How much would you need to be FI if you kept working (for fun) and only lived off of that income?

[arebelspy]

Do Trader Joe’s and Starbucks type employers offer *real* health insurance plans to part-time workers? This would be news to me.

I can't speak to Trader Joe's, but Starbucks does. When former longtime CEO Howard Schultz was a kid, his dad fell and broke his leg and hurt his hip. Had no health insurance. Howard vowed to take care of people if he was ever in a position to do so, and he has stuck to that.

They spend more on healthcare than they do on coffee ingredients (and have since at least 2005), at the cost of corporate profits.

Here's information on what types of plans they offer.

They also offer a 100% match of 401(k) contributions up to 4 to 6% of the employee’s salary (decided by the board each Nov for the following year). So a good way to still take some tax benefits while side-gigging.

Schultz was pressured to cut healthcare benefits by shareholders (he owns about 3%) in 2008, but did not. Pretty neat.

[2Birds1Stone]

Trader Joes offers amazing health insurance to employees averaging at least 32 hours a week, over a period of 6 months. It's re-evaluated every 6 months. This is basically FT, because their shifts are 7.25 hours a pop. So you need to do a 5th day every few weeks fairly consistently to hit the threshold.

Interesting thread and discussion.

I had a high paying and stressful job, which I left over a year ago to travel (joke's on me, huh?). The problem with this job (and others before it) was that the "working hours" were blurry, I would be thinking about work in the middle of the night, on weekends, when in the company of family and friends, and it never felt like my time was my own. When I started off my career in retail, I would punch in and out, and even in a management position I felt like I could leave the work, at work.

Ultimately I chose to leanFIRE on a <$15k/yr budget, which obviously is not enough to live off of comfortably for 60+ years. A few failsafe's in the plan;

1) $15k is @ 3% WR, jumping to 4-5% increases available spending to $20-25k/yr
2) I planned to take a year or two off to travel and decompress and find a second calling so to speak
3) Even a PT job at a place like Trader Joes, earning $15/hr would cover 60% of my spending, working only 2 days a week
4) There is a very high likelihood that by leanFIRIng @ 32 years old, I will fall into some other paid work which will bring my WR to 0% or even have a few years where I add to the $500k stache.
5) DW is still planning on working another 5-10 years
6) As @ChpBstrd pointed out, ERE type approach is extremely resilient. With a WOOF/Workaway/housesitting stint, I can easily get my expenses below $15k/yr for a year or two of bad economic times without having to find professional work
7) Getting back into the workforce is my worst case, by working more years at my high stress and high paid job I was guaranteed to take years off of my life.

[Tig_]

Very interesting thread so far.  Is it just me, or is this topic jumping up more often these days?

I am in the phase of evaluating if this is the right move for me to make next summer myself - sort of a combo of 2B1S and StarBright - partner not interested + my desire to spend some extended time WWOOFing and hiking and such to decompress + partner is 25% through a two year contract 12 hours away - would get to spend time with him and then job search for something with less stress once his future job location is determined.  So, could turn into CoastFI, could turn into just a sabbatical, but need to think through it for more than 24 hours.

Does anyone know if we have a modified sticky somewhere about things to think through before pulling the plug if you want to shift to CoastFI/with or without a sabbatical in there? I know I've seen one about prepping for FIRE that I could just adapt, but unsure if there were some differences I hadn't thought through.

[arebelspy]

Is it just me, or is this topic jumping up more often these days?

Stress and burnout is real. When you have FU money, semi-ER becomes a tempting option.

[Evgenia]

Stress and burnout is real. When you have FU money, semi-ER becomes a tempting option.

^ This. In retrospect, knowing we'd end up choosing to do sporadic part-time work (and that said work would add up to a decent income), I wish we'd gone FIRE sooner. We were just scaredy cats and waited until we paid off our SF Bay Area mortgage (not representative of today's astronomical home prices, as we bought a VERY small house near the bottom of the Great Recesssion/late 2012).

We're 5.5 years into FIRE now. After our initial six months of lay-about, sleep lots, burnout recovery, we ended up taking on very casual, ad hoc, part-time work. Depending on the year, we've had $55k-$97k in income, usually more in the $65k-$75k range before expenses and deductions. We haven't touched our savings. 5 stars, strongly recommend, would do this lifestyle again.

