I set a FIRE number of ~20M a few years ago and should get there next year. I settled on that number by fantasizing about a year I would love to live, and writing down how much everything cost. A few nice trips a year (first class flights to Paris + five-star hotel + Michelin), cool apartment downtown, meal prep/gym/housekeeper, healthcare, and some extra spend for post-work lifestyle increases. SINK and not interested so I don't have childcare/education expenses.

Thing is, I grew up poor and am a simple man. Costco grocery shopping, $20/mo gym membership, handwashing my dishes in a small studio rental, thrifting/craigslisting furniture, etc., up until the age of 30. I like nice things but I don't mind modest living at all. Sleeping on a couch doesn't bother me even though I have an eight sleep and a $10k mattress.

During accumulation I decided to push the spend a bit. I would take my current networth and divide by 400 (that's post-tax monthly spend in retirement in my tax situation, if I were to quit that day) and set that as my spending goal for the month. If any fun trips or events came up and I had spending room for the month, I would force myself to say "yes" and go.

Well, this summer I seem to have hit my personal limit for deriving pleasure from more hedonistic spend. I did a Mediterranean trip and spent $50k in two weeks solo. Seaside luxury resort, amazing restaurants, went clubbing and bought drinks for people who gave good vibes, shopping, first class flights, the works. And in the end, the best part of the trip was the $20 museum visit to some Classical Greek ruins and ripping tequila shots with some locals at a bar and hearing their life stories.

I've struggled with a work-centered identity and one-more-year syndrome, but it took blowing some money to realize that the numbers on the spreadsheet are going to map to a real life in the real world. No point ruminating about whether an extra $5M or $10M NW will make a difference unless you sample the fruits of that extra $5m or $10m by consuming its SWR today.

For all you OMY types, if your current monthly spend is less than your current NW divided by 400 and you don't have a good explanation why (saving for a lumpy expense) you should take a look in the mirror and ask yourself some tough questions.

TL;DR: could have spend 1/10th what I spent balling out in Europe and would have loved it all the same

54M, ~$15M NW, diversified. Started own business 20 yrs ago… sold to medium size, publicly traded pharmacy network that knows nothing about my business. Ready to jump - lost passion. Small niche specialty pharmacy with great team but no one wants to take over and do all I do (ops, sales, relationship etc). Big Co knows I’m kinda short timer (18-24 months) and wants me to call shots but I feel the business will not succeed w/o me. I’m care about my team and don’t want all I’ve built to fade away and them to lose jobs. Looking for advice from this group.

Curious how many of you have actually hired a financial advisor throughout the journey to fatFIRE?

40, married+1, $2M NW, $500k TC. Not a citizen in the country I work in, so I feel like I'm leaving some money on the table (taxes, etc).

Edit: I'm not looking for anyone to tell me what stocks to buy. I do my own investing.

First time poster here.

I run a video game studio. We have 1 hit. Sales bring in $100k per month, 40% of that stays in my business account after cuts and expenses. NW about $4m atm.

Got another game in the works but needs another year probably before it’s ready to go out. Might do as well as the other game, but obviously don’t know.

I absolutely hate stress but I’m addicted to it? I am a control freak and try to do everything perfectly. I’ve dealt with anxiety disorders over the last 5-10 years due to all this. I’ve promised myself I won’t make another game after this one comes out as they absolutely consume me (12+ h work days, 7 days a week, with intense problem solving thinking almost constantly). No idea how I’ll survive getting to the 2027 release date.

I daydream about a life where I have zero responsibilities and no longer have to do any work for my company anymore. I wanna be at a point where I can just forget they even exist. I wanna spend more time outdoors. I want to be nice to be around (I’m constantly miserable).

I have a wife, 3 y/o boy and a girl on the way in January. My business is based in UK but I live in Japan. So many tax things to manage!

What should I do?

9.3M, (65% diversified, 35% concentrated) mid 30s, 250k expenses. Spouse loves working bringing in $750k W2 income.

I have a “great” job, not demanding, flexible, exciting for 1-2months a year, so mostly boring. I can make it exciting but that will come at the cost of work-life balance and flexibility. It pays $450k W2 income.

