Go back to work?
Welp the intrusive thoughts are back
Wee bit of back story:
Ive never made over $50k a year other than the last 4 years when i got bumped to $80k
And then i lost my job jan 2nd
After 6 months of no call backs and almost out of unemployment, i picked up the phone to an odd number. And naturally its a $80k+ job im a shoe in for at a friends plant. The exact same job i have been doing for the past 20 years.
48 years old, single. Everything is paid off. Yearly burn rate since im not working/driving is $20k. That includes aca, house bills/insurance/taxes and food.
The kitty is currently at 1.6 mill with a 50/50 split between brokerage and tax deferred. So i dont have to do any shenanigans and everything i pull will be tax free capital gains. Even the dividends are getting close to $13k by themselves.
All calculators say i am insane, error out, and say i should have quit years ago.
Common logic says i am insane to retire at 48 instead of 59-67(with 59 considered "weird/risky"). I have 10-20 good working years left in me.
But all my calculations say i am insane to get a job again thanks to the snowball. With "ok" returns that 1.6 is going to turn into 3.2 in ten years, even if my burn rate goes up 50-100%. If i go back to work and save say $50-60k a year and not draw 20-30k from the kitty, thats going to be what, an extra mill in the kitty after 10 years? In exchange for only having 3-4 hours a day at the house between working a salary and the commute. My only rationale is after 10 more years it would give me the opportunity to shove another $500k in housing and move more to the south/coast instead of living in the rustbelt.
But this is like the last chance to get a job. The only opportunity that has popped up in six months. If i want a job later, its going to end up being a $20-25 an hour general job, and not what my career is in.
At my last job i was surrounded by the "almost ready for retirement" folk that were 2 bad weeks in a row from just punching out. But all of them had the same mantra of retiring before medicare "its scary to not have an income, so ill just work a few more years".