To answer the original question, that would have been about $800k without a paid-off house, to be FI and keep working. Instead it was $1.5m + paid-off house that (in today's ridiculous Covid bubble market for single-family homes and comps on our block, has an estimated value of $1.4-$1.7m, 3x what we paid ~8 years ago). When we were able to FEEL FIRE in our bodies -- how much better we felt, better sleep, everything -- I wished we'd done it sooner.

[mistymoney]

Stress and burnout is real. When you have FU money, semi-ER becomes a tempting option.

^ This. In retrospect, knowing we'd end up choosing to do sporadic part-time work (and that said work would add up to a decent income), I wish we'd gone FIRE sooner. We were just scaredy cats and waited until we paid off our SF Bay Area mortgage (not representative of today's astronomical home prices, as we bought a VERY small house near the bottom of the Great Recesssion/late 2012).

We're 5.5 years into FIRE now. After our initial six months of lay-about, sleep lots, burnout recovery, we ended up taking on very casual, ad hoc, part-time work. Depending on the year, we've had $55k-$97k in income, usually more in the $65k-$75k range before expenses and deductions. We haven't touched our savings. 5 stars, strongly recommend, would do this lifestyle again.

To answer the original question, that would have been about $800k without a paid-off house, to be FI and keep working. Instead it was $1.5m + paid-off house that (in today's ridiculous Covid bubble market for single-family homes and comps on our block, has an estimated value of $1.4-$1.7m, 3x what we paid ~8 years ago). When we were able to FEEL FIRE in our bodies -- how much better we felt, better sleep, everything -- I wished we'd done it sooner.

this is hard for me to hear, actually. I've been waggling on the precipice of taking a sabbatical with 1099 income and seeing how far I can make it vs continuing to grind.

I've been researching everything I can here and elsewhere about how it all works, AA, WR, taxes, simulations, fail rates, etc. etc.

I'd just today decided to go for 3 more years....then read this.....


....

[Evgenia]

this is hard for me to hear, actually. I've been waggling on the precipice of taking a sabbatical with 1099 income and seeing how far I can make it vs continuing to grind.

I've been researching everything I can here and elsewhere about how it all works, AA, WR, taxes, simulations, fail rates, etc. etc.

I'd just today decided to go for 3 more years....then read this.....


....

Oh, I'm sorry. This is all very easy to say in hindsight, knowing things have turned out okay (that there was ad hoc work at all, for example, and at decent pay, which is luck and privilege in spades). None of what has happened was a given, and I was risk averse too... would we be on the Mustachian path if we were taking impulsive risks all over the place? Nah. It's okay to want to be secure and do the figuring and have more than enough, just in case.

It's funny... I *say* I would have done it before paying off the mortgage (hindsight) but, at the time, it was the paid-off house that -- at risk of sounding dramatic -- evaporated the real need to work. I had no idea how much it apparently drove my staying in the traditional workplace. As soon as that mortgage was gone, work life was SO much more of a palpable drag. Some totally unforeseen thing like that may tell you when you're ready and help you leave. :-)

[mistymoney]

this is hard for me to hear, actually. I've been waggling on the precipice of taking a sabbatical with 1099 income and seeing how far I can make it vs continuing to grind.

I've been researching everything I can here and elsewhere about how it all works, AA, WR, taxes, simulations, fail rates, etc. etc.

I'd just today decided to go for 3 more years....then read this.....


....

Oh, I'm sorry. This is all very easy to say in hindsight, knowing things have turned out okay (that there was ad hoc work at all, for example, and at decent pay, which is luck and privilege in spades). None of what has happened was a given, and I was risk averse too... would we be on the Mustachian path if we were taking impulsive risks all over the place? Nah. It's okay to want to be secure and do the figuring and have more than enough, just in case.

It's funny... I *say* I would have done it before paying off the mortgage (hindsight) but, at the time, it was the paid-off house that -- at risk of sounding dramatic -- evaporated the real need to work. I had no idea how much it apparently drove my staying in the traditional workplace. As soon as that mortgage was gone, work life was SO much more of a palpable drag. Some totally unforeseen thing like that may tell you when you're ready and help you leave. :-)

no need to apologize for sure! And kudos to you for being in such a great spot!

