u/teric233

I resigned from my engineering job today. I am married 35 with 2 young kids. I was not happy with my job after a restructuring and I have been struggling with that for about a year now.

It was extremely hard for me to pull the trigger, and to be honest there were a couple events that happened last week that pushed me over the edge.

I don’t have anything lined up, but I am not particularly stressed because I have done this before and I always land on my feet.

For numbers, my wife and I are extremely fortunate to have a liquid net worth of $2.1M. We have $100k in cash. The kids 529 plans are funded and we have no debt outside of our $1400 mortgage. Budget is around 80k without our nanny.

Now with that being said, to me losing my job was always accompanied by the thought of living on the streets. I have been saving and investing for so long that it seems lifestyle wise that I live paycheck to paycheck as most of it goes into an investment vehicle.

Before I resigned I talked to a few people at work and asked what kind of money you would need to have to walk away from work….. guys the numbers were insane. People would literally pause look at me and dead serious say I would need soooo much money to be able to walk away…. Like at least 100k.

I asked some directors if they would continue working if they had 2million dollars and they weren’t even able to have the thought experiment. To them that wasn’t even a feasible option. One guy told me with just one million he would definitely not be showing up to work tomorrow. And these are high up employees.

That’s when it clicked for me, every single person on this sub is sooooo far away from the norm that it skews your perception of normal.

I know you can look at the statistics and the top 5% blah blah and of course what I’m saying is obvious I have a lot of money. But it really didn’t sink in for me until I started talking to some people around me to see just how safe I am.

Okay queue the comments about how much of an idiot I am for not knowing I was safe financially….

Or close to their number? I have basically reached my number and even though I don’t want to fully quit yet, I don’t really like my job and I think it would help me tremendously to go down to part time. For context I am a manufacturing engineer and I don’t even get the option to work from home at all, so I feel like if I ask there is a good chance I will just be let go. Does anyone have any advice on how to finesse this properly for best chance of success? Ideally I would like to go down to either 4 or 3 days a week. TIA

I guess this is fire adjacent?

We have been saving and investing for a while. I’m 35m married with 2 kids under 2. Both of us work and have a liquid nw of 2.1M. 100k of it in cash and another 350k in asset equity not included in nw. Our spend right now is 99k of which 35k is childcare. Household income is about 250k my wife makes a little more than me.

We live the most basic life, drive almost 20 year old cars that I do all the maintenance on, we live in a 1400sqft house with a mortgage payment of 1300. I am content with my life I don’t need “things” to make me more happy or fulfilled.

Every day I have to drive to work I get so stressed out, I get a stomach ache and drive around with pepto in my glovebox. I know that it literally makes no sense to be stressed out and I thought when I hit the crossover where I would technically be able to retire everything would become less stressful. I also for some reason am physically unable to quite quit for some reason, as I am still one of the top performers on my team even tho I want to quiet quit it’s like my brain won’t let me.

Anyone else deal with this at all, I thought the financial cushion would alleviate a lot of my stress.
Any advice on how to think about the position I’m in?