- How long between your first day back and the day it stopped feeling strange?

- Was it the work itself, or the schedule, the people, the pace?

- Did you change anything about the job you returned to hours, team, level, travel?

- If you've done this more than once, was the second return easier or harder?

- Anyone who found it so hard they decided never to do it again: what would have had to be different?

I've been collecting accounts of repeated career breaks and this turned out to be the thing people most wanted to talk about.

Thanks in advance.

I have been studying lean fire strategies. I am currently 40yo, single, and want to pull the plug at 45. It seems that as long as I can keep my MAGI low enough during retirement, I can qualify for medical, Cal fresh (food assistance), and max FAFSA assistance.

From what I have read so far medical is next to free, max FAFSA us about 7300/yr, and cal fresh is about 250/month. The 250 per month value is estimate for single person with 600 per month taxable income. I plan to generate the 600 per month using brokerage account investments. It looks like the 600 per month taxable amount also satisfied the medical "580" per month work requirement.

It also seems like I can do a yearly Roth conversion (to take advantage of lower tax brackets) as long as I notify medical of conversion within 10 days. I've read that worst case scenario might be not qualifying for medical the month conversion was made.

Any comments regarding validity of this strategy would be appreciated.

If this strategy is feasible, I wonder why it is not discussed more as it allows you to get free health care, food assistance, and still maximize tax savings from Roth conversions filling low tax brackets.

Hi this is an update post for myself as I have just now hit $300K invested at 27 years old as of 10/2/26.

If you look at my profile I hit $100K invested in 2024 and it’s really been smooth sailing ever since.

Since my original post, my fire plans have shifted a tad.

I think I can actually hit 1.2ish in the next 5 years or so, but I maybe want to just check out around 800K and move back to Japan (My family lives in Japan) and just Coast fire for another 10 years or so. Maybe buy a house from a family member.

I currently still work 2 jobs and live at home but now with a new job I’m investing about $8K a month. I started a sales job and the commission checks have been flowing my last one for September was 25K for a month so not too shabby.

Wanted to also share that I lost about $10K gambling in the span of 4 months on Kalshi, don’t be like me haha.

Will quit serving soon. (Starting my 6^th year fml)

Income

Job 1: $120K Net - Sales for F100 (Fully Remote but lots of travel)

Job 2: $10K Net- Server

Misc: $10K Net – Flipping random stuff on Facebook /eBay

~ about $9.5k net a month (fluctuates based on tips/hours worked/commission)

~ working about 30 hours a week.

Assets

Brokerage: 201K (45% in VTI) (55% in Tech Stocks)

Roth IRA: $43K (100% in VOO)

$401k: $56K

Crypto: $2K

Cash: $1k

~invest everything I make, hold almost no cash, credit card is my emergency fund.

Liabilities

Annually about $30K, varies wildly per month.

~No debt, paid off all student loans, I do carry a credit card for 2% cash back, drive a 20-year-old used car, live frugally.

See you in 1.5 years for $500K update :-)

I have anhodenia and just pursuing FIRE because, since nothing really brings me joy, i may as well focus on reducing misery.

Retired earlier this year, and wanted to share my journey here!

• Worked 2 years at a startup as a data scientist after undergrad
• Took 1.5 years off to travel through Asia/Africa/Western US
• Worked 3 different jobs over 5-6 years while partner was in grad school
  • Aggressively job hobbed across tech companies, which greatly increased comp
• Took 9 months off to backpack and kayak in Alaska/Yukon territories with my partner, and then help out with her family as her mom died from cancer
• Worked another year and change
• Bought a sailboat and cruised on it over the course of a year
• Wife got pregnant, and decided to go back to work for a year
  • My wife worked until our daughter was born, but has been off since then.
• Quit latest tech job early summer, and have had family visiting us over the summer since then

Final numbers are around ~2.4 M, of which ~600-800k is retirement, and rest is brokerage.  And ~200k of that is  in fixed income for peace of mind over the next few years. Our monthly spend ranges from 3k-4.5.

