What income did you give up?

[skipro33]

I walked away from a $150,000 a year job with benefits worth about $50,000 a year for a retirement income of about $85,000 a year. The $85,000 a year is more than I had to spend when I was making $150,000 a year due to savings, costs of keeping a job, car, etc. I now have ALL my time to shop smart, enjoy my life and have more spendable income than I did at the high paying job.

Don't look at the salary, look at the spending budget between retiring and working.

BTW, The longer I was away from work, the more money it would take me to go back to work. At 3 years retired, there is no practical amount of money that would get me to go back to work full time. Why when I have enough to do everything I really want to do and the time to do it? If I had more money, I'd be blowing it or worrying over it in this market. How is that retirement; worrying about money in any fashion?

 

[iac1003]

I gave up my salary on 12/15 of $135K working 1 day a week from April-December and before that 3 days a week - easing into ER and less income. The year before was well over 200K working 3 days a week.

So far, so good. We have DH RMDs and SS, the latter of which will not be taxed for the 1st time since he started collecting it.


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[kcowan]

Thanks. I know the NFL is really big in the US. But most of the rest of the world doesn't even know what NFL stands for or where Dallas is.

The only owner I know about is Paul Allen. Dallas? Yes Marc Cuban owns the Mavericks.

 

[2017ish]

We currently make, before taxes (and bundling in "employer" profit sharing contributions), approximately 3x our projected first year's spending in retirement. Varies depending upon how busy our primary wage-earner (DW) is, and what she is busy with.

 

[Bir48die]

I walked away from a $150,000 a year job with benefits worth about $50,000 a year for a retirement income of about $85,000 a year. The $85,000 a year is more than I had to spend when I was making $150,000 a year due to savings, costs of keeping a job, car, etc. I now have ALL my time to shop smart, enjoy my life and have more spendable income than I did at the high paying job.

Don't look at the salary, look at the spending budget between retiring and working.

BTW, The longer I was away from work, the more money it would take me to go back to work. At 3 years retired, there is no practical amount of money that would get me to go back to work full time. Why when I have enough to do everything I really want to do and the time to do it? If I had more money, I'd be blowing it or worrying over it in this market. How is that retirement; worrying about money in any fashion?

+1

 

[World Traveler]

This is a great thread. I'm on the fence. After retiring from the military I thought I would go back to work and retire at 55 when FI would be 100% but after enjoying a vacation and not liking the idea that I have to get back to work I am re-evaluating.
I have a 153k job with 16% from my company going to a 401k. Now it comes down to retiring at 52 or OMY. Freedom and life ahead outweighs job and money IMO.


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[Hiredgun]

Gave up about $900K a year and shut down our practice about 3 years ago. My wife was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer (currently cancer free and doing well!).

We were already winding down the business, figuring that around 4 mil was sufficient, even tho we were in our late 40s. Business was way too stressful and not worth the pain. Sure, we could have hung in there another 10 years and retired with 10-15 mil, which is a completely different lifestyle, but nowhere worth the pain those years would have inflicted.


Like many have said, you only live once. And I am now seeing how precious life is and how short it can be (funerals of several friends, ages 45 to 70). So yeah, we only get 1 shot and we have no regrets.

God Bless All,

Hiredgun

 

[marko]

When you finally declared FIRE, what was your number that you gave up?

High six figures. But as I've noted before, I wasn't given a choice.

Fortunately, we were spending low six figures. We knew the day would come sooner or later, so we didn't go nuts during the high times.

Actually in a good market year (and a re-activated trust fund) we come pretty close to our earlier income.

 

[freetodream]

About all I can say is wow to the high incomes; OK I should just keep w*rking!! Married with a single income average of $60K/year with two major advantages.... low stress job most days & a db pension.

 

[karen1972]

Sorry hadn't realized my STEM comment had generated so many comments.

So for me it starts with college where there are not as many women in STEM and this has a few outcomes
* Because dorms were split by gender, the men would all get together in their dorms to do their homework, leaving you the odd man out.
* Your female friends are all cutting up magazines for early childhood ed or fashion and your stuck at a computer for hours trying to figure out where your software went wrong making you "out of the loop".. it can be rather isolating.
* Dating is often a mixed reaction and because the hours tend to be longer to study in STEM, it often impacts those relationships because you can't just skip assignments.

