Now to my insecurities. I'm 34 and stepping out of the pressure cooker that has been my tech career. Like many, there's a part of me that I can't ignore that tells me I'm making a huge mistake. I have no plans right now after I quit. I haven't had the head space to plan out my FIRE life, and that's my short-term plan. But I am afraid that I will chill out for Y years and come to regret this, at which point I won't be able to get back in. Not the type of top companies I was at before. I'll then be knocking on doors with my head lowered and tail between my legs and beg people to give me another chance. I will have no good answer to "explain the gap in your resume". I'll take a demotion or worse, report to the people I manage now. My peers will use me as a cautionary tale and spare me no empathy because they stuck it out but I didn't, and look at me now.
This post sounds like my inner monologue! I'm 38, coming up on $2M in investments, and approaching FIRE very soon. It was supposed to be this year, but I'll probably OMY into 2021, just because I figure I might as well wait for a COVID vaccine to be deployed so I can travel in retirement like I wanted to. But as my date gets nearer, I've been grappling with these same thoughts.
Ironically, my biggest problem is that I don't hate my job. I've been at the same company long enough, and built up enough of a good reputation, that I have a fair degree of autonomy in setting my schedule and choosing my projects. I've been part-time since 2018, which has made it even more bearable.
If my boss was an asshole or the stress was unbearable or I hated my coworkers' guts, I'd have quit already. As it is, I don't really have anything prodding me to take the leap - other than the knowledge that sooner or later I
have to, or else I'll wind up old and grey with a bigger pile of money than I'll ever be able to enjoy spending.
But counterbalancing that, like you, is that little whisper of anxiety that I'm unlikely to find another job where I make this much money for this little effort. If I quit now, will I regret it for the rest of my life? Why not grind it out for six more months or another year or another two years, just to pad my stash some more and make sure I'm
definitely set for life?
This kind of thinking is hard to resist, but it's insidious, because there's no limit to it. No matter how much money you have, you can always come up with a scenario where you would have needed more.
If I could give you the advice I'm trying to give myself, it's that your stash is big enough that you'll never suddenly wake up and find you're broke. With the 4% rule, you'll see a portfolio failure coming a long way off - and if that happens, it doesn't matter if you're unable to get another job at a top-flight company, because you don't need one. You'd just need a job that's enough to cover your expenses while you wait a few years for the market to recover. I saw it said on a FIRE blog: Our worst-case scenario is everyone else's normal scenario.
Something else that might help is making a bucket list. You said yourself that you don't have much of a plan for FIRE life, and that may be feeding your anxiety. It's hard to mentally compare a "something" (your current job) to a "nothing" (your unplanned future life). If you have something specific to look forward to, something you want to do and currently can't, that might be the little bump of motivation you need to get over the hill of worry.
Have you seen the
Rich, Broke or Dead calculator? It was helpful to me because it drives home that, at some point, running out of time is a bigger risk than running out of money.