u/InevitableLopsided35

As someone who’s just quit his decent remote job and is doing an iPGCE to hopefully teach maths or CS. I can’t help but feel like maybe this was a poor choice after stumbling across this subreddit and seeing posts regarding schools closing, people with lots of experience struggling to find jobs, birth rates declining massively in Asia, salaries stagnating or declining, work loads increasing.

As someone who has zero plans to teach in the UK ever (will not do the 2 years ECT) I was hoping and happy to go to a lower tier international school and build up experience from there and was excited about the future.

What’s everyone’s opinions on this?

31, single, no kids. Current NW is $845k USD. Like $200k of that is in retirement accounts and inaccessible until 58 possibly longer if they change the rules. My FIRE number would be around $1.6M USD to be very comfortable in Asia. (Not sure if this is total overkill, but I would like to rent a fairly nice apartment and not have to worry too much, I am naturally very frugal, but don’t want to be once I FIRE)

I’ve spent the last year on a break travelling Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand, Korea and Vietnam. I think my ultimate goal for FIRE would be to get the Gold card Visa for Taiwan or possibly the DTV Visa for Thailand as a home base and then travel to other countries if I feel like it. 90 days tourist visas possible in Korea and Japan.

I’m really torn between sticking it out and working or quitting, getting a teaching job like TEFL etc to pay the bills and fairly low hours and sort of coastFIRING my way to my FIRE number. I should reach it by early 40s thanks to compound interest and can get there faster if I continue investing.

I’m at a point where I want to move and spend my 30s where I actually want to be. Can anyone provide any insight or advice with my plans? Especially people who’ve made the move to Taiwan as that’s my number one place. Although I am concerned about China invading.

If I was to teach I would probably move to China to start. I earn about $90k USD currently, I could study and interview prep and earn a lot more but honestly I’m so burnt out, lazy, dopamine fried that even if I did land a high paying job like this I’d just be even unhappier and would probably get fired.

£250k ISA
£200k GIA
£170k SIPP
£5k Bitcoin
£10k Cash

No property, no wife, no kids and no plans to retire in the UK. Aiming for 50k spend per year, roughly £1.25M is my fire target inflation adjusted.

I’ve ran the numbers through all the calculators and AI models and assuming 5% real returns for global trackers and cutting my total contributions per month to £1.5k, I get there by 39. Depending on markets returns in the next decade and my actually savings per month but realistically it’s looking like I don’t even have to touch this and contribute another penny and I’ll get there by 45.

Even if I somehow landed a very well paid role and saved £7500 a month, this only brings it forward a couple of years to around the 36-37 mark.. The compounding looks to have taken over at this point and I’m questioning what the actual point of trying any harder is?

Current role is £70k, if I grind and try and get £100k role, extra work, extra stress for an after tax and student loan net gain of £1000~. To the overall figures, that extra £1k a month hardly dents the timeline at all, maybe brings it forward a year or so…

Seems like at this point it’s genuinely worth my time to try and work on an online business or something of that nature if I really wanted to accelerate this as chasing PAYE roles feels like diminishing returns.

I’m even debating just getting a TEFL and taking a few years off just travelling, teaching English and coasting to this end goal as long as I can put away £1k~ or so each month, I reach the goal in the ballpark age of 39-43.

Am I being gaslit by AI? Or am I missing something fundamental here?

I know I could probably grind this out, but after essentially grinding my 20s, I would rather not do this for another 4-5 years just to retire at 36 when I can just take it easy and get there at 40~ instead.

What would you do? I’m tied to the UK due to my job but I would like to leave ASAP, am I good to go?