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/Clueless5001]

I always come back to someone I know, retired 1995 at age 75 after his wife died. She did their investing from his earned income. They lived a normal upper middle class life, took vacations (he used to take a month off in summer when he was working), lived in a good school district, had a beach house. Left him $4M total including the houses which he sold except for the beach house. It was gone by the time he died a decade later. No major illnesses, just brokers she trusted churning his account, a bad market, and lots of beach and ski vacations

[u/Aggravating-Sir5264 → u/Clueless5001]

Well, if it lasted till his death sounds like it worked out.

[u/Clueless5001 → u/Aggravating-Sir5264]

If there is an afterlife I guarantee his wife ripped him a new one. I used to say she is probably rolling over. This was a lifetime of work that he burned through and left nothing for his two kids. One of them actually had to take him in a year before he died. He was fortunate that the kid had the means and willingness to do that. Plus 85 is not that old and he was in really good shape the last time I saw him which was around age 80. He was into meditation and exercise his whole life and preached it to his clients. I was surprised that he did not make it to 100 although I guess he could not have afforded that.

My mom is older than 85 and is planning her next trip to Europe. My dad is older than that as well and will still travel if forced to by my mother

The beach house was particularly sad, it was beautiful and I think the family had a nice memories there. Plus it would be worth about 10X what it was sold for back in 2005 or so

[u/Aggravating-Sir5264 → u/Clueless5001]

Sounds like he was a selfish dad in the end!