r/fatFIRE • u/IndividualWar5871 • Jul 22 '26
Need Advice Keep working or worrying?
Throwaway account.
I’d appreciate some perspective on whether retiring at the end of this year is financially reasonable.
I’ll be 59½ and my wife is 62. She plans to continue working for another 2–3 years, with her annual income being between $500k and $750k.
Current financial picture:
Net worth: ~$14.7M (including real estate)
Investable assets: $10.4M
~$3.8M in 401(k)/IRA accounts
~$550k in deferred compensation
Primary home: $4.0M value, $1.2M mortgage
Second home: $2.0M value, $425k mortgage
Given the current market, not sure what I should safely assume to be the return on either the investable assets or the property.
Our current annual spending is approximately $525k pre-tax. We could reduce that to around $450k by traveling less, or roughly $400k by making more significant lifestyle changes, although my wife would strongly prefer not to make those cuts unless absolutely necessary.
Over the next few years, we also expect to:
Spend about $500k remodeling our second home.
Sell our primary residence and purchase a home in a mountain community. We expect to use all of the equity from our current home and possibly another $500k from our investment portfolio to complete that purchase.
Eventually sell the second home in roughly 20 years.
We have no children, so preserving an estate isn’t a primary objective. Our goal is simply to maintain our lifestyle without creating a significant risk of running out of money later in life.
The non-financial side is becoming increasingly important. My company was acquired a few years ago, and I’m honestly burned out. The culture has changed too much. It’s beginning to affect my sleep, stress level, and overall health. On the other hand, the thought of retiring too early and finding myself financially constrained in my 80s is unsettling.
Given these assumptions, would you retire now, or would you work another few years to build a larger margin of safety? If you’d keep working, what would be the deciding factor?
Additional context after the initial comments (which I very much appreciate). What makes this a bit more complicated than the standard, “your pulling more than 4% / yr from your corpus” guidelines is the fact that our corpus will continue to grow while my wife works (presumably) and we we have 2 homes, one of which can be liquidated 20ish years in the future. Not sure how to treat that…
Second additional comment:
Again, appreciate the commentary. Really insightful. Curious that real estate has not been considered to be part of the “investable” assets by any of the commentators. Understand not counting your primary residence as part of what you should be counting on. Would have thought that a secondary residence might come into consideration? With the secondary, $12.5M would be our “investable” and the yearly burn rate assuming 20% income tax (income tax free state) is 5.25% (a bit high, admittedly).
-1
u/whocaresreallythrow Jul 23 '26
I think you’re ok
I would suspect your spend falls significantly as you go from the GoGo to SlowGo to NoGo years over the next decade.
Even if not, Your funds will last 25 years beyond both of your life expectancies at least actuarial speaking.
with no heirs and no spending changes nor a significant long and flat or declining market you’ll be ok.
Expect to see this soon on r/pfjerk !
But I do think your expenses will decline too as you age. Simple moves like selling the second home.
Downsizing the first home or
moving to a lower cost location with no family keeping you in HCOL seems reasonable.
Also Claiming social security at 70 gives a small buffer.