I guess I've accidentally found myself here. Used to make ~$120k year but was away from home traveling for work all the time, and couldn't stand the work, it was depressing. I had always seen about $1M-$1.5M invested as the number I needed to get out as we seemed to get by fine on $50k/yr, realizing with a growing family there were a lot of unknowns.
9 years ago, at the age of 36, when I had about $300k in retirement savings and a paid for $200k house and had just had my third child I finally had the guts and the client contacts to start a business where I and my employees could all work from home, figuring if I failed I wouldn't be broke, would start a phase of semi-retirements, and most importantly at the time would just be home either way. After making less for a number of years (though plenty to cover our expenses and save well) the work and net profit exploded. Over the past couple of years the amount of work got to me and I was close to checking out but I've since finally figured out how to shift much of the responsibility to employees and thru client partnership ventures.
Last year I netted about $500k and this year will likely be $1M+ (extremely volatile from month to month, next year could very well be $200k as it could be $1M). For these years taxes are now by far the primary financial focus as what I'll pay in taxes this year alone is many times what we spend. Needing new financial goals I've filled 529s to the tune of $120k for each child and started a DAF to help with taxes which I'll use throughout FIRE to make charitable donations from, and investments not including 529s have built to about $2.8M with a total net worth of about $3.6M. We've let our spending increase and now basically buy everything we want to, go on any trip we want to (and can find the time for), etc, but for this family of 5, $100k pretty much covers all that.
The 'problem' that obviously emerged is how to downshift without quitting, as quitting is no longer the holy grail as it once was. I feel personally obligated to employees to keep things rolling, my workday stresses me out and takes too much of my time but I certainly don't "hate" it, I'm actually quite proud of it now, and its hard to not notice what OMY of work can do right now, even though we obviously have more than enough. I think I'm finally getting somewhere on the transfer of responsibilities and reducing stress. Its really really funny how many people think you have a hidden agenda when you try to give up profit in return for handing off responsibility, no one seems to ever understand giving up profit potential and that has actually created some difficulties in this downshifting.
Topic: Race from $2M to $4M...and Beyond! (Read 1396909 times)
