I'll be joining this group. Have been reading for years, never post though.
I have been close to pulling the trigger the last few years, but due to the wife and myself desire of a house, walking distance to the beach in Florida I waited out a bit longer. Live in Georgia currently. The wife and I have a 4 month old, I will be a stay at home dad while she goes back to work in September, She is a flight attendant and has a very flexible job so in time she will only have to work 8 days a month or so. I'll be a few months shy of 41.
How we got here. We were fortunate/smart to buy several properties at the right time. And it helps my wife has a hard time spending money on anything besides organic food and travel so we also pumped a lot of money into stocks and the 401k. Weve been married for 14 years and only have had 1 car the whole time.
Well pay for the Florida house in cash. We have 350k in our 401k that we will let grow and continue to add to it through the wifes job and fun jobs I am sure ill pick up along the way (This will be old age money). Our after tax account 500k will pay for taxes and insurance on our expensive house by the beach with only dividends. We also will still keep a mortgage free rental we own in Florida which will pay for the utilities and other bills on our new house. I also got inspired by the solar article Pete just put up and will most likely install that soon after moving in. We will live off the wifes income for everything else. We will most likely slowly ramp up spending as we realize we aren't spending enough. So the idea is to continue living a similar lifestyle that we do know and to slowly increase our spending as we realize our cushion is too big. The increased spending will almost all be on travel type things, Skiing, scuba, rent a sailboat, deep sea fishing etc well be able to do those expensive things more often than we do now.
Thanks for all the inspiration from reading this site and the reinforcement that we are not alone.