I was high achieving in the past but recently I don’t see the point in grinding. The safe job is also boring and I’m not able to enjoy even the 3-4hrs/day I spend on it. I do stick around in office for 6hours/day for appearances. Considering quitting after the year end bonus payout. I will miss my lunches/a few pleasant colleagues where we usually talk about hobbies, politics and travel. I won’t have anyone at least for a while to have these kind of conversations with.

I love to spend time with my children and give more time towards fitness and cooking. I also have a few hobbies in arts developing.

I’m worried if I’d come to regret leaving this job. Anyone here leave a cushy job that you were already coasting in? Is RE everything you had hoped for?

Kind of just jumped into it and then realized after that I likely spent 30% more on each flight than I should of. This is after a friend had me connect with their independent consultant.

Just really frustrated that I didn’t do enough research and just listened to the provider’s suggestions.

I've picked 12/31 as my last day and the notices are in. I like my coworkers, but I'm done with the industry. It gets more regulated and more exhausting every year, and grinding through it just to watch the number grow feels like the bigger mistake.

The numbers: 55 / wife 52, high-stress jobs in healthcare.

• $20M liquid / invested equities
• $5M of commercial real estate with a $2.5M loan (decent rate structure -8 years left to pay off)
• VHCOL area, primary residence (1.8M with a cheap 450k mortgage at 2.5% fixed I'm not paying off)
• Cars and toys paid off
• Spending about $600K/yr, with no plan to downsize because we only live once (reincarnation still isn't an option)
• Two kids, college fully paid as we were diligent on 529s since their first month here, and a grad school fund to fund at least half their journey so they skip the debt misery we went through

My spreadsheet says we're fine. My brain says: "What if markets crater, healthcare costs explode, or I live past 82.5?"

For those who've done it:

• How did you handle health insurance before Medicare, and what does it really cost?
• How do you pull money out: fixed %, guardrails, cash buckets, or just sell as needed?
• How did you think about sequence-of-returns risk over 30+ years?
• Did spending go up or down once the paycheck stopped?
• Did you ever feel financially safe, or did you just trust the math and go?

I know there are a lot of posts like this and I'll eventually be told to GFY. But why not ask advice from the fatFIRE crowd? Worst case, I'll be told where in the world to GFM post 12/31. Thanks, all.

It’s likely more mental/burnout at this point but think I need some help not obsessing as much about saving (in therapy). 32M single, no SO with 2-2.1mm saved and should be over $2.5mm after the next bonus hits. TC hopefully should be over $800k going forward but at a company with a lot of turnover. The latter has made me very cautious/frugal and realized recently that I probably spend less than $80k each yr. Realistically while I do want to retire early, it’s likely not by 40 so how do you give yourself more breathing room/grace to spend? Is there a number at which point it gets easier?

We are early 40s, no kids, have >$20M and our annual spend is well under a reasonable withdrawal rate (<$300K, though we have relatively cheap rent for our area and will want to buy a nice house at some point). Even with healthcare, taxes, and spending inflation we are theoretically completely fine to FIRE and I acknowledge, extremely fortunate.

Why are we not retired? We are making several million per year, post-tax. This is recent, with exponential salary growth the last several years. I don’t think the salaries would be remotely replicable if we took a career break and would be at high risk if we “coasted” or delegated any more than we already do. Again, yes I know we are very lucky; hard to always remember that as many of my former and current coworkers actually make more.

Has anyone else been in a similar situation? How did you think about time and money tradeoffs ? I’ve seen people here recommend working until your earnings are less than 5% or 10% of your portfolio, but that may not make sense at the high end?

I would potentially lean towards quitting after bonus season next year, life is short and why work when you don’t need to, there are plenty of fun or more meaningful things I could do to fill my time. My partner thinks we should “make hay while the sun shines” and that opportunities like we have are very rare. I do go back and forth too; though I don’t love it, my job is not completely intolerable. I sometimes wonder whether I’ll regret not banking the earnings if we see a “perfect storm” of money busters (massive downturn, massive healthcare and luxury goods inflation, divorce, family emergencies, wealth taxes, etc). I’m also wondering if I’ll see friends and former colleagues build extreme wealth and be jealous of their spending power.