So say you get through those social issues and stay the course and graduate and get your first job.

*STEM is often very competitive (look at Google or Microsoft interviews). Women are not necessarily trained to be competitive but taught to be cooperative. It comes down to gender rolls and starts when girls are 3+. I have noticed that women that were in competitive sports or competitions in childhood do better in STEM because they are trained to compete, win and lose. Trained that its ok to say your the best.
* women tend to help others without taking credit. This means it appears your not getting as much done because you spent hours helping a counterpart. This "niceness" factor has hurt many women I know as it actually makes them appear like they are doing less rather than more.
* Women don't tend to brag (cultural) and thus talk about what "we" did and not what "I" did putting us at a performance disadvantage. I had a female manager tell me to always mark my performance review as all 5 out of 5s and then argue down vs. I marked myself as a 3 (average) expecting my manager to tell me how good I was and mark up. She was right, that doesn't happen.
* For some reason there is a phenomenon where a woman can say something brilliant in a meeting and it is often ignored and yet two seconds later a man can repeat the same idea and then that idea gets associated to the guy, not the woman. I've seen this happen a ridiculous amount of times in a meetings. I actually think this is because women tend not to be as forceful in their language and tone so in busy meetings they can be drowned out.
* Men and women just tend to interact on a different basis. Men ask if you saw the game last night, women will ask about family. I've seen time and time again water cooler talk where men can sit there for 20 minutes discussing some game at night and then a woman talk to someone for 5 minutes about some other topic and the manager come in and make some snarky remark about not being paid to chit chat.
* STEM can be a very different environment. When projects are running behind schedule there tends to be a lot of yelling... finger pointing. You have post mortems where everyone is looking for a scape goat. This is not the type of environment that many women I knew could handle.. they really didn't like it and it stressed them out immensely and thus as soon as an option to leave arose, they did. I once was at a customer site where a large wireless carrier had zero service.. the guy sat at my shoulder screaming at me how incompetent I was for almost 4 hours while I try to figure out what went wrong. When I chatted with my female friends after the incident they asked how I didn't break down in tears and why I would let that happen, it was unacceptable.. but that was what I had learned was normal...yeh it sucked but I held it in because crying isn't an option.. crying got you put in the "never to be promoted again" bucket.

So between being passed over for promo/pay increases, being yelled at and blamed for things you didn't do, being under high stress, being dinged because you went home to pick up your kids (even though you made up all the hours and worked twice as hard as your male counterparts).. it wears you down and eventually you quit. Its not that women aren't just as good at the actual job, it that they aren't as good of dealing with the environment that job is in.
I worked in a myriad of jobs at the same company and various other companies and noticed that this behavior tended to only exist in engineering. Moving to other jobs such as project management, this type of behavior didn't exist and jobs were judged on a different basis. Part of it was I didn't notice as much of the over dominant behavior. Ie engineers can be really full of themselves.. this behavior tends to be encouraged because you want the best to do this work. That same behavior is not encouraged or even acceptable in most other fields. It was common to know that this engineer didn't play well with others, was a complete ass, yet was highly praised and promoted as the only guy who knew his stuff. He was applauded for hoarding information... which is just bizarre to me. I'd say at least 1/2 of the highest "performers" fit in that category. At least for this female, having to deal with that behavior every day and it not being reprimanded was mind boggling, frustrating and wore on me.

I believe I was only successful because I dramatically changed my behavior. I'm sure many people thought I was the B-word. I saw that the only successful women in my field were all type A. They stood up to men in meetings and didn't back down. It seemed to be the only thing that was respected (at least at all the companies I worked). I was nice on a personal level but when it came to business it was all non-emotional fact based A/B/C. And I would come home exhausted and emotionally drained because while I was successful at work it wasn't me. About 5 years ago I suffered a back injury and went back to "me"...and stopped getting promoted and was once again passed over, out of the loop, ignored. My career turned back into a JOB and while I was still rated highly I knew that I was done. If I wasn't willing to go into meetings and be forceful and argue with the other engineers then I wasn't going to get ahead any longer.. that is a sad realization but very true.

 

[Danmar]

We currently make, before taxes (and bundling in "employer" profit sharing contributions), approximately 3x our projected first year's spending in retirement.

