Heres the deal...my taxable accounts are killing me at tax time I find myself pulling from the accounts just to pay the tax bills (this can't be good) and the fees on some of those accounts are nearing 1%..I know the obvious idea would be to transfer all of those to vanguard funds but Im just apprehensive because I know the tax hit will kill me.
I'm not sure what your definition of "killing me at tax time" is, but if you had $600k invested in a Vanguard stock index fund, you would expect to pay tax on a 2% dividend yield, or $12,000 of extra income. This would be taxed at a favorable rate (0-23% depending on other income), so perhaps $2,500 of extra taxes.
Now if you have your funds with an advisor that trades stuff all the time or invests in funds that have a lot of churn, they'll be passing some extra expense on to you in the form of capital gains that you'll be taxed on every year. If this applies to you, not only will you save that 1% by switching to Vanguard, your annual tax bill will go down after the first year.
This is a switch you know you should make eventually. You'll owe those taxes eventually. All you gain by delaying is another year of paying high management fees on your portfolio.
Meanwhile you have about $700k invested in the market. 4% of that is $28,000. Add in your $45,000 pension, paid-off house, and $700 monthly rental income, and I think you should easily be able to retire on less than $81,400 of annual spending if you adopt even a little bit of frugality between now and then.