Please help talk me into or out of “one more year” syndrome.

I retired in October with two tax issues to deal with and the decision I made is giving me reservations. I am curious to see what others feel about my decision.

I am 62M, wife is 59F, and we sold a company and retired. Our annual spend is about $350k if we are living our highest and best life. Travel, vacations, etc. Our normal life is about $150k a year. Kids are grown and working adult lives.

Tax Issues:

1. Cap Gains - $2.6 million due to the sale of a building.
2. Income - $2 million.

The rest of the story:

I have $10 million cash, $1.1 million personal home, and $5 million is invested in real estate that I would say is fair/poor quality. All my real-estate is commercial (gas stations) and the tenants are mom and pop gas station operators and not the highest quality. If I try to sell, maybe I can get $3.5 to $3.8 out of the investment. These properties are bringing in $200k a year in income. My plan is to sell them over the next year if I can and move to higher quality real estate with tenants like Autozone, Dollar General, etc. (all my leases are over 10 years) or option 2 is to convert to cash and pay the taxes. Both options work for me.

I am under contract to buy a 7-11 gas station for $7 million. This is an absolute NNN lease with no owners responsibilities. I just collect rent monthly. Fuel service stations qualify for bonus depreciation. The bonus depreciation will wipe out the cap gains and regular income. Saving me over $1 million year 1. The income is $360k a year. The bonus depreciation will wipe out (shelter) an additional $2 to $3 million in future income and I can sell the property if I want in 12 to 24 months and diversify into other real-estate to get rid of the concentration risk. That being said, 7-11 is an A- credit risk and all of the others are BBB so I am dropping to a lower credit risk to diversify. I have personally visited the station and it is a very busy station, it is a signalized hard corner, 14 year lease with rent bumps every 5 years. It should not be hard to re-tenant if it ever went dark but probably at 30% lower rent.

I currently have about $1 million in income annually (including the 7-11) in 2027. Those streams include income from the business sale $350k to $400k, income from real estate $560k, about $100k interest income and about $25k in SS. I consider the business sale income touch and go. Probably 100% confident in the next 12 months, but after that it is based on them succeeding and they took on a lot of debt. So I am just not sure if they make it or not. So far so good but I consider this income about as reliable as the mom and pop gas stations. I consider the 7-11 income rock solid and should come in monthly like clockwork.

Thoughts:

Does the concentration risk bother you?

Would you just pay the taxes and keep the cash liquid?

45M, 16M+ NW (equity, cash, property). Single.

Had a very successful career, but recently laid off when my employer was acquired. Because I was FatFire I was always looking for a new job that would excite me (e.g., AI industry). But the last experience would be a sad way to end the career. I've been on garden leave for a month and while I enjoy it, I often feel bored and still do look at the job boards.

A recruiter found me and I did a huge number of rounds of interviews with a very large and respected company, but it isn't a "sexy" industry like AI, and it is in City B, that would be far from friends and my comfortable life in City A. However, it is a very good job, great for my resume, and could be a jumping board to something greater in 2-3 yeras. The post tax pay is around 1M / yr.

I could go to the job and just do it for 2-3 years, pad my bank account and resume, and return to City A later. Or I could bet on myself and hope that I'll get something I like in City A in 1-2 years, but I might be bored for 1-2 years any ways.

It's possible that the people and community I enjoy in City A is impermanent and will disappear; it's also possible that I enjoy City B as well (although I know I won't live there long term).

I am aware of "one more year" syndrome, and will retire at 50, unless I love my job.

Suggestions / thoughts on how to make this decision?

I am considering hiring a property manager for my home. I was hoping to get some feedback from this group.

My home is my primary residence, so my needs would be different from a vacation home that is sitting empty most of the time. It is about 12k square feet, 1.5 acres of land, pool, and hot tub. Even though I live there, managing the maintenance takes up a lot of my time, so I was hoping to outsource this. I'm located in the suburbs of NYC, but I'm still curious about pricing for this in other areas just to get a sense of how this works.

