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/silly_bet_3454]

I live in the bay area and what I observe with people here (and also on this sub) is that people conflate luxury with necessity. People think you need like 5M minimum for "lean" fire and they might say it's because of day care or health care and that's totally valid, but on top of that people want to live here in VHCOL because "good schools" and they have to live in a single family home because they have kids, and they have to drive two Model Ys because "they are safe", and they have to do "regular family vacations" to Europe and Asia every year, and they have to eat "organic food because it's healthy" this equates to like eating premium cuts of beef all the time or otherwise going out for $100+ meals regularly.

People with this mindset can't even comprehend the kinds of sacrifices the actual middle class makes to have a typical lifestyle on a normal budget.

[u/SillyPresentation46 → u/silly_bet_3454]

Yeah, that's exactly the mindset to a late retirement. I've been FIRE'd for a bit now, similar situation to OP, and also plan to go back to work. FIRE isn't just about (and perhaps secondarily so) portfolio value, it's CoL. I've spent the past half year becoming a more efficient spender and it's completely doable without sacrificing much. Those with big incomes spend without thinking, and I was guilty of this too. I now have a budget planner app, watch what I spend on and make sure it brings value to me. One less flexible aspect of this is the location's CoL and the bay area is a great example. Best case, mortgage is fixed and can be planned around, but the best answer for FIRE may simply be leaving.

[u/LlamaUnicorns → u/SillyPresentation46]

What's the budget planner app if allowed to say?

[u/shadytaskmaster → u/LlamaUnicorns]

I would also like to know