Net worth Threshold to not take higher pay/stress job

[Gatsby]

Curious to know if there is a networth number that would have folks almost immediately turn down a position that comes with higher pay/stress.
The higher my net-worth has been climbing, the more appreciative I have been feeling about my current role/pay/lifestyle and I am now finding that it is only my "career ego" that seems to be considering those internal promotions to being a people manager.
What number on your path to FI would this be for you?

[Sanitary Stache]

I was 36 with a positive net worth less than $100,000 when I made this decision. And have continued to make it. Though it has only been two years and one opportunity.

[Steeze]

100% FI or bust. More Money Faster, please!!

At the point now where I am at the top of the hierarchy and have to look for creative ways to make myself more valuable. I do sometimes think about taking a completely different job at a different company in a different field for 1/2 the pay just to expand my skillset. Then I think about how I am not FI yet, so I go to the office and continue on. Am about 50% FI now, maybe this will change as I get closer? Starting to gain some noticeable momentum, I imagine that as capital gains play a bigger and bigger role I will be less and less attached to the paycheck.

If I had to put a number to it, 1 Million seems nice and round and an "I made it" type of number, a "I can go mow lawns and it doesn't matter anymore" type of number.

[Metalcat]

I had a negative net worth of a few hundred thousand when I took a major pay cut.

You have to balance out all of the factors and make the right decision for yourself/your family.

Rules of thumb are just lazy ways people avoid actually thinking through what decisions are best for them.

[YttriumNitrate]

Curious to know if there is a networth number that would have folks almost immediately turn down a position that comes with higher pay/stress. What number on your path to FI would this be for you?

It's not a number, it's more of an equation for accepting a new position:

A/(B^2)>C

Wherein

A=New annual salary as a percentage of net worth
B=Factor expressing expected stress level
C=Constant

[ixtap]

I have a brother who always made this decision and last I knew he wasn't saving for the future at all (lillies of the field and all that).

On the more responsible end of the spectrum, enough people are interested in barista and coast FIRE that there are names for those options. Choosing not to move up the ladder should be an easy choice if you have made your goals based on your current income. If you set your goals based on a regularly increasing income, than you can either reset your goals or take the stress.

[utaca]

FWIW I recently made a change to a lower stress/lower pay job after I hit $1M. About six months in, my major regret is not making the change sooner. My previous job paid well but it took a toll on my health and happiness, and on my family life.

I would suggest that net worth is probably not a good measure of when to shift to a lower pay/stress job. What you should consider is what is best for you and your family. Certainly pay is a factor but it's not the only (and IMO not the most important) consideration.

[Freedomin5]

We calculated/estimated the amount that we would need to retire at age 65. Then we figured out how much we would need now for it to grow via compounding to that amount,  if we were to never add another penny to the stash. For us that amount was $200k. We knew if we had $200k in investments, then the magic of compounding would turn that $200k into our target amount by the time we turned 65. That meant that all we needed to do from now until 65 was to find a job that just covered our expenses.

[Metalcat]

FWIW I recently made a change to a lower stress/lower pay job after I hit $1M. About six months in, my major regret is not making the change sooner. My previous job paid well but it took a toll on my health and happiness, and on my family life.

I would suggest that net worth is probably not a good measure of when to shift to a lower pay/stress job. What you should consider is what is best for you and your family. Certainly pay is a factor but it's not the only (and IMO not the most important) consideration.

Exactly.

It entirely depends on what you are trading off for whatever income you are making.

Some trades are good trades, some trades are bad. It's not like higher paying jobs are standardized and everyone trades off the exact same resources for more money.

[srad]

Nope, its FI or bust.  But if you hate your job you can always look for a new one that pays well too.

When i was at my last company and i no longer enjoyed working there, i went out and found a job in the same industry that came with a 40% pay raise.  Now my pay has more than doubled and I hit my original FI number.  And then realized its no where near what i need, I need to double it.   Damn lifestyle creep.

[FIRE 20/20]

FWIW I recently made a change to a lower stress/lower pay job after I hit $1M. About six months in, my major regret is not making the change sooner. My previous job paid well but it took a toll on my health and happiness, and on my family life.

I would suggest that net worth is probably not a good measure of when to shift to a lower pay/stress job. What you should consider is what is best for you and your family. Certainly pay is a factor but it's not the only (and IMO not the most important) consideration.

