45 and 48 with an $8.2M net worth - Can we retire?
I'm 45, my wife is 48, and we recently crossed $8M in net worth and are now at roughly $8.2M. Here's our breakdown:
- Stock market investments: $5.7M
- Cash: $1.3M
- Home: $1.2M (paid off)
I know we're carrying a lot of cash, but we're considering buying a home in a lower-tax state soon (we live in NY), selling our current home, and then balancing our buckets a bit better.
I run my own business, so with expenses, our current monthly spend is around $30,000. If I stopped working, I could cut our expenses down nearly 20% to probably $23,000 to $25,000 per month. And of course, if things in our portfolio changed for the worse, we'd be able to go lower. But our preference is to continue living our normal lifestyle.
I will likely inherit my parents' home (worth roughly $400,000 today) in 20 years or so, and maybe have minimal Social Security, but I don't really count that stuff as I think about this situation.
I've run the numbers on Claude and ChatGPT and whatnot, and the answers all seem to swing wildly. Sometimes it says I can spend $18,000, and other times it will tell me to spend $28,000, just depending on the style of analysis.
My hope is that someone has either A) lived something similar to this and has some advice, or B) understands how to truly run the numbers so I can get a little confidence in either direction (yes I can retire, no I cannot, or even "work 5 more years at $500K" or whatever.)
Can we retire?
Happy to answer any questions. Totally open book and just looking for a bit of guidance, as I've inherited a very worrisome money mindset from my father.
Appreciate everyone.