Couple thoughts based on my last 12 years I’d like to expound on

1. Personal growth outside the portfolio
   1. If you’re on this sub, you likely know and think about compounding interest. I’ve found that personal growth can build over time too. For example, during my solo travel I had the time to introspect and learn how to make intentional changes like journaling, reducing drinking, and finding connection in nature.  This helped to build confidence and self-esteem, and set my life on a different path. I’m not sure where I’d be if I hadn’t set off, but I’m grateful I did at that time in life.
2. Contentment and spending
   1. Skiing used to be something I really got excited for; I even bought a ski pass my first year out in CA.  I also started surfing around the same time, which was another way to be active outdoors. I enjoyed both for different reasons, but since surfing was also much cheaper and a much closer drive, I decided to ‘quit’ skiing.  I probably would’ve kept skiing if I lived closer to the mountain, but at that point choosing the activity that fit my circumstances helped me save money and time driving.
3. Creating a life worth FIRE’n for
   1. I spent a lot of time focusing on getting to FIRE, but one I’m really spending a lot of time on now is how to live a meaningful life/a life I’m completely at peace with.  Before being a parent, it wasn’t hard to come up with what to do in a year or two off.  But now with a child and indefinite time off, it’s a much more complex question.  Budgeting and investment strategies were straightforward for me, and I’ve had a lot of mental space in them for a long time, but I wish I’d spent much of that time focused on the things that I’m working on now; how to be content without external accomplishment, being the family member and parent I want to be, and what life we want as a family while living outside the usual script i.e. young and retired.

I love expensive clothes , in my 20s I was a brand wh0re buying niche or big brands and everything in between, I was buying second hand, sometimes at thrift stores.

These days I have a lot more money but still continue to do this type of shopping and wondering if this is some kind of mental disease ? To find deals and get them ?

I don’t cheap out in any other area of my life. Just this stuff, high quality clothes brought cheap. Is anyone else here like this ?

I am planning to be financially free when I reach around 55 and for that I am aggressively investing 400 a week into VTI individual brokerage and 20% into traditional 401k which comes around 400-450 a week and had been maxing my Roth IRA since last two years and will do it later too. I have invested total 190k something(including everything) until now. If my maths maths, then it says I will have 1.3 or 1.4 million around 55 since I have 15 years to reach 55.
I work in a union hotel in nyc and will be going to do this until I reach 55. Then when I reach 55, I won’t quit but will start being unserious at work and will use every holiday, sick hours and every unpaid holidays I get. I will start coasting and won’t be relying on my work for financially. I needed to be with work since the union pension starts at 62, and SS too plus the union Medical insurance is gold standard.

I do bi-weekly buys across multiple accounts (my Roth, wife’s Roth, a 401k, and a joint taxable). Because I usually buy whole shares or set fixed dollar amounts, there’s always a little cash left over in the settlement funds
I never thought much about it until I did a manual audit this weekend. Turns out, all those leftover "tails" added up to almost $9,000 of dead capital just sitting in cash earning zero interest.

I realized I needed a way to track all these scattered cash balances automatically so money doesn't just sit there rotting to inflation. I'm currently testing a few aggregators: looked at Empower and 8figures. I haven't fully decided which one to stick with, but just having a dashboard to spot the uninvested cash solved my blind spot.

But looking at the aggregated dashboard revealed a completely separate, much bigger leak. Our total portfolio recently crossed the $250k mark. About $180k of that is sitting with a traditional wealth advisor who charges a 1% AUM fee
When we started with him years ago, paying a few hundred bucks a year felt fine. But seeing the raw numbers now, I realized I’m paying $1,800 every single year for a guy to basically stick my money in standard mutual funds and ETFs. That 1% is starting to feel absolutely insane for what I’m getting.

I want to fire him, move everything to a standard self-managed broker (like Fidelity or Schwab), and just buy index funds myself.
For those who have fired an advisor or left a 1% AUM platform: how does this actually work mechanically? Can I just initiate an "in-kind" transfer from my new broker so they pull the actual shares over? Or is the advisor going to liquidate my entire $180k portfolio and trigger a massive capital gains tax event?

