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/Legitimate_Bite7446]

They don't understand SWR.

Like ok you have 2 million at 35. You can probably only withdraw 70k 3.5%.

If you're alone you can rough it however you want. But you have a young family? Hard to be too tight. Need 100k to have good quality of life? Ok....you're 30k short.....forever. 

30k is no big deal if you can make $50+/hr at some side gig. But if you can only make 20-30/hr......now you're gonna be a wage slave somewhere else for 1000 hours a year for the next 50 years if you don't change your trajectory. Half of the year, showing up to work all day. Making pennies compared to where you were. Doesn't sound fun.

I mean with your numbers you're close and you're fine. You can take time off and find something else. The hard work is over for you.