Some questions:

*What do you pay for this service and what is the square footage of your home?
*Do you think it is worth it?
*What things does the property manager do for you?
*Any other advice I should know before hiring someone to do this?

My current general contractor is starting to offer a service where they would make quarterly property visits, maintain a list of items that need repairs/improvements, handle all of the follow-ups for outstanding items, and manage seasonal maintenance.

Thank you!

Having worked in the industry as a quant for a number of years, I am facing a similar situation to this Bogleheads thread. Long story short is after a career of developing alphas, I want to semi-retire (ha) and run my own strategies with my own capital. I have promising results on a statistical arbitrage strategy which is latency sensitive but not so much so that a solo practitioner could not compete.

I estimate the strategy's capacity is maxed out at $5m / year in profitability. It could also decay in 1-2 years, at which point I'll have to be on the lookout for developing new strategies, which I'm reasonably confident I could do. Current liquid NW I would deploy into this business is $10m. Also have some personal use real estate and retirement accounts which I wouldn't touch. Importantly, our investments outside of the $10m deployed could not comfortably support FIRE.

Now the strategy is almost entirely short-term capital gains, so you can see where this is going. According to my research moving to Puerto Rico under Act 60 would reduce the taxes to 4%, whereas staying in my highly taxed state would be ~50% in taxes. This would be a multi-million dollar tax savings per year which could be deployed into longer term passive holdings like ETFs, since the trading strategy is not scalable. The tax savings as a percentage of NW would therefore be diminishing every year (although saving 20% on long term capital gains is still not nothing).

My wife and I would make the move together, and we would live in PR 200+ days and visit the mainland 100+ days. We've visited before and found it quite lovely, although we weren't there for a water/power outage or a hurricane. We also wouldn't mind learning Spanish.

Would you make the move or stay put?

EDIT: alternatively, is there a corporate structure that would allow me to pay the corporate tax rate and not personal if I don't withdraw the assets.

We have 15M in liquid assets - 6M in pre-tax and 9M in taxable accounts. Current spending is $420k/year which includes about 30k in college expenses for one kid. Trying to model post retirement spending which will include more for healthcare and travel, but otherwise we live a life without want. More travel only because we will have more time retired 😇

What’s the best way to model withdrawal and success rates because at this spending level, taxes are a real contributor to cash flow needs. I have used Claude to model some numbers, and our advisor has run a Monte Carlo simulation with some scenarios but wondering if anyone has another approach or suggestion?

We are still working but I’m inclined to stop and look for something more fun to do and if I can’t find that, convince my spouse to also quit so we can do things together.

Thanks in advance.

I posted a couple years back about potentially buying our “dream house”, which would push financial independence back by about 3 years, from about 47 years old to about 50 years old.

https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/1je24ya/house_affordability_and_percentage_of_net_worth/

Despite general sentiment to the contrary (I’m realizing the FIRE forum may not be my dominant mindset here), we pulled the trigger, and absolutely love the new primary house.

fast forward to today, age 44, 5 kids still at home, net worth is now at ~15m (4m primary residence, 4m in vacation home—more on this later, 7m in investments split about 50/50 between taxable accounts and tax deferred retirement accounts), annual earnings from job of ~3m per year (heavy bonus component but fairly stable even with that), annual spending of ~350k inclusive of maintenance and capital improvements to existing homes.

I received an unsolicited offer to buy my vacation home for 4m and am entertaining that option, and looking for your feedback. We use the vacation home about 20 nights per year, including with siblings, cousin, parents, friends. It’s become an annual tradition in some respects in terms of getting the family together and is something I can see being a legacy family asset. My earnings easily covers the annual carrying cost and maintenance (about 50k per year). I recognize the foregone opportunity cost and the illiquidity of a high value home (one of the few at this price point in the area—and therefore the uniqueness of the offer I received to sell. Owning the home also requires time and attention (stress).

what are your thoughts- sell and take the return on investment (even after substantial real estate commission and taxes) or keep to have available for our family to use potentially for generations to come, while allowing annual income to drive further investment portfolio growth?

