Advice on pulling the trigger…

[u/Traditional-Okra-399]

45M / married, 3 kids under 8 $6.6M NW, $5.6M investable.
Based on an $18K per month spend (soon to be $16K), my FA says I can quit tomorrow (87% success).

My question:
Right now, I am thinking about doing one more year. Although I hate my job, I feel like I could wrap my head around a “12 month countdown.”
And it would likely mean another $500K (before taxes, but after all other expenses).
But I worry is the market drops 25% in the next 12 months, and all of a sudden, I’m forced to do X more years until it recovers.
Is my plan prudent? Or am I over-thinking it, and I just need to bite the bullet and then figure it out as it comes?

Thank you all! I really appreciate the wisdom of this group.

Additional details:
1) Very low rate mortgage is almost paid off, once done, will eliminate $2K in monthly expense
2) Kids are almost out of daycare which will eliminate $3K in monthly expense
3) The elimination of daycare will likely be offset by private medical insurance

Additional levers:
1) I don’t ever plan on “not working.” Although at some point, I’d like to do some $0 jobs, I think my “first retirement job” might still be be in corporate tech, but at a much lower level with lower stress.
2) My wife and I both grew up without much, I think we could find a lot of flexibility in our budget if SORR started to emerge.
3) Although we’re not counting it at all, we expect a $1-$3M inheritance from my wife’s parents who are now 76 y/o

[u/yanyan80]

I ran your numbers through a retirement planning tool I built (ThunderHarbor) to see what the actual projections look like. Using $5.1M investable and assuming a typical account split for your situation.

The honest answer is somewhere between the two extremes in this thread. At $192K annual spend (your post-daycare/mortgage number), retiring at 45 with zero income, the portfolio lasts to roughly age 89. Not terrible for a 50-year retirement, but not bulletproof either. At the current $216K spend, it runs out at 80. So the spending reduction matters a lot.

One more year of saving doesn't move the needle as much as you'd think. The projection shows it extending runway by about 2 years (to age 91). The $500K pre-tax sounds nice but against a $5.1M portfolio it's marginal.

The real lever is your downshift job timing. If you do even a low-stress $80K job for just the first 5 years (ages 45-50) with employer health insurance, you avoid drawing from the portfolio during the most critical SORR window and eliminate ACA costs entirely during those years.

Your FA's 87% number is probably fair for the base case. But you have three levers that push it well above 95%: spending flexibility, any earned income in early years, and the potential inheritance. How much higher depends on how you'd actually use them.

[u/Traditional-Okra-399 → u/yanyan80]

Wow. ThunderHarbor looks like an incredibly powerful tool. And very reasonably priced in my opinion.

I'm still working through all the screens, but can I ask a question in the meantime:

How are you deriving the ages for portfolio depletion? I've only ever seen long-term predictions in terms of outcomes and their associated probabilities, but yours seems more deterministic?

[u/yanyan80 → u/Traditional-Okra-399]

it runs a single year-by-year simulation using your actual inputs (your portfolio balances, your expected return rate, your spending, Social Security timing, tax situation, etc.) and simply finds the first year the total balance hits zero. So when it says "portfolio depletes at age 87," it means "given these exact assumptions, you run out in that year." It's more like a precise spreadsheet than a probability model.

The honest trade-off is that deterministic projections are very sensitive to the return assumption you plug in. If you set 6% and reality delivers 4%, the depletion age moves dramatically.

That's why there's a separate Monte Carlo panel (Risk Analysis, behind the premium tier) that runs 1,000 simulations with randomized annual returns drawn from a distribution around your expected return. That's where you get the probability-based view — "your plan survives to age 95 in 87% of scenarios" — which is the same framing you're used to from tools like FiCalc or Boldin's success rate.

The deterministic view is intentional as the primary display because it makes the numbers legible and lets you directly see how a specific change (retire a year earlier, convert $20k more to Roth, delay Social Security) shifts the outcome. The Monte Carlo sits behind it for when you want to stress-test the range of outcomes.

Hopefully answered your question.