use that as your definition for 'above market' than literally pretty much every FA signing ever is above market.

Exactly. The Brewers have no choice but to accept the realities of what a player like Cain costs on the FA market, or avoid that kind of market all together and stick with contracts like Chacin. Just the way it is, hope to recoup your value in the first few years and then hope it isn't a disaster by year 5. No one expects that Cain is going to be a 4-5 WAR player at age 36. I understand the desire for a safer 3 year deal for a player his age, but even if they could have pulled it off it would have definitely been more expensive on a per year basis, something like 3/60. 3/48 would have never happened.

I think some are missing the point when it comes to the Cain deal. No one is expecting him to produce 5 years at his current level. Nor is that the Brewers expectation. Stearns and Mark A. are well aware that 5 year contracts to players in their 30s rarely work out that way. They're hoping for 2 years or so of a 4 WAR player, 2 years or so of a 2-3 WAR player, and hopefully at least a serviceable bench option by year 5. That's very realistic and $80M is well worth that if it pans out that way. The contract is also structured in a way (diminishing no trade clause list) in a way that as he ages, they will have the ability to trade him to more teams). With rising costs in MLB, if they wanted to move on after year 3 or 4, as long as Cain isn't a total distaster at that time, they can likely find a taker in at least a partial or near full salary dump, especially with the short 1-2 year commitment at that time It's actually quite smart as far as FA contracts go. Cain was a market inefficiency and Stearns took advantage. Cain is 21st in position player WAR since 2015, even with lost injury time. JD Martinez, who is going to get the much larger contract, is 42nd.

The Yelich trade tree: Lewis Brinson (through Jonathan Lucroy, drafted by Brewers 3rd round 2007) Monte Harrison ( drafted by Brewers 2nd round 2014) Isan Diaz (through Jean Segura, through Zack Greinke, through Lorenzo Cain, Jeremy Jeffress, Jake Odorizzi, and Alcides Escobar) Jordon Yamamoto (drafted by Brewers 12th round 2014) The bottom of the JJ Hardy trade tree (for Carlos Gomez, (with Mike Fiers), for Brett Phillips, Domingo Santana, Josh Hader and Adrian Houser)

I hope you're not speaking for everyone Boomer. I said before the deal that I would do Brinson + Ortiz + Diaz which is very similar to the actual deal.

Way too far out to assume anything. I mean yeah you'd think so but Gomez looked like a budding star at 26 too. That's post-2022 and Yelich will be 31. Won't even fall under the current CBA so impossible to even say that the current QO system will even be a thing.

I still just don't understand the theory that Stearns is going to be hamstrung now because GMs know he wants to trade Domingo. They've known that since the Winter Meetings. Everyone knew the Marlins wanted to trade Yelich, but I'd say they still did quite well for him. Or if you want a better example, back in 2015 the Mets nixed the trade we had with them for Gomez. We had about 24 hours to dump Gomez on someone when the entire world knew that we wanted to and we ended up with Santana, Hader, Phillips and Houser. Teams will pay for something they want and need especially when someone else wants it too. If they don't, stand your ground and wait it out. They have 2 months to figure this out, if Santana is still on the roster at the end of the week or even the month it's not a big deal.

Not sure why anyone thinks $16M a year for Cain is an overpay. He's well worth that if you can even get 3 out of 5 years close to his recent production. I'm not crazy about the 5th year either but to be honest he could have gotten 4/80 in this day and age instead of 5/80 and the sports world wouldn't have been the least bit fazed by it.

Never thought Ryan Braun would be our worst starting outfielder, ha.

Still have a lot of great prospects on the farm. The pitching is basically all still in tact, and numerous position players could break out in '18 - Hiura, Erceg, Grisham, Ray, Dubon, Gatewood, Lutz. Lots of exciting things happening on the farm still. Obviously lots of exciting things happening in Milwaukee. Crazy how we are about 5 hours removed from calling this the most boring off-season ever.

Exactly. We can rent him for 3 years and trade him at 29 if things aren't going as hoped and still probably get comparable value back to at least Brinson + Diaz.

I know this stings but keep this in mind -- we essentially gave up no pitching prospects. Yamamoto yeah, but he's borderline top 30.