So nobody else wanted to ask how someone with zero debt, no mortgage has a $190-200k yearly expenses? I know COL & taxes are high in NYC, but $69-70k/yr taxes high? Am I that out of touch? (Could be, wouldn’t be the first time). Most people wouldn’t call a $24k/yr pension small. It’s not easy street, but it ain’t peanuts either!
Without even looking at FIRECalc, $6k/m fixed income is $72k, leaving $130k “needed”. With a very safe (even with todays outlook) 3% WR, $5M is still $150k/yr, and that is mostly after tax! Walk away and deal with the feelings and what to do after you see what it is all about. After Covid, assuming your still alive and things get back to normal, then you can re-evaluate if you want to w*rk at something you love to do. The money for retirement sure isn’t a reason.
Edit: 38chevy beat me to it!
TLDR: OP can easily have a $200k annual expense budget.
Sure, here's my targeted budget
Housing
a small house in a hcol area like the one I currently rent in the SF bay area is about $1.5m to buy, that is $15k in prop taxes, and generally folks budget 1% for maintenance so that's another $15k. Have a really nice house (there's a lovely one for $2.75m on the road I want to live on in our neighborhood) and that can go higher.
Transportation
I'm not a car person and my wife doesn't drive at all (city girl, she's talking about getting a vespa to get around the city maybe which would add a bit to this number) and I budget $10k a year for transportation costs (amortized vehicle purchase, operating costs, repairs, plus non-special air travel to visit family). If you like fancy cars instead of running a honda civic until it dies of old age, and you want two or more cars, that would be a bigger number.
Medical
There are repeat threads about how much this can cost, I personally budget $30k for myself and my wife, and probably should be targeting higher based on numbers I see coming out of other folks here.
Food/Drink/Consumables
I budget $40k a year for this, we eat well, my wife likes to drink, we throw frequent big parties where we host large numbers of people (I'm pretending that life will go back to normal someday and I need the budget) and we enjoy fancy restaurants, high quality sushi, and the occasional Michelin 3 star outing a couple times a year.
Hobbies/Toys/Clothes/Makeup/Electronic gadgets/Games/Books/Cooking Gadgets/etc
We each have a $10k a year budget for this.
Recreational Travel
My wife is a traveler and we expect this to be a big line item in retirement, I want to do a long antarctic cruise, when travel, and cramming into small boats are a thing again. Yeah right now nothing is being spent on this, but the budget includes $20k for this.
So that's $150k in after tax expenses I target for what we'd like to be able to spend. I want to be able to live our current lifestyle indefinitely with lots of adventure travel that we haven't been able to do while we've been saving and working.
If somebody has some fancier hobbies (high end photography, flying small airplanes, etc.) that can add a lot of money. Our food budget is high, but if you are a Michelin starred restaurant multiple times a week person, you will likely crush our food budget. More first class flights and 5 star hotels can run that travel budget way past ours. Own a couple houses, have them be nicer than what $1.5m can get you, there goes the house end of the budget. Be super into cars you can add essentially unlimited costs there. Heck, even that medical budget doesn't cover it if you end up with a loved one being sick with something that insurance doesn't want to treat and you end up spending on cutting edge medical care.