As the title says, I am pretty much agonizing about whether to ER now or not. The decision is now vs. 2 years from now. Here are the necessary bits of information, you get to vote on what you would do and maybe leave some comments if you like.
Reasons for going now:
- I am not passionate about my job, at all. Don't hate it, but could easily never do it again a day in my life and I'd be fine. I do, however, have a passion outside of work. It is an outdoor lifestyle sport that requires a lot of focus, time, training, and commitment. My wife shares this passion with me. This is not a sport that gets easier with age - a year now in my early 40s is extremely valuable to me. I've been doing this sport for almost 20 years and hope to do it another 20 - it's not a passing thing for me, I live and breath it and spend most of my time at work thinking about it.
- If I sell my house I'd walkaway with about $3.8M total. We could go buy a nice house in a lower cost area for $500k, set aside $200k for college expenses, and still have over $3M to live on. At 2.5% WR this is $75k per year - we could easily live on that and supplement with seasonal part time work if we needed to, perhaps coaching our sport.
Counter-argument for staying:
- I am in a unique position where I have unusually high compensation for the next two years because of a one-time business deal. Long story short, if I stay two more years the walkaway number would be closer to $5M instead. Kind of a lot of money to walk away from.
Every day is a struggle to convince myself not to quit - it's been much harder for me to keep going after FI than before, the option to walk away is just so tempting. I am afraid I'll regret walking away from the money, and I'm equally afraid I'll regret selling these two prime years of my life for money that I don't really end up needing.
If it makes any difference, my wife is much more adventuresome than me - she's fine to wait 2 years but thinks we should go now.
So... what would you do?
Reasons for going now:
- I am not passionate about my job, at all. Don't hate it, but could easily never do it again a day in my life and I'd be fine. I do, however, have a passion outside of work. It is an outdoor lifestyle sport that requires a lot of focus, time, training, and commitment. My wife shares this passion with me. This is not a sport that gets easier with age - a year now in my early 40s is extremely valuable to me. I've been doing this sport for almost 20 years and hope to do it another 20 - it's not a passing thing for me, I live and breath it and spend most of my time at work thinking about it.
- If I sell my house I'd walkaway with about $3.8M total. We could go buy a nice house in a lower cost area for $500k, set aside $200k for college expenses, and still have over $3M to live on. At 2.5% WR this is $75k per year - we could easily live on that and supplement with seasonal part time work if we needed to, perhaps coaching our sport.
Counter-argument for staying:
- I am in a unique position where I have unusually high compensation for the next two years because of a one-time business deal. Long story short, if I stay two more years the walkaway number would be closer to $5M instead. Kind of a lot of money to walk away from.
Every day is a struggle to convince myself not to quit - it's been much harder for me to keep going after FI than before, the option to walk away is just so tempting. I am afraid I'll regret walking away from the money, and I'm equally afraid I'll regret selling these two prime years of my life for money that I don't really end up needing.
If it makes any difference, my wife is much more adventuresome than me - she's fine to wait 2 years but thinks we should go now.
So... what would you do?