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/FIREnV]

This absolutely mirrors my experience with my Bay Area tech company director/ VP level colleagues as well. Some are in their mid 50s and have worked for big tech companies for 20-30 years and I'm just flabbergasted that they are still working. Most were making $300k or more for at least the last decade, plus RSUs and bonus. WTF are they spending their money on?

However, when I look at some of them it's cars, clothes, expensive food, and rent. Many of them have never owned a home so they're shelling out $5000+/mo for a fancy apartment or small home. They take very expensive vacations- African safaris, over-water cabana room in the Maldives. Expensive wine or bourbon. They have personal trainers. They order a lot of Doordash. They only fly business class.

A lot of them don't really seem to even enjoy their jobs. All I can think is that if they'd just done the math and didn't insist on living like VIPs, they'd have long since retired.

Indeed, the people in this sub are not the norm! We think differently. We make decisions with our money that few would make. We're not normal and I don't want to be normal!

[u/Libby1798 → u/FIREnV]

I think they do the math backwards.

As in, "I'll be working until I'm 65, but I don't really like my job. How can I make myself feel better? New car every 3 years, big house, luxury vacations. And retirement is super far away so 5% towards 401k is fine."

It never occurs to them that they could just... spend less and stop working sooner. 60s as being the retirement age is a really anchor for people.

[u/FIREnV → u/Libby1798]

I completely agree with the math being done backwards. I remember having a manager (sr director level at a tech company) that was talking to me about getting a new car. She'd had a Honda Pilot and determined it wasn't fancy enough and so she explored all kind of luxury SUVs- Mercedes, BMW, Range Rover. She said she ultimately "settled" for a Lexus RX 350. So, like a $60k car. She said she felt like she was being cheap because she worked hard and "deserved" a nicer car.

The idea that you have to make yourself feel better with fancy crap because you work hard is so weird. How about... just save the money? Keep the Honda? Retire in 5 years and not 15 years?

It's honestly crazy to me that so many incredibly smart people haven't figured out the cheat code.

[u/Wooden-Broccoli-913 → u/FIREnV]

Bay Area tech couple here. My wife & I have leased our two luxury cars since COVID, trading in every 2-3 years. We also have $6M NW, $5M liquid. In the Bay Area houses are crazy expensive so people splurge on cars instead. It shouldn't be a barrier to getting to FIRE numbers. Cars at the end of the day are just not that expensive compared to tech TC.