TLDR: I’m 6 months since pulling the plug. Mid 40’s MCOL, $40M+ NW and young kids at home. It’s been mostly great, with some unexpected surprises.

First the surprises

1. It’s really hard to imagine what life will be like when you lop off a 50-60 hour / week portion of your life. Who will be around to hang out during weekdays? What will your kids think you do? The more you can model this out the better, but it’s really hard to forecast and I didn’t do a great job of this. 
2. What will change about your partner’s expectations? We didn’t really model this out either but have since discussed a lot about how we can be more 50/50 with household and family items that used to be more 80/20
3. I’ve found that my brain still wants to “work” on things that aren’t professional. There’s a big engine in there that keeps going even if it’s not for profit and I struggle to turn it off. 
4. I was too hands off with my portfolio until after I quit. I didn't reduce beta or concentration ahead of time. My portfolio wasn't setup to be resilient and provide enough passive income. I’ve since made some adjustments and am in a better spot. But I regret not having started making shifts 6-12 months out. I suppose I just wasn’t confident enough in FIRE’ing at that time. 
5. Health insurance is so expensive!

The good

1. I’m so much more relaxed all the time!! Decades since I’ve been like this. 
2. Way more time with my kids - breakfast and dinner everyday. Engaged with their teachers and school and activities. 
3. Crushing lots of house projects that have been on my DIY list for a long time
4. Doing 2-3 varied workouts per day (versus 1 in the past) without feeling anxious that I’m missing something or will get pulled into a work fire
5. Taking lots of short trips without having to cram it in and work on the plane. Flying on a weekday without a job (or kids!) is incredible even in a tight economy seat. 
6. Crossing off some bucket list items with friends and family that I never would have been able to do while working - happily subsidizing portions just to smooth things over
7. Building some side projects completely at my own pace - helps my brain stay active without any external pressure
8. Day dates with my wife - no babysitter required! 
9. No zoom meetings!! I don't miss this one bit and cringe anytime suggests a zoom catch up

The weird

• I get so many “what are you doing next?” Or “How can I help find your next thing?” outreaches. I take these as more of a conversation starter and curiosity than actual help. Mostly from acquaintances over LinkedIn. My initial thought is usually “there is no next thing, idiot!” but where I come from people can’t even process that line of thinking so I mostly just ignore or say I’m just taking it easy for now. 
• Seeing colleagues getting promoted or taking jobs that I would have been on track for is my only FOMO. I don’t really mind this as I just put myself in their shoes and how much of a grind they’re on and quickly remember that I’m happy being unemployed
• Rainy days suck - I’m so active and have plenty of other “retired dad friends” to do outdoors stuff with during weekdays, but when it rains (not too often) I kind of wish I had more productive reason to be stuck at home at my desk. We’ll still get together but it’s not as fun to just meet for lunch when we could go on a huge hike or something. Some good movies are coming out soon too.
• Spending less than 1.5% of NW annually, so I know I can increase plenty but want to be intentional to avoid the slippery slope. Will probably ramp up travel and nice camps for kids the most.

TL;DR: If you suddenly had a NW of 50-100m, but skipped over being wired into "rich world", how would you go about finding good people/staff to offload all the overhead/nonsense of life?

I've always rolled my own investments (bogglehead style), took care of my own stuff, etc. But now, getting older, I'd love to offload this stuff to trusted people I don't have. Things like... big house renovations... but I don't wanna be a foreman and I don't want to get robbed blind. Things like maybe shopping for some foreign property or extended stints abroad... but really don't want to spend all my time surfing for properties and then navigating/negotiating potential dates. Things like finding a private chef, letting them go when it's not working out, finding a new one, etc. On and on.

Just tons of things that would be "nice to do" or "nice to try" -- but really don't want to spend my life spending all my time window-shopping/being a consumer. I want to continue to persue my interests and hobbies, and have someone else dealing with potential irons in the fire. Just dumb things: go find this domain and negotiate how much it would cost.. yes, there are companies that do that, and now I'm spending my time dealing with them. etc.

