40M, got a taste of early retirement and don’t want to go back
Also have $850k invested in commercial real estate generating ~$70k annually. Only debt is mortgage balance of $420k @2.5% on a house worth maybe $1-1.1M.
My wife and I both quit our jobs last year. We were planning to continue to work longer but we both just got so tired and burnt out.
She started her own consulting firm and is doing really well. I signed a short term consulting contract until the end of the year and I start on Monday. We are hoping to reach $200k in 1099 income this year, but the nature of our consulting means this could potentially vanish to $0 next year. It’s not as much as we made when we’re were on W2 but we feel really fortunate to be able to spend more time with our child in her important formative years.
I live in a HCOL (San Diego, CA) and while I’m lucky to have my biggest expenses like the mortgage be fixed rate, we still probably need around 7-8k monthly to sustain our lifestyle.
I have two major problems that I could use advice on:
Asset imbalance and liquidity: a lot of our net worth is concentrated in our home equity, illiquid real estate investments, or retirement accounts. The amount of liquid capital I can actually live off of is probably only 10% of total net worth and this amount is draining over time (our consulting profits go into a separate business account and we haven’t been taking equity draws into our personal use accounts) meaning I don’t think I can sustain this lifestyle in just passive investment and one of us needs to continue to work unless we can rebalance to generate more passive income in liquid accounts.
I learned that I’m not a particularly self motivated person. I didn’t really accomplish much of anything in terms of financials or starting a side hustle in my year off work. I pretty much spent the whole year doing nothing but working out and getting in shape. This has actually been starting to feel unhealthy to me recently and I could use some advice on how to properly create goals and a working business without the structure of corporate to help me.
Any advice is appreciated, thank you.