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Inflation is a bitch, and the current status quo cost of living will be exponentially more in the future. What I thought was an unfathomable amount of money in the 90's ($100k / yr, and $1m net worth) is not good now in 2020's. Healthcare in the 90's was $500 / yr and is $1.5k / mo with $5k deductible. Property taxes, utilities, continue to increase. Basic child daycare is $2k / mo after tax.

$300k / yr is the new $100k / yr, and I'd hate to project what it'll be 20 years from now ($2m / yr?)

Yet tons of families make it work in the mid-west where the costs are not what you state them them to be.

And are there an abundance of tech jobs there like there are in the HCOL areas? Remote work is shrinking, and while it'll be here to stay, there will be far fewer opportunities as companies rein it in. If we look at the housing market alone, it looks like there's a big crash in these 'low cost of living' cities people flocked to from SF and NYC as they move back.

Salary alone is an irrelevant number.

200K in some places won't let you have a nice apartment in a safe place, 100k in some places and you can live in a king with your own private kingdom.

In my mid 20’s I had an order of magnitude less savings and quit my job to backpack Europe. My career wasn’t remotely impacted in the process and I genuinely think this is one of the best decisions I ever made.

The 4 hour work week has a far better treatise on this than I could ever write and I highly recommend reading it. You’re incredibly resilient in your 20’s. I’d rather be coming out of prison as a 20 something than be a millionaire in retirement.

As a late 20s, recently laid off, I'm wondering why you think it would be disastrous for your career? I'm not necessarily disagreeing, I've been in a very similar headspace before, but now that it's actually happened - without my choice - it feels a lot less bad than I expected.

Maybe I'm in denial, but I'm not super worried about getting another job right now. I'm enjoying the time off and reevaluating my priorities. There's even a work-related benefit: the extra time / lack of stress has allowed me to read up on tools etc that I haven't been using (although lately I've been tuning out of career stuff entirely).

I'm a senior eng at FAANG nearing my 40s, so according to your napkin math I should be a millionaire.

Of course is not that simple. I won't bore you with my life history, but I spent most of my career living paycheck to paycheck, and only got a high paying job recently. With the double wammy of moving to the US and stock plummeting, my life savings are paltry. I'm still renting and I project it'll take me 2-3 years to save for a down payment.

In fact I'm confident that if you graduated 3 years ago and have been working in tech in the US, you'll likely have more wealth than me.

I would say this is pretty normal. Everyone thinks about life and salary and a linear path to wealth, but its not true.

Not everyone stick in a company for 10 years. Some take sabbaticals, some have medical bills, some go travel for 2 years.

I was earning peanuts up until my early 30s. Also if you are not in US and not in Tech which is lets face it, majority of people - you are nowhere near these numbers.

Survivorship bias at its finest.

> I look up and I see colleagues in their 40s-50s. 20-30 years of experience in the industry, with the performance of their RSUs they probably easily have $2m+ net worth. I really don't understand why they don't quit.

I was/am that person. I actually did quit and retire for a while. But then I went back. Mostly out of guilt. I felt guilty not working and building up my kid's trust fund during my peak earning years. It felt like I was betraying my family by not continuing to bring in income while I could.

(just wanted to say thanks for writing this —- I think it is sometimes hard to be honest in this way, about a hard decision, out loud, and while I’m not in the same situation as you right now, there are others who are, and in those cases it can be nice to read something like this and know you’re not alone at least!)

A few things:

- a lot of the people who are in their 40-50s today never saw the packages we are seeing today (well, until two years ago)

- some of them carry a family with kids. You will only understand the math behind it until you’re in it.

- life does not work like an xls spreadsheet. It’s not like you « decide » to live of $40k/year. You meet people, things happen and the next thing you know, your « basic » needs require 50% of a significant salary.

- people need a purpose in life. I have seen plenty of people with FU money keep going with their job if they like it. Not everyone dreams of creating a company or living in the countryside.

