Comment by kldg
6 months ago
If you have the money, there's nothing wrong with quitting and doing your own thing for a while. Alternately, working for a fundamentally different kind of company can be rewarding. I found working at a small business (a sales company where tech was an afterthought) to be delightful and weird; everything was non-standard and many roles were just not hired for, but everyone's door was open and there's no bureaucracy, so whatever I wanted to be would be in my domain. The workload was low, so I made my own work and got into Facilities work, learned how to check the fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, and elevators. -And you know what? I opened up some of the smoke detectors and detected prior smoke in them; visual charring and melted plastic. The smoke detectors had been recalled for catching fire. I filed for replacement costs from the company, and now our smoke detectors won't burn the building down, which I think's pretty neat.
I wish I had "do my own thing for a while" money. Sounds like you found a nice place to still do something useful but catch your breath. I'm hoping I can find something similar.
Seriously. And even if you do have savings, for every N years you dig into that savings, you are sacrificing XN years of retirement savings that you are very likely to need later. Where X is always greater than one, and significantly greater depending on your age when you take that nice sabbatical.
I didn't intend to say "do your own thing" to mean "make no effort to generate any earned income." You could instead slow down and take on a la carte freelance/contract work. -Or you could take a risk for a couple years, and maybe your project launches into the abyss of space, never to be seen by a single soul; at least you'll have something to show for your work gap years.
-But I would caution against treating life too much like an Excel spreadsheet, too. It's never going to turn out anything like you plan, and I'd advise to critically examine wealth advisor boilerplate. At least for federal US tax code filing HoH (which is what I'm familiar with), we get >$60k tax-free to realize in long-term capital gains each year. If you can generate what you need now to live on with investment growth at least matching inflation -- and I'll point out you can get a serviceable house on an acre in a safe neighborhood for <$150k in most US states if you're willing to live away from a major metro -- you can likely generate enough to live on in retirement, especially if social security and medicare still exist. I take ~$20k/year in contract work and keep my unearned income under $11,950 for EITC purposes, with remainder/majority of my annual deduction eaten at least partially by my daughter's capital gains (she gets SSI survivorship which I dump directly into an individual/unsheltered brokerage account), and without mortgage payments, things are peachy -- I don't even spend that much per year.