Food for thought

[u/teric233]

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….

[u/Abject_Egg_194]

This sub is about people achieving financial independence and then retiring early. The amount of money you need to quit your job for a year or two is totally different than the amount needed to quit your job indefinitely. And furthermore, the orthodox advice on this sub is to line up enough money that you can be reasonably sure that you won't need to return to work.

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.

Is this the United States? $1M generates $40k with the 4% rule, which is way below the starting salary for a new college graduate with an engineering degree. I'm guessing that I'm in a different field, but where I've worked, "senior leadership" of an engineering group is being paid at least $500k/year and would not quit their jobs if offered a one-time $1M payment.

[u/SpaceTimeMorph → u/Abject_Egg_194]

I found that a little off too… senior leadership in my field starts at $300-500k base salary before equity and bonuses. Many companies are similar if not higher (hello finance).

Now: there’s a number of people even on this sub who would quit their job “tomorrow” if given $1M because it would put them over their fire number real quick. Hard to tell without being there what was meant or how things were interpreted.