Simple answer – lifestyle creep. Over the years as you get older and keep moving up in your career you get accustomed to increasingly finer things in life. It's perfectly normal to drive a beater in your 20s, but you don't want to take your kids to soccer practice in one. It's normal to couch surf with friends when traveling in your 20s, but not when you are on a family vacation to Disneyland. Add in a hundred more of these and suddenly that $40K/yr that seemed like a king's ransom a couple decades ago isn't quite enough to make ends meet.

My family has no willingness to live in a LCOL location, or I probably would do that!

But I’ll note that $40k/year isn’t nearly enough to live on for people in their 50s unless you’re unusually healthy or someone is subsidizing your healthcare. Healthcare gets much, much more expensive with age.

My employer spends $20k towards my family’s overall healthcare consumption, and we still spend $10k out of pocket.

Regarding taking a break: what have you got to lose?

No programmer I know whose resume says “I took a year or two off to travel the world” has had any trouble getting a new job when they come back. Hiring managers will be jealous, perhaps, but not upset by your choices.

I'm curious: Is "health tourism" a thing for Americans? Healthcare is extremely cheap where I live by comparison.

> I'm curious: Is "health tourism" a thing for Americans? Healthcare is extremely cheap where I live by comparison.

Depends on what kind of healthcare is required. I'm from a country with "extremely cheap" healthcare (Ukraine), but if you are diagnosed with something nasty you either shell out hundreds of thousands to go to a place with expensive healthcare to get that CAR T-cell therapy or you die.

> I am in my mid 20s. I have about $200k saved and I think about quitting everyday, even though it would probably be disastrous for my career.

It really wouldn't. I had to take a year off waiting for a work visa, it was great and I got my highest paying job role straight after.

It's not going to be disastrous for your career. It will have an impact, but one you can recover from -- if you're lucky, even fully recover.

I quit at 33, didn't work for 3 years, had the best time of my life.

Then I got a fun, flexible job that paid below market, but more than paid the bills, and didn't take up all my time and still allowed me to do what I wanted with a decent-sized chunk of every day.

After a couple of years of that, I ended up with an adult job, and my hours are no longer flexible, but it is fully remote and pays about market for a HCOL area, while I can live anywhere I want in the USA.

Virtually same life!

Quit around 30, didn't work for a full year.

Then worked 20h/week for about 2y while I invested the rest of my productive time into hobbies or pet ideas.

Then I went back to similar job different company. Took me about 2y to get career back to where I left it, but remote and live somewhere I've always dreamed of.

> I look up and I see colleagues in their 40s-50s. 20-30 years of experience in the industry, with the performance of their RSUs they probably easily have $2m+ net worth. I really don't understand why they don't quit.

I'm at the very young end of that range. My answer is, when you have a couple of young kids and you live through the past year of inflation and stock/real estate devaluation, you scale up the retirement number by a pretty large multiplier to feel safe. My early retirement target is now around 10M (HCOL, want optionality to send kids to private school, got accustomed to nice things) and I'm not there yet.

Fortunately the trajectory is looking good, so I'm starting to ratchet down the time and effort I spend on work. As I do so, the stress is starting to melt away and I find myself able to better tolerate and sometimes even enjoy my job now. I don't need the job so I can take a risk here or there, drop a few balls on the floor, take some random days off to spend with the kids or get through some yardwork, etc.

Mid 30s, $1.5m net worth, no major obligations.

I don't want to live in self inflected poverty in Tulsa, and I enjoy my work enough that I'd rather find something else to work on that I find interesting.

Good luck keeping up a resume for freelancing.

Also, I have nothing better to do than work.

Building a resume to get freelance job or building a resume using freelance jobs?

I took 18 months off of work to travel when I was 25/26 (2018-19) and had a job within 2 weeks of starting to look again. If there’s any line of work where it wouldn’t be disastrous it’s probably being a software engineer.

I'm about 30 and have only ~4.5k€...

Not because I didn't save more, but because I wasn't able to save more. I do look brightly towards the future and hope I'll turn for the better.

If you have kids and quit while your family is used to the standard of living there is a good chance a divorce is in the cards.