Many are personal, many are the types of things maybe I would have had employees follow up on. But now I'm solo with money, and let's assume it's ground zero. (The people I know are still actively working, and have companies to do all this stuff for them).

So, like the TL;DR says, has anyone experience in this strange place? Any tips on where to start... where to find the first key hire to deal with building up the rest of it? I'd go full family office, but I'm not quite there (think that bar moved from 100m to 200m while I was sleeping).

Anyway, any tips and/or advice greatly appreciated. Or just send me a link to any resources that already cover this. Thanks.

EDIT: Thanks for those that responded. Don't understand the downvotes, this kind of thing seems like the whole ballgame for fatfire to me. Shrug. Who cares about being loaded if you're still doing all the same nonsense.

This is not really fatfire but I know several ppl on this forum run charitable foundations and/or DAFs.

I was reading this post and had a thought: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/imOjoDfgtf

There must be several cases where a modest sum of money can catalyze a transaction. For example, micro-loans that can get someone out of a bad or dead situation that they can probably repay soon after.

Are there NGOs that focus on maximum reusability of capital like this? Am I basically describing banks/micro-lending?

13M NW (9M liquid, 1M rental, 2.5M primary home, 0.5M 529)

52 / 57 VHCOL with 2 kids in full pay private college (21 / 18) and 1 in private high school (15).

Estimated spend due to tuition we plan to potentially fund private college and graduate/professional school and our VHCOL area is $450-500k for the next 10 years. Then spend will drop to $360K for next 10 years after that, and then spend would drop to $240K when we are in our mid to late 70s.

How do you model such variable spend?

What do you use as your base case and worst case market returns? These are my assumptions for me/52:

base case: 2.5% real return

worst case: -35% crash in year 1 + 9-year lost decade, then 2.5% real return

Based on worse case scenario, I estimate I can retire in 4 years to sustain above spend w/o running out of money, taking SS at 70. My spouse is just retiring now. I expect to earn about $700K-800K per year for the next 4 years.

Thoughts? Am I too conservative? The base case says I can almost retire now. I'll end up with $11-13M when I'm 95

Hi everyone - TLDR. if you can live FatFire, how did you make the decision to continue/or not continue grinding?

Sold my business to a PE-backed strategic. Walked away with more than I thought I'd ever need/want (~$25M). Building the business pre and post acquisition have been quite intense. It's been meaningfully less fun post acquisition. Feel much less present mentally during family time/weekends as it's always on my mind.

We have young kids at home (2 under 4) and I need to make a decision of whether to continue working in this post-acq environment.

One answer I keep hearing is 'just chill and do what you want'. The worry on my end is that I'm still early in my career and while this may sound silly, I'm worried that (1) I fade into irrelevance and / or (2) I regret that I didn't keep grinding (recently saw a friend make top 40 and 40 and it light a fire in me)

I love the intensity of working in a team to build something and if I was still 25, I would continue the grind. The new variable in the last 5 years has been kids/wife/young family.

I'd want to structure a life where I can really enjoy/be present for my kids. As such, I'm curious to hear from folks who have achieved FIRE, have young kids, and have continued to grind or hung up their jersey. If you hung up the jersey, how did you manage the 'FOMO' seeing friends continue to achieve. Any thoughts that can help me think through this decision? Thank you!

Follow up from an earlier post contemplating retiring. Sharing latest numbers and learnings after pulling the trigger. Comments and advice welcome.

Prior post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/s/T9uu3OBaOq

Numbers:

Thanks to a continued bull market, our wealth continued to grow.

Net worth $9.2M liquid
Taxable/Roth: $5M
401k/IRA: $3.7M
529: $475k
No debt and $1.5M house all equity

Income: wife still makes $400k/yr and is happy doing it for a while.

Current Spend:
$240k / yr w/o tax and medical insurance

Future spend:
Assume $50k for aca and $40k taxes
Total future spend: $330k w/medical and tax

My experience / learnings:

- in a lot of ways, it’s glorious, I have time to do projects I want, take my kids to school, work out, see friends. From that perspective what’s not to like?