^This!

Obviously as many other people have said, this is highly dependent on your situation.  However, I am in total agreement with @utaca because when I got to somewhere around 90% of my FIRE number I moved to a different role within my company.  It didn't come with any decrease in pay, but I moved out of a high-stress position that set me up for career growth into a low-stress dead-end position.  My life improved so much more than I thought it would.  Even in my high-stress position I felt like I had a great job, so it wasn't a situation where I moved out of something I hated to something better.  The difference for me was that rather than being stuck working 6am to 6 pm I was able to work from 9am to 3pm at which point I had a choice to use PTO to leave early or stick around until 5pm to get a full 8 hours.  In both cases I was fortunate to have a great job with excellent co-workers, but in the latter case I also had a great life outside of work.  I did take a little bit of a "pay cut" because I used up hundreds of hours of PTO that would otherwise have been paid out when I FIREd.  My partner did something similar although she officially transitioned to 32 hours a week.   

I just cannot recommend downshifting enough if it's an option.  I didn't realize how much better it would be for both of us, and I wish we had done it sooner.  My recommendation would be to start looking into downshifting around the time you're 50-75% of the way to FIRE.  At that point the 'stache is doing so much of the work that a small reduction in pay isn't going to make a huge difference in your FIRE timeline but the lower stress levels and possibility of a better life outside of work may more than make up for it. 

[use2betrix]

Depends on amount of difference in income and stress.

There’s a big difference in going from $500k with a 9/10 stress to $75k with a 3/10 stress.

I’ve had jobs paying 1/4 of what I make now, where I’d put the stress at about 50%-75% of where it’s at now.

[chasesfish]

To me, it's between $600,000 and $1,000,000.

I took the higher stress / higher paying job when I was just under $1,000,000 and mostly regretted it.

[bryan995]

It’s more about comp than NW to me.

100k to 200k for a higher stress job, sure.
300k to 600k for a higher stress job, sure.
600k to 900k for a higher stress job, meh.

Often the large jumps also come with an incredible increase in responsibilities.

IC -> Director -> VP.

I would not take on 10x the responsibility for 2x the money :)

[gooki]

Once I was debt free (mortgage paid off), I started avoiding stressful jobs.

[flyingaway]

I did that twice AFTER I achieved financial independence. My boss(es) were furious to the extend that my work day is probably numbered.

[FLBiker]

Personally, I was never willing to add much stress, but I was always open to higher pay.  I don't love supervising people, but I've taken positions supervising small teams sometimes.  I currently supervise 1 full-time and 1 part-time, and that's fine.  If my boss were to leave, I would not try to get his position (which is basically 100% people management).

I am definitely not a FI or bust person -- we've made lots of choices that delayed our FI over the years (ie having DW stay home for two years when DD was born, moving to Canada from the US) because our emphasis has always been on quality of life (both now and in the future).  That said, we're basically at our FI number now, so my tolerance for work related stress is very low.  My plan is to ask for reduce hours / more weeks off next year.  I don't really want to quit working completely, and I like my current job well enough.

[Kayad]

I made this decision once when I was proto-Mustachian at <$100k networth and it was the right decision.

Now I've slipped back into high pay (but not nearly as high as if I'd stayed on first job track)/high stress/but high job satisfaction.  Still, will make a downshift move again soon, hopefully on a more permanent basis.  It will be comfortable because we are easily over the coast FIRE threshold (that being ~800k in investment accounts for us).  Not sure what I'd do/how long I could grind it out if I didn't have that degree of security.

[DadJokes]

There's not one exact answer. Questions I would ask myself?

How much do I enjoy my current position?
How long will it take me to reach FI in my current role?
How much additional stress would I be taking on?
How much faster would I reach FI if I took the new job?
Is that reduced time to FI worth the additional stress?

I'm roughly a decade from FI, and I wouldn't really want to take on a more stressful job unless my timeline to FI was cut by 3+ years.

[Metalcat]

There's not one exact answer. Questions I would ask myself?

How much do I enjoy my current position?
How long will it take me to reach FI in my current role?
How much additional stress would I be taking on?
How much faster would I reach FI if I took the new job?
Is that reduced time to FI worth the additional stress?

I'm roughly a decade from FI, and I wouldn't really want to take on a more stressful job unless my timeline to FI was cut by 3+ years.

