As someone considering a similar early abandonment of biglaw, curious to see how this all went. Any updates??
I'd totally forgotten about this thread! Interesting to read back on my own despair. How are you holding up with biglaw
@PassMMM?
Update on personal matters: Around the time I posted in April 2021, I burnt out big time. Very strange feeling. Felt like I was physically disassociated from my body, was fed up with small things, no motivation to work at all, sometimes spent hours just staring at a 2 line email paralysed late at night.
In June 2021, I unsuccessfully resigned (boss convinced me to take indefinite unpaid sabbatical lol). After about 3 months my boss wanted to know how I was placed and whether I needed more time. I said I hadn't quite recovered from burn out but could try a 4-day week and said I won't look at emails past 6:00pm.
So from November 2021 til now, I have been working on that basis (and took some time off being a new parent in that time).
Coincidentally, around the time of your post PassMMM, I resigned proper. Turns out flexible working / part-time etc doesn't solve toxic workplace issues. I don't know what I'll do next honestly but I'll try my hand at legal consulting. I'm also going to try and monetise a hobby / turn it into a business, but that will take years honestly. I will finish up in Dec, and 2023 will be a new beginning, where my wife and I will do a mixture of drawing down from our portfolio income and supplementing with odd jobs here and there (c.f. legal consulting if possible). But really, I just need time away from the rat race. I need time to try and actually build my
own life, not a life that the firm wishes me to have. I've now proven to myself that those golden handcuffs can very much be broken. Hopefully now I can stop complaining about how this awful corporate behemoth is ruling my life, and I can take responsibility for what happens to me and my family.
Portfolio updateStock markets have been nasty and I got my hands burnt with my fairly heavy allocation to Asia. I did however get lucky with my S&P500 portion which was GBP-denominated.
It's hard to quantify in USD because of the strength of the USD, so I'll show the change of in portfolio value since my opening post in GBP:
- FIRE stash (equities): £0.86M to £0.66M (23% decrease) - but most dividends were kept as cash, and I did shave the top off my S&P500 on occasion
- Cash for house: £216k to £475k (120% increase)
Overall portfolio: £1.076M to £1.135M (5.4% NW increase) - excluding post-tax earnings of about £100k, this means my portfolio itself returned about -3.8% in a pretty horrible year so I'm happy with that.
We will probably also settle for a house that's not quite as extravagant as the $800k we originally envisaged!
Edit a number of figures that got confused in currency conversions - apologies.