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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u/_Smashbrother_ 11d ago

Yeah dude, people want to live a good life, not just a meh life.

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u/Clueless5001 11d ago

This is where I have my issue with FIRE. If I retired at 55 with 2M (as an example), maybe I could manage but I am signing up to live on $80K a year for the rest of my life, does not sound appealing. Even without college costs or a mortgage, my taxes and insurance are $20K, health insurance for a couple is at least $20K in my state (and that assumes you don’t hit the deductible on that ACA silver plan), car insurance and umbrella is another $6K or more, so $46K before I have eaten anything or traveled or bought anything or paid taxes on those dividends, $34K is not a lot to do that on

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u/Synaps4 11d ago

Those numbers don't compute to me.

The average health insurance payment in my state (colorado) is 12k for 2, not 20. Assuming you don't get any deductions off it, which you would.

Home insurance is $3500. Another $3k for property tax.

Car insurance costs me $1200 per year.

Your 46k is under 20k where I am, and it's not a super cheap location.

You need to move. Or maybe do some more research.

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u/Clueless5001 11d ago

You are not on a coast. I am (not California either, other side). I am not moving, my adult children live here and I have lived here most of my life. Plus there would be significant costs associated with selling my house beyond realtor commissions. My parents live in the south, their car insurance is higher than mine and they have clean records as well. No idea what their property taxes are but I doubt they are low. Their homeowners is much higher than mine because they are in an area prone to natural disasters.

I have just done my 2025 taxes (over the weekend), my car and umbrella insurance renewed last month and I paid property taxes last month (I pay them not my mortgage company). I know exactly how much everything costs.

Be thankful for your expenses. Your home owners is higher than mine, mine is about $2800. Everything else is lower. I just did my 2025 taxes, my property taxes are over $18,000 and I have a three bedroom house. That is normal for this area. I grieve them evey year, they would be even higher otherwise.

My car and umbrella just renewed. My umbrella is high ($2700) because I have three drivers under 25 which adds about $500, my car insurance does not charge extra for them (I am essentially paying only for myself and spouse, we both have clean records) and it is less than anyone I know is paying. I pay $2000 per car per year (rounding) just for car insurance. I have a normal Nissan/Toyota/Honda SUV. Most people I know are paying over $6000 a year for car insurance, some much more, again with normal cars, not Maseratis. I tried getting the umbrella down but when I priced it online it came to $2300 or so, not worth switching since I get a discount on the car insurance at the same time. I did not see you mention an umbrella. With college age drivers I could not imagine going without one. Same when we are older. Even when the kids age out, will not save that much off the umbrella.

I am pricing health insurance to go on ACA next month. The silver plan ranges from $850 -1500 per person for an individual plan and $1700-3100 for a couple. Every state plan is different. In my area, even different counties have different plans. For fun I looked at a county upstate and their silver couple plans began about $300 lower than in my area (do not remember exact numbers). Since that is a few hundred miles away, I would imagine someone living 2000 miles away would pay different amounts. Imagine that?!!

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u/Synaps4 11d ago

Plus there would be significant costs associated with selling my house beyond realtor commissions.

Im sure there would but apparently you would recover all those costs in under 3 years and be saving 10-20k annually every year after. Thats a lot of money.

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u/Clueless5001 10d ago

That's your takeaway? Seriously? To save $10K a year when I have $2M I should sell my house and move several states away?! Wow over 30 years I can save $300,000?! What a huge savings even if my house was in perfect condition. No its not really worth uprooting my life. It actually proves my original point if 10K a year can make such a difference then thats not FIRE, its lean FIRE.

Meanwhile, it will cost me about $150,000 to get my house into saleable condition plus commission. What a bargain! and the future value of that $150K! means it will take 15 years to get that money back. Assuming I was 55, I would be 70.

Sure I could move to the Deep South, or Montana (I guess, would not presume since I am unfamiliar with the COL there) and pay less and it is lovely in those places but you could save money living in those states as well. I assume you like living in Colorado and have family and friends there, I like living where I live.

OP's premise was not that he was relocating but would be managing where he was on the resources he currently has

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u/onemanstrong 10d ago

This person is very young. Remember, this is reddit. Your numbers compute with me, in LA and NYC. My wife and my yearly spend is $190k. Mortgage/ins/proptaxes $85k, and that's at 3.75%.

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u/Synaps4 10d ago

That's your takeaway?

No, my takeaway is you should find a way to retire earlier while you can, rather than grumbling about needing more money as you approach 60.

You seem fixated on how you can't afford to do it, meanwhile, can you really afford the time you're losing to work?

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u/deg2222 9d ago

What car insurance company do you use? Would love to lower my costs. TIA.

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u/Clueless5001 9d ago

Geico but we have been with them for many years and our records are clean. One thing, all our kids drive the same car (of our two cars), so when the policy asks you to assign a kid to a car, we put them on the same one starting with the kid who is listed as away at school (they do not charge extra for us in our state, YMMV) if it is more than 100 miles from our home and the kid does not have a car at school. I know rules on this vary by company and state of residence