Just turned 50 and considering my options
Burner account for obvious reasons.
Married, non-working wife. Kids grew up and left home - not a factor, we’re leaning towards “die with zero” rather than generational wealth anyway. Lived in CH for all our adult life. Citizenship, language, friends, etc.
2.5M liquid assets, mostly ETFs. Not exactly “VT & chill”, but close - with perhaps just a bit too much US/tech exposure. A six-digit chunk in cash, trying to at least partially follow the “keep your age % in bonds” mantra while CH bonds are useless.
About 500k in pillar 2. There was more, but it went towards the house as WEF. Not intending to pay that back. Decent house in low-tax canton, worth 2M+. 1M mortgage in few fixed 1%-1.5% chunks maturing over next 10 years.
Fully remote and relatively low-stress job, 200-300k/year net savings. But also a dead end, largely driven by tenure and company/domain-specific expertise. Plus a field impacted by outsourcing / layoffs / AI. Once I’m out, I’m likely unemployable.
Annual fixed spending a bit above 100k, stable and tracked for years. Happy, boring, safe life. We don’t care about exotic travel, eating out, fancy cars, etc. Basically just enjoying our time locally with simple things like nature, hiking, driving around CH. I do have some personal extravaganzas on top of that 🙂, but those will be trivially cut when high income ends I’m aware of all the FIRE living cost technicalities. Wealth tax, self-retired AHV, Eigenmietwert going away, inflation, health costs growing - I’ve beaten all these to death. All of this factored in the above spending number.
So, while the job is fine, I’m still longing to pulling the plug. Every time I take vacation, I wish it was longer. Much longer. Ideally, forever. I have so many plans what I’d do when this happens. But then, whenever I tried assessing my FIRE situation, be it various public calculators, ChatGPT or my own spreadsheets, the outcome was always: “you’re almost there, but, with your savings rate… just one more year!”.
How much is enough?