I've just been on a teeter totter for about a month or so.....if I figure it this way, I make it....if I figure it that way, I don't. Then I'm thinking no way I can do it.....but then I think - oh - forgot about SS kicking in eventually so I can make it.....then....forgot about taxes and the 10% withdrawal penalty, and I can't....but wait - if my 1099 income continues, or even grows...I make it...but pandemic, SORR could gut me, so I better not try right now....etc. etc....

I have a lot of vacation and holiday time in the next 2 months, so definitely going to push through to the new year. Maybe mix in a mental health day or two.

Then rethink in 2021....

[MudPuppy]

I actually do find my FT job rewarding, so I guess I'm doing that now? In noncovid times I work with chronically mentally ill persons, but I have been moved to covid response team by my org.


My spouse isn't sold on the idea of the RE part of FIRE, so in reality, once our house is paid off we can live on their paycheck and I could quit working FT and just work a few shifts a months to keep insurance. We expect the house to be paid off in 10-12 years at our current payment rate.

For both of us to stop working we would need to have about 900k in savings/investments. Universal healthcare would reduce that need to around 600k.

[ReadySetMillionaire]

Is it just me, or is this topic jumping up more often these days?

Stress and burnout is real. When you have FU money, semi-ER becomes a tempting option.

This is definitely my feelings, although I would say that you only need temporary FU money. I think if you have $100,000 in accessible cash, and you know how to make money on your own, you can likely CoastFIRE.

The interesting thing for me is that I somewhat explored CoastFIRE already, but didn't know it at the time. I was a solo attorney that was hustling making more than $100k/year, but life was still good. Having done it, and knowing I could get clients, I know I could "coast" and easily make enough income to cover my expenses (15/20 hours a week would likely be $40-50k/year).

Now I find myself doing my solo practice on the side while also working full time at the City Law Department.  Good base salary and amazing benefits here; but doing both is only temporary.

The plan is to save a mini-FU fund, pay off my student loans, and then probably coast with the solo practice.

[Sugaree]

Probably $1M.  $850k would buy an annuity that would give me $2500/month.  That is the magic number needed to get a residency visa in Honduras.  Another $150k to buy a house.  Then I can  work, or not, as a dive instructor or open a coffee shop or hot dog stand.

[ReadySetMillionaire]

I think this is basically my plan, to be able to go to part-time work in my same field (either negotiate for fewer hours or just move to a different job), or allow my husband to go part-time, or both of us go part time and not need to stash during that time as our stash grows on its own without additional contributions while also keeping our tax bracket lower.

I think somewhere between $500-$800k would do it, if we were able to not touch the stash. There are a lot of unknowns at this point. One thing that would help is if one of our jobs would cover medical for both of us--that would be worth a heck of a lot more than the actual paycheck.

I think this is my plan as well -- to go into PT work in my same field. And interestingly enough, and as I reflect on my seemingly always changing plan, the biggest reason I'm leaning towards CoastFIRE is because I've already dipped my toe into the water.

I left a law firm to start my own practice in early 2018.  I was going pedal to the metal with it, so it was a full time job and I was making $125,000 or so.  But I've already proven the concept to myself that I can hang a shingle and make it work. And I already know it would not be hard for me to get clients (the scariest part about going on your own), so I'm ready to do it.

Right now I work full time at the City Law Department ($66k/year plus amazing benefits) *and* my solo practice, which I do on Wednesdays and Sundays.  It's quite a bit, but the plan is to pay off my student loans, get retirement savings to about $350-400k (will be 35 at the time), get cash to $100k, and then go purely solo, 15 or so hours a week.

[kissthesky]

Is it just me, or is this topic jumping up more often these days?

Stress and burnout is real. When you have FU money, semi-ER becomes a tempting option.

Love this thread. Planning something similar - I'm at $1.3M and am just waiting until DH is done with his PhD (~1.5yrs). I never want to work again while he loves his field and wants to work forever. The plan will be to live off his salary and not touch the stash. I'm so burned out though I don't know if I can make it another 1.5 years. but I'm too afraid to quit in case something doesn't go well with him getting a job.