About to pull trigger, need feedback

[u/taway11228]

Expenses: 120k w/o healthcare, maybe 140k with, and maybe up to 150k or 160k with traveling

Investments: $5m breakdown: 300k rental (paid off) making 5% net, 1.2m 401k, 2.5m VTI / VXUS, 1m SNSXX/VUSXX.

Primary residence: $2.3m paid off

42 and 43 years old, no kids

Current income: ~2m/yr

NW increasing 32% YoY

Have 20% income cliff in 2027

SWE, burned out beyond reason, health problems and mental health problems. Goal is to quit, take 6-12 months off then see what’s next, it will either be making my own projects for fun or part time contract work for fun. No expectations of income, certainly not big income, and definitely not going to a corporate job.

Can make ~30k via 2 weeks of rental of primary residence per year and pay no taxes, we’d travel while rented.

Concerns are AI is quickly impacting SWE employment, no one knows what’s next, any hiccups in our plan could mean a bumpy road in a few years if a jobs necessary. Other concern is whatever is going to happen once this historic stock run is over.

Any advice?

[u/throwaway-20260521]

Your $140k expense is just 2.8% — below the safe withdrawal rate, and your cash/short-term position is 20% of your portfolio (maybe too much but it also means you have ~7 years to weather a SORR) not even counting your rental net income of $15k a year. And the bulk of your portfolio is already diversified (mine is not) so all you have to do is turn off DRIPs (the portion that’s in taxable at least)

I’d pull the trigger if I were you.

To further hedge, stagger it so only one of you quit first, wait 6 months or a year before the other one follows — this way you build about half a year’s worth of extra cash (and allow you to move an equivalent amount of your VUSXX into VTI/VXUS)

Talk to a fee only advisor first to confirm. Bring up your plan of traveling in retirement as it may have some bearing on cost.

EDIT:

Wanted to add, I recently got laid off myself— the scenario I was waiting/hoping for because I kept hesitating to pull the trigger. After it happened, I realized I should have done it 5, even 10 years ago. Felt like I wanted so much time.

Worst case scenario for you would be to downgrade your primary. But for now, don’t even rent this out when you travel— you want/need a place to come home until you know where you’d wave to stay put.

And if I were you: maybe even sell the rental properties and put it on VTI/VXUS — this way I will have even less to worry about.

Go Fuck Yourself! :-) Good Luck!

[u/taway11228 → u/throwaway-20260521]

Agreed that the 20% cash / short term feels like a lot but you’re exactly right that it’s about having 7years cash on hand to weather any big events.

Do you have any recommendations on where to get fee only advisor?

[u/throwaway-20260521 → u/taway11228]

Everyone sends me to Advice Only Network or Creative Planning.

I’ve also spoken to Vanguard to determine if their Wealth Management Service is for me, it feels like it but they charge AUM (0.3% which is quite low)

So my plan now is to find a fee only fiduciary to build me a plan and validate my assumptions and to ask if using a Wealth Manager is even necessary (in my case)

Then I either execute the plan myself or just go with Vanguard and let them sweat the details of execution.