This was about the same as us once one time items (in retirement) removed. The amount saved for each added year of work would have been around 8-10% of the nestegg. So each added year would have helped financially but not to the extent of the added aggravation. Furthermore, the cash generated from our nestegg and pensions was projected to be quite a bit higher than what we were spending while working. You have to pull the trigger at some point.

 

[tmm99]

Karen,

I read your observation with great interest. I think you have a lot of insight into the situation. I am female and I was in the IT industry for over 20 years, and I can say too that I was considered a b*tch, and I knew it (The b*tch is kind of part of my personality really, unlike you, and I believe it did help my career.) - At some point in my career, I was the only female in IT and even when I wasn't, I was the only female in many meetings. One time, the phone in the conference room rang, and I was sitting next to the phone, but I refused to pick it up (I remember distinctly that everyone did look at me - This was in the mining industry, but people I worked with were not the typical miner type, but still), because I didn't want people to perceive me as a helpful, secretarial type. I always felt like I represented the whole women kind in some ways. (I am originally from Japan which has very traditional/restricted views of females in the work place (which I hear has changed a lot)).

When I hit the 10 year anniversary at my last company and had everyone from our department in the room and one guy (in front of my director/boss) asked me what it felt like to be the only female in the department. I told him that I didn't realize that and that I felt just like one of the guys. (Interestingly, my boss started hiring female employees after that.)

I feel I was compensated as well as the next person (men) with similar experience/work history. I don't think they particularly look at you and say she is female so I pay her less. With the line of work I was in, it was expected that you had no life outside of work. And I didn't have much of life (I was single and I have no kids) so I could do it. They did accommodate their employees picking up children from day care, going out to do errands for family, etc, but you were expected to work after that, nights and weekends if necessary, with very short notice. If you are on time sensitive projects, you were expected to work through weekends, etc, and that would have been very difficult if you had small children with no support from relatives or from hired hands. I was in a specialized job position for many years in IT and I have met some women who did similar work, but most of them were single, or were married but had no children.

 

[marko]

* For some reason there is a phenomenon where a woman can say something brilliant in a meeting and it is often ignored and yet two seconds later a man can repeat the same idea and then that idea gets associated to the guy, not the woman.

Not to take away anything from your very insightful comments but the above reminded me of a situation back in the '80s.

We had hired a young woman for our marketing department. All the managers were smitten. (Those in the trenches said "phony" on the first introduction)

I saw her one day copying notes from a TIME magazine article on a technical subject that involved our industry.

She called a special meeting and spoke on the insights that TIME had spelled out, cleverly not mentioning the magazine.

Senior management's reaction: A few days after her presentation, the VP was running around the company with the TIME magazine saying: "Wow! She's brilliant!! TIME just published everything she said! She's brilliant!! Everything she said is in the magazine!"

Took another year for it to catch up with her...eventually they got wise that she was a poseur. But fun to watch while it went on!

 

[Mulligan]

Not to take away anything from your very insightful comments but the above reminded me of a situation back in the '80s.



We had hired a young woman for our marketing department. All the managers were smitten. (Those in the trenches said "phony" on the first introduction)



I saw her one day copying notes from a TIME magazine article on a technical subject that involved our industry.



She called a special meeting and spoke on the insights that TIME had spelled out, cleverly not mentioning the magazine.



Senior management's reaction: A few days after her presentation, the VP was running around the company with the TIME magazine saying: "Wow! She's brilliant!! TIME just published everything she said! She's brilliant!! Everything she said is in the magazine!"



Took another year for it to catch up with her...eventually they got wise that she was a poseur. But fun to watch while it went on!

Any way we could spin this to someone just being pragmatic? Why reinvent the wheel?


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[marko]

She wasn't being efficient. She had no idea what she was doing and getting by on good looks. A complete fraud who even fudged her credentials.

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[marko]

Any way we could spin this to someone just being pragmatic? Why reinvent the wheel?


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What was fun was was watching management make fools of themselves thinking she was brilliant when everyone else knew all she was was hot

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[Mulligan]

She wasn't being efficient. She had no idea what she was doing and getting by on good looks. A complete fraud who even fudged her credentials.

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My first boss back in the Byzantine era always had a soft spot for the "lookers". He always justified it by saying, "A pretty woman can do just as good as job as an ugly one can".


