Perhaps it is obvious, but the above is exactly my plan.
I currently stash about 2-3x a FAT level of expenses per year. I will OMY indefinitely until something changes dramatically.
<2% SWR of a heavily padded budget seems to be the sweet spot, and it sounds like you are there. Lots of buffer to adjust should the world collapse, as it seems to be doing currently!
Though even at that stash level, think about retiring AFTER the peak of the income earning curve. If you are still in the exponential phase, then its mathematically inefficient to stop early :)
But perhaps quality of life efficient to do so.
I have an aunt worth over 50M who refused to stop working because her salary was over 1M/yr. She was in her late 60s, cheap as fuck, so she didn't even use her money as it was, and wasn't going to leave it to her meth head kid she had already disowned.
She spent 40+ years doing a job she was never very passionate about because the money was just too good to pass up. This is someone wealthy enough that she could have retired many years ago and lived a life that most people could never dream of.
Instead her husband is dead, her kid hates her, and the rest of her family think she's deranged, including me.
I'm a BIG fan of earning money doing shit that's fun, and as a result
I too will end up dying with an absurd amount of wealth, but I am very opposed to people earning money they don't need and don't intend to use, just for the sake of having more money they don't need and don't intend to use by doing work that's holding them back from the life they actually want to live.
That's not financial freedom, that's financial prison.
What you are doing is the sweet spot for YOU, which is great. But there are A LOT of people here who OMY'd themselves into serious burnout.
Also for me, at a certain point of financial security I started making every decision through the lens of "what is most likely to strengthen my marriage?"
That was a big factor in me letting an 8 figure deal blow up. I knew I "could* make it work if I was willing to tolerate some unpleasantness, but I could not make it work and have my marriage come out the other end stronger. We would be stinking rich, and that would be great because I would need to be able to afford losing half of it.
OP:
My metrics by which I make decisions about what to do with my time are as follows:
-Am I exercising enough *and enjoying it*?
-Am I sleeping enough *and waking rested*?
-Am I primarily eating high quality food?
-Are my loved ones getting enough of my time and energy?
-Is my marriage steadily getting better?
-Do I feel good about myself as a person?
And I measure all money making opportunities with respect to either increasing the above or decreasing them. If the net effect will be an increase in the above because of more money, then I'll do it. If it will be a net decrease because of the trade offs needed for more money, then I consider it too risky.
I've treated a lot of seniors in my time, and the difference between a vital, happy, healthy senior and a worn down, beleaguered senior of the same age is absolutely shocking.
So whatever I do now, at 40, I do with a long view of how it will compound over time and manifest at 75.
Money should never be a goal in and of itself because money isn't anything in and of itself. You could take away most of my aunt's money and replace it with a dummy website that shows a fake bank account, and her quality of life would never change.
Money is a placeholder for time and energy, and life is a series of exchanges we make of our time and energy. If you find a way to exhcnahe your time and energy doing shit you love and getting paid massive sums for it? That's golden.
But for every increment of time and energy you exchange when you would rather be doing something else that would benefit your quality of life, you have to calculate the rate of exchange relative to your particular circumstances.
My aunt worked through her husband's last year of life, going on a month long work trip to Asia just before he died. They had been married for 50 years. He openly said he felt completely abandoned by her, but that he understood that her work came first.
The work she does for money she doesn't need and will never use.
It's an extreme example, but it makes the point. Money has to actually *do something for you* in order to be worth trading your previous time and energy for.
I'll happily make several million more than I need. DH is also setting himself up to be able to make 7 figures a year in consulting fees. We spend around 45-65K per year. We do not need that money. But it's work that makes our lives, out health, and our marriage better.
As long as it improves my guiding criteria, then bring on the firehose of cash, I'll figure out what dog charity to leave it to when I die, lol.
But if it damages just one of those metrics, especially my marriage, I'm out.