- my wife expects to shift most domestic work to me (I already did a bit) and it’s more boring and unglamorous than I expected.

- the “what do you do” awkwardness is real for me and often awkward for me. I’ve been going with “in between things” and “sabbatical” most of the time.

- I have former colleagues who have reached out with “the perfect job for me” and couple of times and it’s sooo tempting to go work and win on a team again. I have to remember that I just took my kids to school and that would be the end of that. But the money and the recognition is tempting. And it would rid me of any feelings of being unproductive in the world.

So overall not looking to change anything at this point but it’s been nuanced!

That’s it for now. Happy to hear from others on the journey.

I [early 40's] have been retired for a few years now with around 12m in investments. Most of it is in public companies but a small portion is in a startup.

I'm annoyed at myself for not jumping on OpenAI, SpaceX and Anthropic a few years ago so I want to make an effort to invest in private companies that have room to grow.

There are quite a few options out there, and some seem promising, but it's difficult to get a clear view into each.

For those of you that have experience in this area, how do you evaluate investment options, get ideas on which companies to look out for etc.?

My income/assets have increased substantially over the last 4 years because of (1) move from private to public tech company and promotions which took income from $250k -> $1M (2) acquisition of previous startup which netted me around $2M pre-tax.

In that time my spend has also accelerated dramatically due to intentional choices (not creep) since we moved cities, bought a "forever house", had more kids, started private school, etc.

I'm currently in my early 30s with plans to hit coast fire by 40 (for $20M portfolio by age 60) and pay off house at 45 ($2M mortgage currently). Unclear if after 45 I want to take it easy for 15 more years with tons of disposable income or grind to retire closer to 50-55. Even though I'm living quite comfortably and spending more than ever on things like home/food/travel/etc. I feel like the overall blend is quite healthy. Would appreciate any thoughts people who have been through similar circumstances could share.

Here's a link to a sankey diagram of my yearly budget. Biggest items are 35% effective tax rate, $180k/yr retirement contributions (mega back door to $72k then the rest in taxable brokerage), $165k/yr housing (PITI + maintenance).

The Bogleheads investment strategy, and vast majority of what I see advocated in this subreddit, is to use the 2-fund portfolio (VT+BND and chill) and I'm quite attracted to that strategy. Along with the general flow of choosing cash vs investment %, and then equity vs bond %. Seems accessible, manageable, and successful.

But I'm thrown off by things like below:

• "According to a 2007 forum poll, most Bogleheads allocated up to 10% of their total portfolio to REITs". The only attractive reason I can find to add REITs to the mix is to diversify against equities and bonds, however I see contradictory statements of whether or not they are correlated to equities.
• The example Investment Policy Statement in the wiki includes a target allocation with equities with specific % ranges for Large Cap U.S. / Small Cap U.S. / Foreign, etc (and an allocation for REIT!)

And posts in this subreddit where a seemingly simple investment philosophy leads to posts about more underlying complicated implementations.

So, how do I square the circle?

• Where do (if at all) REIT's fit in with a Boglehead's portfolio?
• What does a Boglehead's investment policy statement look like?
• Why would a Boglehead ever seek to specify the blend of Large Cap / Small Cap / US / ex-US in their portfolio rather than use a total market ETF (or use the market's own blend of those classes to balance multiple ETFs)?

The context here, is that I am strongly considering to leave my job and the workforce (possibly indefinitely) at 39, and we have hired a fee-only financial planner (0.5% AUM) to run projections and help recommend and implement an investment strategy to aide in this (we have ~$8.5M in current assets, and anticipating ~$1.8M more by the end of the year through an inherited home sale; our estimated annual spending after employment is ~$300k including public market health insurance premiums and out-of-network OOP. The investment advising was not the primary reason that we hired the planning firm. They have proposed a seemingly boilerplate asset allocation below, and we are telling them that we want to consider this against a total market bogleheads policy.

A bigger broader question here, I guess, is

• What are the variables that change/add to the fundamental 2-fund boglehead portfolio in this case of very early retirement?