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[Spanky]

My first boss back in the Byzantine era always had a soft spot for the "lookers". He always justified it by saying, "A pretty woman can do just as good as job as an ugly one can".


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Ha! Ha! Ha! or vise versa! .. "An ugly woman can ... "

 

[Spanky]

Originally Posted by karen1972 View Post
* For some reason there is a phenomenon where a woman can say something brilliant in a meeting and it is often ignored and yet two seconds later a man can repeat the same idea and then that idea gets associated to the guy, not the woman.

This is also true for minorities in the Midwest. Hopefully, the West (e.g. the Bay Area) is better.

 

[MichaelB]

Sorry hadn't realized my STEM comment had generated so many comments.

A very thoughtful post. I worked in a STEM field in Latin America, which has all that plus a strongly male culture. Your post reminds me of many personnel reviews I sat in on, especially in the southern cone countries. When describing their female employees, a typical manager would begin with comments on her appearance, then get into work attributes. With their male employees, they always focused on work related attributes. Still a way to go, eh?

 

[razztazz]

Originally Posted by karen1972 View Post
* For some reason there is a phenomenon where a woman can say something brilliant in a meeting and it is often ignored and yet two seconds later a man can repeat the same idea and then that idea gets associated to the guy, not the woman.

This is also true for minorities in the Midwest. Hopefully, the West (e.g. the Bay Area) is better.

This will happen anywhere there is an "Establishment" that, in the words of Mel brooks, needs to protect their phony baloney jobs. I have seen it happen in meetings run by Minorities who treat any White person's idea as second rate or uninformed for 2 minutes until a Non-White/ Non-Male person says it

The Military does it all the time. The enlisted person's view is completely ignored until the CC, XO or currently in-favor Junior O-3 says it. And I've seen officers do it to each other. The Major that the commander doesn't like but is the only person who knows what's going on: Cold stares. Loud mouth Partyin' Charley Captain: We need to adopt that asinine idea immediately.

 

[AndyS]

I don't mind laying it all out: Retired Federal LEO here ... GS-1811-13 ... last years salary was approx 125k with overtime, language pay, etc.

Retired about 6 years ago at age 49 on approx 71k combination of Federal pension; life expectancy payments from a hefty TSP account; and supplement that goes away at age 62. Have about 100k in the bank & mutual funds.

House, cars, boat, motorcycle, etc paid for, one kid in college on scholarships living at home, zero debt. FEHBP for health insurance (NALC/Cigna.)

Moved to panhandle of Florida when I retired for cheaper property taxes and no State income tax. (my property tax on 3200 sq ft w/pool on 3 acres in Texas was approaching 8k w/insurance approx $1200 ... my property tax on 2100 sq ft in a brand new family subdivision here in FL is $1650 & insurance about $800)

Had a couple jobs after I quit working but last one only lasted about 10 months & I'm not looking for another at present.

Wife did not work enough years to build a retirement plan & now has stage 4 cancer so thank goodness for health insurance 'cause we are maxing out to catastrophic on health insurance each year & one of her chemo drugs (Ibrance) is about 10k per month. (Pfizer has a co-pay assistance program for that so it actually costs us $10 per month out of pocket) She also had a 300k+ spinal surgery last fall at MD Anderson and requires periodic bone scans and MRI's several times per year, some of which requires trips to Houston three or four times per year.

 

[World Traveler]

Andy S,
I sincerely hope all goes well with your wife. I'm in TX so I know the deal about property taxes. Thanks for the info on Florida.

 

[papadad111]

If you are happy then you are a winner. Nothing worse than trying to live according to other people's expectations.

So true. Don't compare yourself to others. Only compare yourself to your own standards that you set.

 

[karen1972]

One last note, I think we were doing so well at improving the number of women remaining in STEM up until this last recession. Almost every single female I know volunteered for severance or were layed off and stayed at home by choice. When the economy got really bad and the layoffs were non-stop and the work place became nothing less than vile as the office became nothing but backstabbing, try to save your job type place.. women walked out the door in droves and I'm not sure how you get that back as you lost a whole generation of females in STEM. A few have moved back into the workplace but mostly into teaching jobs. In the industries where layoffs were minimal, there may still be hope, but in the industries hardest hit will likely be 20 years to recover all the gains they lost.