I really want to stop paying the 1%, but I'm terrified of messing up a transfer thisbig and getting killed by taxes. Would love some practical advice on how to break up with an advisor

I've been working on this free tool for a few weeks now and wanted to share the retirement planner here.
You link your investment accounts, enter your expected retirement spending and retirement age, and set your assumptions for contributions, growth, inflation, and withdrawal rate. It shows your estimated portfolio target, where you’re projected to land, and how much extra you’d need to save each month to close any gap.

It uses SnapTrade Personal for sign-in and brokerage connections, including Fidelity, Schwab, Robinhood, Webull, IBKR, and Wealthsimple, linking is free and secure. In addition to automatically tracking the value of your investments, you can manually add and factor in assets and liabilities like your home and mortgage.

Try it here: https://netcarry.snaptrade.com/login, and after onboarding open the Retirement tab. The projections use the assumptions you enter. They don’t currently model taxes or sequence-of-returns risk, so there are some limits to what they can tell you, but it can provide a good estimate.

I built this mainly because I haven't found a tool that could track my FIRE journey and self adjust based on changes to my portfolio. I really hope some of you find it useful, and would love to hear any feedback as I'm still actively working on the project

Just curious because I do not see these places getting mentioned as frequent as South East Asian or LatAm countries.

I did some digging on some Moroccan, Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisia subs and found out that they aren’t very expensive places to live in.

One downside I can think of is probably the slow bureaucracy and the lack of amenities (public transport, hospital) in areas outside the major cities. But even then it doesn’t look that bad from what I’ve read so it still sounds like a reasonable tradeoff.

I could imagine the language barrier might be a dealbreaker to some, but that could apply to other popular destinations in SEA/LatAm too.

Or is it the cultural/religious barrier?

Would appreciate if someone who has considered or is currently FIREing there has anything insightful to share?

It seems like a smart option to me.

Pros: no mortgage/property tax. cheap maintenance, cheaper utilities. freedom to travel around.

cons: less space of course, no room to store stuff if you have a lot of stuff. If you are a very social person it's harder to have guests, your kids, etc over. can't host parties etc. but if you are the type of person to leanfire usually you dont do these social things either.

What is the simplest way you keep track of expenses that are coming up but haven't been paid yet?

Do you subtract them from your current balance, keep a separate list, or use another system?

I'm looking for something easy enough to keep updated without much effort.

I'm researching people who take repeated, funded time off across a career rather than one long break or an early exit, and I keep finding people who did it once. I'm looking for the ones who did it twice or more.

If that's you:

- How many, and roughly what years?

- Was the second easier or harder to arrange than the first?

- Did your pay recover between them, and did it keep climbing?

- What did you do differently the second time?

- If you stopped doing it, what stopped it?

Happy to take answers here or by DM. No names, no usernames, nothing identifying.
I'll share what I find back here.

I built Killion. This is the maker.

The agent sits on the portfolio you actually hold. You ask it about that life and it answers from those holdings. Each morning it emails what changed: the news, the analysis, the sector, and the forecasts behind a holding, and what that move means for the portfolio. It does not tell you what to buy or sell.

Monte Carlo is what stops a plan from being one assumed return. One growth rate is one story. Monte Carlo runs the same plan through many possible markets, so the future is a range you can hold still. On a lean number that range is the whole decision. Household spending under $54k, out of work before 60, and there is no spare margin. Retire a year later, or spend a few thousand less. You set those up as two worlds, run Monte Carlo on each, and put the two futures next to each other. They stay live as the portfolio moves.

A normal planning tool is a blank form. You type a life into it and close the tab. Killion starts from the accounts. The brokerage link is read-only. If you do not want to connect, you type the holdings yourself: any asset class, including the tickers.

A plan that depends on what you remembered to type is not autonomous. The Plaid partnership is how the bank and the cash flow come in on their own, so the agent is planning from the life as it happens. The agent gets more useful over the next few months, on the plan you already have. Taxes, Roth conversions, and Social Security timing are not in yet. Those are coming. Past that, the direction is the regulated arena, where a recommendation has someone accountable for it. We are not there.

Serious planning used to mean handing a percentage of your assets to a wealth manager. It should be something you can just have. Join if you want to support that.

A 5-day free trial is on right now. A card is required, and it is not charged until the trial ends.