You will then owe 20% (pretax, 30% post tax) of your "imputed" salary for the kid, as well as possible alimony. If you don't come up with 20% of your generous salary you git tossed in a cage, even if the kid only needs a tiny fraction of that for a decent life. For many it's impossible to step down their career without being tossed into prison, as the judge uses "imputed income" to calculate what you owe based on what you can potentially earn. That is if say you go from engineer to carpenter, you may now owe over 100% of your salary for support.

Tl;dr If you value your freedom to choose your own path don’t get married or have children.

In the US you owe child support even if you're raped. So it's not necessarily even a decision.

That's my take-away here too.

More like don't marry a psycho and maintain communication...

From watching other people’s lives this seems way easier on paper than in reality. It’s a huge risk no matter what.

There're plenty of safeguards the society has developed over a long time.

But if somebody heads for relationship straight from romance movies with drama all around and sex is #1 criteria... Then outcome is pretty clear.

Or you know, talk to your spouse about it first. I dropped down to $0 income for 2 years with two kids and a wife. My family is as strong as ever.

Obviously just one data point and divorce rates are high. Do you have any data on this specific case: depressed about job, quits job to be happier, results in divorce. It seems quiet possible that given the circumstances, quitting the job might decrease the chance of divorce by helping remove so much stress from work.

Thanks for sharing that data point. I'm planning to take 6-12 months off of work with 2 kids and a wife. I'm scared about the impact this could have on the relationship. But I've talked to my wife and she is supportive. Reading your comment reminded me that I'm doing this to feel better not just for myself but for the family.

If you're no longer going to be contributing income, what will you contribute instead to the family? Nobody respects or appreciates a freeloader as a partner. But if something other than money is contributed, it's more likely to work.

Holy God it's not like being mentally present, raising kids, or just doing chores around the house is valuable to your family. /s

Such a toxic, capitalistic, misandronistic mindset.

It’s just a realistic mindset.

If you’re a man and quit working - you’re in the fast track to being broken up with.

I don’t know why we act like gender norms don’t exist.

> I don’t know why we act like gender norms don’t exist.

They’re inconvenient, uncomfortable, and people want to pretend they don’t exist because there’s a one in a million exception.

In the real world a man who can’t provide is going to find out almost no woman will tolerate that, even if they claim otherwise.

For half the assets + 20-25% of a top engineers salary (court imposed child support) you can hire an au pair to do your bitch work for half the week and still probably have money left over to buy dinner for a fuck-boy/girl on the side. Probably can even find a new person to stay with and take advantage of dual income life while availing yourself of the 20-25% income stream of the high earner.

Economically I don't see the advantage to staying together with a high earner that quits their job. Take half, plus the 20% support (they'll have to work now because they'll be tossed in jail if they don't pay, and imputed income will be at their high professional salary), then you can find a new person who doesn't work outside the house and let them contribute their half with chores. The sooner the divorce the better as they'll have to go back to work after the judge's order. Versus just having a person who doesn't work outside the house without the 20% of an engineer salary income stream.

This all sounds really fucked up but realize over 18 years we're talking about possibly $1M+ (tax-free) on the table. People will do some crazy shit for a million dollars.

>bitch work

this doesn't seem necessary or accurate

That's exactly what I said - "if something other than money is contributed".

But not every man (or woman) does these things, and likely their spouse will be doing them as well. If I do half the child care and chores, while my wife does half the child care and chores AND earns all the money, how much is she going to like the arrangement?

I’m sorry but in this case you have a much bigger problem than “being a cog in the machine” and an “unfulfilling job”. You should never get in such a relation, or stay in one.

The stories of couples who FIRE'd together and the wife moved on from the relationship in anger/disgust 2-3 years down the road are copious...

Probably the best thing for both of them, obviously a mismatch.

I don’t understand the logic behind this. A man can lose his job then how can he make court ordered payments for kids and wife? And then putting the man behind bars is detrimental to society because a divorced man would be experience depression and likely lose his job. Punishing such a man is not good for society.