Thought I'd solicit some opinions and experiences from the community, as while my situation is unique, I'm sure there are others who have gone through similar scenarios. I'll try to keep this to the point here...
DW and I, no kids, 38 years old. Both of us have good jobs, I enjoy mine more than she enjoys hers, but in the near term things are tolerable (this is not an "I'm losing my mind at work" situation) for both of us.
A number of years ago, I stumbled into the concept of early retirement while researching general investment / financial planning. We have followed the path that I am sure is familiar to many of you who are reading... learning leads to cutting spending leads to increasing savings leads to being surprised at how little happiness was being gained from all the extra spending. While this has certainly supercharged our savings rate / amount, we are also looking forward to starting the next chapter in our adventure. Working is fine, it just isn't how we would like to spend our time. We have many interests (many of which are not particularly expensive), enjoy each others company, and would like to stop spending so much of our time toiling away trying to generate wealth.
We are not yet to a place where I feel comfortable jumping off, but that mindset of "Everything is going to be fine, go for it and figure out the details as they come" is definitely starting to tug at us in a much more tangible way than even just a year ago. I am trying to find the balance between making the most of our current situation and enjoying it as much as possible with staying longer than we have to and wasting time that could be spent young and healthy doing whatever we feel like.
Financial stuff, we are at about 720k in invested assets, 250k of which is in taxable accounts. We have the house and a mortgage, but I have basically been counting our home equity as a wash... estimated conservatively, our current home equity should get us at least most of the way to a house in the new location, mortgage free. Home and land prices where I live are tricky to estimate, so maybe there will be a nice surprise there but I'm not counting on it. It's hard for me to get an exact number on how much we are saving per year (and that amount is somewhat variable for a number of reasons), but it is in the neighborhood of 100k.
On the spending side, a couple years ago we started tracking spending more seriously and specifically. At that point, we decided to simply be more careful about what we spent money on. No budget, no specific rules or anything formal, and if we really wanted something we'd just buy it... the goal was to see how much we could drive our spending down without feeling like we were giving anything up. Since then, we have averaged about 45k per year (for purposes of this discussion, this number does not include mortgage since the plan will be to eliminate that), which includes certain things that will likely go away (3k+ / year big house electric bill, 2.5k / year in gas for long commute are at the top of that list) but does not include some other things that will likely be different than they are today (health insurance is at the top of that list... no shortage of uncertainty concerning that, and I have no idea how to plan for it. We're both healthy and active... beyond that, who knows).
I am 100% certain that if we committed to it fully, that number would go down more... potentially significantly. There is plenty of stuff included in those spending numbers that were clearly wants and not needs, and we are both completely on board with eliminating that kind of thing if it allows us to live more freely. We are also both open to generating income, if we can do it in a way that better aligns with how we'd like to spend our time. I am consistently amazed when I play with firecalc or cfiresim, and how much difference an extra 5 - 10k / year in income can make over the long term. We are both educated and well adjusted (well okay... sort of), I'm a software engineer and DW is in sales... generating some sort of future earnings feels like something that not only we could figure out if we had to, but something I could see us doing because it would be fun to do together.
The largest potential complication in our situation is that we don't want to stay where we are, geographically. This means selling a large house and a lot of land, which could take some time. I think we have a pretty good idea of where we'd like to go next, but knowing that for sure is a challenge that we underestimated last time we moved. I'll be taking steps to try and mitigate that risk, but in my experience it can be a difficult problem to avoid.
I would be interested to hear how others dealt with this "balance" problem (well... "problem", I guess)... especially if it involves moving. We could keep doing what we're doing for another 5 or 10 years and be quite wealthy... but I'm just not excited about spending my time that way. Barring an economic catastrophe or whatever, in a year or two we may be at a point where it makes sense to go for it, and I'd like to start getting my plan organized so when that time arrives I already know what I'm going to do. Thanks in advance for sharing any experiences on these topics...