You went from discovering you were FI to turning in your resignations in a week? That seems extraordinary to process so quickly. The job must have really turned sour for you. How much over what you needed was your stash when you found this out? Being just barely over the line doesn’t yet feel safe for me, especially as our lives still feel unsettled. Somehow I thought we would have this adult stuff figured out better by now!
Yes, one week. We used to not really pay attention to our investments other than to make sure we were maxing out our various tax deferred contributions and whatnot. Even when doing our annual rebalancing, we never really paid too much attention as we figured we'd be working for quite a bit longer anyway. FIRE was an idea we really liked, but it was a "yeah, we'll do that eventually" kind of thing.
Then a company from Dubai bought out the firm we worked for and the company culture fell through the floor super quick. They started pressuring us to lie to customers, lie to vendors, started asking employees intrusive questions about personal matters, threatening not to pay employees for work already completed unless they took on new commitments...it was shockingly awful. After one particularly bad meeting with management where I had to threaten to report them to the IRS and DOL, I sort of jokingly said to my wife that we should just retire and wash our hands of the whole situation. My wife laughed, I laughed, and then we half-seriously figured out what our budget would be if we stopped working. We then looked at our investments and realized that we actually could quit if we wanted. A week later we did just that. Took everyone else between 6 and 12 months to find an exit, but every original employee left the firm about as fast as they could.
We never had a budget before FIRE as we are both naturally frugal and not wired for unnecessary consumption, so we never needed to really keep track. So while the amount in our retirement accounts was known to us, we didn't really know how far it would go budget-wise since we'd never really sat down to figure out exactly how much money we needed from month to month. When we finally came up with a solid budget, we realized that we had overshot our FIRE number by about 30%. So our first year of FIRE we were at a WR of just under 3% and it's gone down each year since as the market has done so well.
I know what you mean about feeling unsafe about being just over the line. We were well over the line and it still felt unsteady to retire with a house full of young kids and lots of future unknowns. I'd recommend taking a hard look at your fixed expenses and see where you might be able to drive them down. Every dollar you can comfortably take out of your monthly minimum is added safety margin in case things go south.
I don't buy in to the idea of ever really figuring out the adult stuff. I think everyone is just pretending whether they admit it to themselves or not. :)