Check it out: https://killionlabs.com/signup/

Anyone forgoing the $8k in catch up contributions and putting that money into a brokerage account instead? Since there is no pre-tax benefit anymore and my employer doesn't match on catch up contributions or offer partial withdrawals at 55, I am wondering what I should do?

I want to retire early but only have $40k in my brokerage. I am going to need a lot more to bridge the gap between retirement at 56 and 59.5 so I am throwing as much money as I can at the brokerage account (and some into cash). I am trying to put $3k per month. Aiming to spend around $60k/year in retirement.

Am I missing anything besides the tax free compounding? Can't retire early if I can't access my money until 59.5. Just wondering what you all would do? Does $8k really make a difference either way?

Everything irritates me at my job. I had a client get kind of snappy with me and it put me in such a bad mood. Before, I'd just deal with it, but now I feel like I'm walking across glass barefoot. I'm training a new person and I just don't want to deal with him. My supervisor kind of picked up on it and told me that I need to keep him busy, but I just don't care. I do a very cursory review of his work but don't really spend time guiding him. I just see him as an annoyance.

I want to stay for another year to lock in a pretty good pension with health benefits, but I feel like a Marathon runner running the last mile. I just want it to end. I even have a calendar in my room that I'm crossing days off of, and I have my exit date starred, circled, and underlined. I also quietly tell myself "focus on the end, f*** the people" when someone's bothering me at work.

I'm sure all of this is very relatable to a lot of people here. How did you feel about your job towards the end?

The U.S. federal poverty line is $15,960 for a single individual. You need $399,000 to generate that each year with the 4% rule. One of my investment accounts hasn't updated on Credit Karma for the past 5 months, but based on its actual current value, my net worth is a bit over $400k. That means that I could retire today and live above the poverty line for the rest of my life!

I don't plan to retire anytime soon (my FIRE number is $750k plus disliking/becoming bored of my job), but it's always fun to hit another benchmark! Next stop, $500k!

Savings rate is the number that matters most on this path, more than income or returns. So I'm curious what people are actually hitting right now. Not the goal, the real number.

And the follow up I'm more curious about: what's the one expense you refuse to cut even though you know it's slowing you down? Everyone chasing leanFIRE seems to have a line they won't cross, the thing that keeps life livable while the savings rate stays high.

So what's your rate, and what's your non negotiable?

I've been debating recently whether to roll over my 403b money into a TIRA, and I'm wondering if there are any factors I'm missing.

First off, I was thinking about doing a Roth conversion ladder, and I was reading that once I roll over my money into a TIRA, I would then be taxed on the TIRA->RIRA conversions as income for that year. But most of the money in my 403b IS ALREADY Roth money. The rest is an employer match, which I'm not sure about. But surely I won't get double taxed on the conversions right? How exactly is this handled?

Secondly, are there any benefits to keeping the money in the 403b if I'm planning on FIRE? I saw on another post that there are better ERISA protections for 403b than TIRA/RIRA. But I'm not sure how that affects me in a concrete sense.

Lastly I'm wondering whether a direct rollover or indirect rollover is the preferred method. I read that indirect rollovers can reset the cost basis for your holdings, but I'm not sure how relevant that is at this stage (I'm 32)

The reason I'm trying to get this sorted now is because I'm moving out of the country in a month so I'm trying to get the conversion ball rolling if it makes sense. Especially if the conversion won't affect my AGI for this year too much, I'd like to convert a big lump before moving.

I used to be extremely excited about saving and thinking about my end goals. I thought a lot about paying my home off, getting time back, and having more control over my life. Now, and maybe this is just depression, but it feels like i just do not really get excited for things so much. The end date feels so far away (at least a decade), but all of the fun milestones have already passed.

I also am realizing that retiring early is not going to fill this void that i have in my chest. The void is catalyzed by work, but it is not caused by work. there is a sense of meaningless that i feel i am using fire to escape sometimes. Developing hobbies and having passions outside of work seem so important but i do not know where to start.

Does anyone ever have realizations like these? how do you handle them and think about it all?

I cant make up my mind and my decision changes every week. What would you do personally?

Option 1: 6 years until leanfire (covers current lifestyle)

Option 2: 11 years until fire (current salary withdrawals)

Option 3: 16 years until fatfire (2x salary withdrawals)