Welcome to the board, Triumph.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Triumph
All is good yet I don't feel FI - still stress out over money - how come?
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In our case it was convincing ourselves by worrying constructively. If you've done the math a thousand times on FIRECalc then shft over to FinancialEngines.com or some other difficult, tedious, high-data-entry calculator (my vote would be ESPLanner) and crunch the numbers some more.
Eventually, somewhere between "This is cool!" and "This is way too much detail" you'll feel satisfied that you haven't missed anything.
One day you'll realize that your ER portfolio earned more money that day/week/month than you did. Another time you'll realize that you're tired of putting up with all the crap at work. Yet another time you'll feel that work intrudes on all the neat hobbies you thought about when you read Ernie Zelinski's "How To Retire Happy, Wild, & Free".
Eventually you'll realize that you have enough, and maybe even reach "you can't spend it fast enough." At that point you'll be both FI and able to sleep at night.
Until then... well, if you don't absolutely hate work and if it's not getting in the way of the rest of your life, then you might as well keep on working. In my case work was always interfering with the other things I wanted to do.
But if you're satisfied that you've crunched the numbers correctly, see if you can take a month or two off work to test-drive your ER life. If you don't want to go back, then you've learned to live with both the FI and the RE components of FIRE!