Well, I meant $100k for both, but either way. Bottom line, that same secure feeling you get when you start collecting SS is only magnified as the amount climbs. Wife already filed, and we are collecting our pensions and when I file in 6-7 years, se are looking at what I consider a pretty decent fixed income of over $10k/mo plus we have a decent portfolio of about $1.5, with a third of it Roth. It’s hard to have a large non government pension without having a high SS. If you retire early enough, especially due to self employment selling of your business, RE or an IPO, you may have very little SS & of course no pension, so that is a lot of ground to make up, income wise, possibly $2.5M, to have the same $100k income comparatively. Of course you also get to retire 10-20 years earlier, and that comes at a price. Luckily, it never crossed my mind that I could or would want to RE, until I was mid 50’s, and by then certain truths were established. I couldn’t leave so much on the table (more than half). Side note:When I retired, I was good friends with a fellow engineer that had retired 6 years earlier, and had poker faced everyone in to not knowing he was an equities savant. He bought gobs of early tech and financial stocks and rarely if ever made a bad call. His NW is over $25M yet he actually stayed working until age 60 to get his non reduced pension and company funded healthcare worth maybe $60/k a year at that time!
Oddly, if I knew an ER someone with $4M invested as their income source, with a tiny SS planned, I would still certainly consider them wealthier than we are, even though we would have the same income.
Someone that worked the grind for 40 years is used to their salary being far less effective as net income. We were used to paying full fed & state income on our earnings, with up to 7.2% off the top up to the limit of whatever FICA was, with the only real deductions temporarily seen as pretax savings which is paying yourself first, ( the tax savings of which turns out are an illusion if you are in the same or higher tax bracket when retired, especially if widowed. ). So someone that FIREd with tax advantaged Munis and LTCG/Divs, and no FICA or Med to speak of, sees $150k of income vastly different than a work for a salary for 40 years FIRE. Or maybe more correctly FIR.
So I see my “retired” $150k income, net amount, as vastly higher than the net I saw with my higher income I had when working. If I never add another cent to principal I still have more disposable income than ever in my life, couple of thousand a month, only taking whatever the portfolio earns added to our fixed incomes. Yet my “Net Worth” remains the same.