For me it was the opposite.

I realized that I absolutely LOVED my job if I did it under certain, better circumstances and for fewer hours, but that it was crushing and brutal when I didn't.

I wanted to extend my career as long as possible, so I took a pay cut, reduced my hours, and customized my career for maximum enjoyment and just stopped worrying about FIRE.

[trollwithamustache]

Pre MMM I was a big saver, but not really thinking about RE or that early was possible. Still discovering MMM I hit ~400k in retirement savings and realized at a 6.5% growth rate, I didn't need to save any more for retirement at 60 at what I thought was needed. Probably a fat fire number by this websites standards.

By the time I discovered MMM and a formal way of thinking about early retirement, I was already at my "retirement at 60 number" and contracting.   I enjoy work quite a lot when I am only picking projects that are interesting and/or clients I like/respect. If you are organized, working as a contractor also means you can write off a lot, so you may only need to work 50% of the time. 

Outside of this website I would consider us frugal, but here we likely really are not. We never really saved more than maybe 35% of income while W-2 jamming. Even the years at substantially reduced hours (say 60% of the year working), we are still able to cover all our cash flow needs and save a little. Many years we saved more and full MMM-math approved fat fire moves much closer.  But, I've got two clients who are both nice guys and have really interesting technologies, so I have no real desire to retire.  If I were working for a pointy haired boss at a Fortune 500 company I would probably feel very different about this.

[norajean]

Around 30 times annual spending.

[nereo]

Around 30 times annual spending.

To be clear - this would be beyond when most people would consider themselves completely FI…

There's not one exact answer. Questions I would ask myself?

How much do I enjoy my current position?
How long will it take me to reach FI in my current role?
How much additional stress would I be taking on?
How much faster would I reach FI if I took the new job?
Is that reduced time to FI worth the additional stress?

I'm roughly a decade from FI, and I wouldn't really want to take on a more stressful job unless my timeline to FI was cut by 3+ years.

For me it was the opposite.

I realized that I absolutely LOVED my job if I did it under certain, better circumstances and for fewer hours, but that it was crushing and brutal when I didn't.

I wanted to extend my career as long as possible, so I took a pay cut, reduced my hours, and customized my career for maximum enjoyment and just stopped worrying about FIRE.

Sounds a lot like us.

[affordablehousing]

One way to think about it is in terms of hourly pay, and I mean each hour you are really thinking much about work. That in my mind gives a value to the "stress". Some people like to do a good job and stress about it no matter how relatively pressured or unpressured the environment is, others couldn't care less no matter how much their bosses get on them. I think if you are able to get a sense of how many hours you are really "working" at a job you shouldn't take a paycut.

[Metalcat]

Around 30 times annual spending.

You would seriously need 30 times annual spending to turn down a more stressful position just because it paid more?

So like, you are happily working along in your job, and have 25X your expenses, and you are offered a much more stressful job with a 20% raise, which at this point isn't really going to speed up FIRE very much because investment returns are doing a lot of heavy lifting towards FI anyway.

But you would take on more stress because you can't turn down more money even if it would make your life worse??

[Loren Ver]

My two cents would be that there isn't one, assuming you are talking about a job that you don't really want the stress levels it would require.  I'm was not willing to sell my happiness nor that of my spouse. 

We never had this situation, since we weren't corporate climbers, but we kinda had something similar.
DH had a job that was tolerable and they changed it to make it no longer tolerable.  They did this by literally moving his seating assignment :).  Anyway, he came home one day and stated he could no longer work there and we needed to do something about this.  Always we, because we are a team.  The options were:
1.  Quit - he becomes stay at home husband and we have one income.  FIRE timeline changes, but happy family.
2.  Suck it up and hope the company fixes the issue after he complains.  He was one of their best workers, so they might do something, maybe.
3- Do some part time work while going back to school for a new career. 

#2 I kicked to the curb immediately since I refused to live with a miserable spouse.  What's the fun in living ones best life all the time if you are going to CHOOSE to spend years of it being MISERABLE.  BY CHOICE!  Nope.  Not an option. 

We went with option #3.  He went back for an associates degree and then spent 7 years in a much more interesting and rewarding job. 

Then we FIRED.  The joy of building a nest egg is it starts doing the heavy lifting so you don't have to worry about these things.

Loren