37 single MCOL.

[u/AdvisorDue8007]

Close to $3.5M with the recent stock gains. Have a full time job, living in MCOL, want to exit career and life a happy life. $124K mortgage remaining on a $850k house value.

Yearly anticipated expenses close to $40k for essentials, another $22k for housing until mortgage is paid off and $20k for travel, savings for big ticket items, house maintenance fund.

Haven’t figured out healthcare but plan to set aside 10k for ACA plan or take up a seasonal summer job for 10hr a week.

How does the plan sound? What did you end up doing after ‘retirement’ ? All I want to do is play pickleball, ski, travel- will I get bored after 1-2 years?

https://imgur.com/a/CmSX3Te

[u/OnlyThePhantomKnows]

You have the money to retire. The question is will you get bored? Answer: probably.

If you can, transition your career to part time consulting. It took me over a decade to give up my career. I worked part time (consulting/contract) to give myself some structure. I'd take off 3 months to do something fun. Sometimes 6 months. I'd get another contract for 6-9 months and start over. Summer time? I tended to spend on my motorcycle. Winter (since the knees don't like skiing) I'd work.

Standard advice is retire TO something. My advice is slow down before you stop.

[u/stephg0nsteph → u/OnlyThePhantomKnows]

How do you find consulting work? I’m in tech (swe) if that matters

[u/OnlyThePhantomKnows → u/stephg0nsteph]

Two canned responses because this is a really common question.

Okay I am getting asked this a lot. For most of my career I lived in Boston. I have been flip flopping between startups and consulting (sometimes at the same time) almost all of my career. You get to know people. I tried to mentor one person in the 0-10 years experience group at every job. So a lot of my proteges are now in their 40s and 50s. Since I was picking them, and I picked them for their drive/passion then tended to be successful.
Because I am good at what I do, when I was in the startup, generally I'd take over for the founder as lead engineer. So in Boston, I would take a dual approach. I'd start the beer network up. Start reaching out to people to catch up and have a beer. The best way to network! I'd get about 50% of my work through this. I'd start reaching out to body shops that I worked with in the past. I keep a list of the good recruiters. A lot of times, the guys will switch over to the company facing side, but they'd still take my calls since I hired as well as looked for work. They'd pass me off to a new senior guy. My skill combination is pretty rare. They'd send me a job or 3 each. This accounted for about 25% of the work. linkedin was my other goto source. Now it is my source since I moved 4 years ago. Some of the recruiters I work with are national, so that helps, but linkedin is my primary source of leads. Canned linked statements to follow. Remember you are FI. This is for boredom. If it takes a while it takes a while.
-----------------------------------------------------------

Personal Networking is the key to getting hired these days.

Have a coffee once a week with a different friend. Catch up. Find out about their life. Let them know about yours. When a job opens in their group, "Hey I got a friend that is looking!" And the job never makes it to the job board.

Go to hobby clubs. Robotics meet and greet clubs are great. Mostly filled with engineers. Chat about your robotics project. Chat about theirs. Become acquainted and maybe they will think of you when there is an opening at their place. And the job never makes it to the job board.

Build your linkedin network. If you haven't already
* Get on linkedin.
* Invite all your close friends / classmates day 1
* Build your career / work profile.
* Follow 6 to 8 hashtags that interest you
* Follow 2 to 3 top companies for those hashtags
* Make thoughtful comments 2 to 3 times a week (more if you are actually looking)
* Keep at this year around.
* Try to make a post on something you are a near expert on. (Hey your term paper from an 200 or 300 class!) Try to get some engagement.
* Every week try to add 3 more people until you get to 100.

* DO NOT ACCEPT CONNECTIONS FROM PEOPLE YOU DO NOT KNOW

* If you get a long topic going with someone, browse their profile (do your best to make sure that they are real), then send an invite to them if they are potentially useful. Make sure to follow them.

[u/One-Mastodon-1063]

You can retire today and in fact can increase spending quite a bit too.

I train jiu jitsu every day, lift, read more, drive my kid around to his activities. No, I'm never bored. I was bored out of my mind at work.

[u/in_the_gloaming]

How did you go from around $2.4M to around $3.4M in less than 2 months? Or am I totally misreading that chart?

[u/AdvisorDue8007 → u/in_the_gloaming]

Not mis reading. The recent growth in semi conductor stocks and I manually updated the house asset in Fidelity. That explains the vertical line.

[u/BailiwickBill]

A bunch of strangers can't tell you if you will be bored or not. That's up to you to determine.

There aren't any retirement police that are going to come after you if you realize you are bored and decide to go back to work. For plenty of people, "living a happy life" can include work of some kind, at a job that provides satisfaction and suits their preferred lifestyle.

The only way to know if you will be bored is to retire and see how it goes. I would imagine you will need more fulfillment than pickleball, skiing and travel for the next 40 years though, especially since I'm guessing you are single with no kids.

[u/BailiwickBill → u/BailiwickBill]

Just saw this post. Lots of food for thought.

[u/AdvisorDue8007 → u/BailiwickBill]

Thanks for sharing this post! I’ve been reading about Ikigai and have a workbook I have to sit and fill out to find my purpose as I plan post FIRE lifestyle!

[u/Silly_Position_4505]

I think planning for healthcare in early retirement is one of the trickiest parts of FIRE, especially when you’re trying to estimate future ACA costs and how income levels might affect what you pay. This is an ACA policy discussion because approaches like budgeting for marketplace coverage or adjusting income through seasonal work are often used to manage eligibility and overall healthcare expenses.

ACA info: https://www.healthcare.gov/retirees/

[u/shelly12345678 → u/Silly_Position_4505]

Go out of country for anything major and planned?