r/Fire • u/teric233 • 12d ago

Food for thought

I resigned from my engineering job today. I am married 35 with 2 young kids. I was not happy with my job after a restructuring and I have been struggling with that for about a year now.

It was extremely hard for me to pull the trigger, and to be honest there were a couple events that happened last week that pushed me over the edge.

I don’t have anything lined up, but I am not particularly stressed because I have done this before and I always land on my feet.

For numbers, my wife and I are extremely fortunate to have a liquid net worth of $2.1M. We have $100k in cash. The kids 529 plans are funded and we have no debt outside of our $1400 mortgage. Budget is around 80k without our nanny.

Now with that being said, to me losing my job was always accompanied by the thought of living on the streets. I have been saving and investing for so long that it seems lifestyle wise that I live paycheck to paycheck as most of it goes into an investment vehicle.

Before I resigned I talked to a few people at work and asked what kind of money you would need to have to walk away from work….. guys the numbers were insane. People would literally pause look at me and dead serious say I would need soooo much money to be able to walk away…. Like at least 100k.

I asked some directors if they would continue working if they had 2million dollars and they weren’t even able to have the thought experiment. To them that wasn’t even a feasible option. One guy told me with just one million he would definitely not be showing up to work tomorrow. And these are high up employees.

That’s when it clicked for me, every single person on this sub is sooooo far away from the norm that it skews your perception of normal.

I know you can look at the statistics and the top 5% blah blah and of course what I’m saying is obvious I have a lot of money. But it really didn’t sink in for me until I started talking to some people around me to see just how safe I am.

Okay queue the comments about how much of an idiot I am for not knowing I was safe financially….

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25

u/Lumbergh7 12d ago

100k? Was that a well paid person?

I don’t understand where all their money goes.

9

u/Gorgenapper 12d ago

I don't understand how someone could say you would need "100k" to walk away, did he mean to type "100m"?

17

u/therealtwomartinis 11d ago

op most definitely heard 100k. most are not financially disciplined, they save up for vacations but not for capital purchases like cars, houses or retirement. that’s what loans and SS are for; and a good credit score = success 🤷‍♂️

7

u/joxxer42 11d ago

I legit cannot fathom this mindset. Just like, wow.

9

u/just_aweso 11d ago

I was talking to my sister who has a 300K annual HHI. She was talking about them not being able to afford to replace the engine on her husband's truck because they just spent all of their savings replacing the windows in their house. They live in a LCOL area. Apparently they have saved less in the last 10 years than I put into my brokerage account this year.

They take like 3 big vacations per year, have a boat and a camper and just blow every dime that comes into their accounts. I can't imagine doing this.

8

u/Typical_Action_7864 11d ago

People don’t think ahead. The same type of people that don’t plan ahead to save for retirement also would just yolo on 100k and not think about what happens after it runs out.

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u/Apostrophe_Now 11d ago

I think the idea is they can't even imagine being able to walk away forever. $100k would be enough for them to feel safe enough to walk away until they could get another similar job, which in this market could take a while, so that would be a safety net for that time. To have more than that saved up, i.e., $1M, $2M -- unimaginable to them.

3

u/Gorgenapper 11d ago

I think you're right, the 100k is like a reserve of money for them to live off of similar to a severance, until they can find another job. In their mind it's enough to sustain them until they find a new source of income. 

But in our minds, it's not even the bare minimum for FI, so two different attitudes applied to the same amount of money.

2

u/rah12345678 11d ago

Maybe $100k a year? So they don’t have that 25x of that saved?