I've been starting to consider the possibility of retiring in 2025. I've been following MrMoneyMustache since very nearly the start of my career. I've also been lucky enough to be paid very well for my labor, have a similarly minded partner, and also make some luckily timed financial moves regarding housing.
At this point we have saved up something like 40x annual expenses, ignoring housing cost, taxes, and health insurance. We are considering relocating from our current HCOL location to an MCOL location, where a whole house of a similar quality to the one we have can be purchased for just the equity we have in our current house.
Moreover, if we were retired, I reckon we would be able to immediately cut about 1/4 of our overall expenses, which are currently spent on afterschool care and full day+sleep away summer camps for the kids.
Health insurance is somewhat of an unknown for me. At this point, I'm trying to approach the problem by looking at the upper bound of expenses. According to the health insurance transparency page for the state we're considering moving to, we'd be spending about $1,500/mo for our family to be on a gold plan. I think we would actually be fine on a silver plan as we have no significant health issues and could probably afford to self-insure.
I also find it difficult to game out exactly how much I'm going to spend on taxes. I've just estimated 25% average on rich-broke-dead, and the model seems to think we'd be fine.
In light of all this, I think we're about as safe to retire as you could really ask for. I think the bigger questions are the intangibles. Would we really be as happy in the medium sized city we'd be moving to? It has much better outdoor options and kids stuff than where we currently live, but not as many fancy restaurants and cultural options. As parents of young children, we don't currently take much advantage of all that fancy big city stuff. We would miss the mass transit options, but we also don't mind driving that much either. Would we miss work? Would we suddenly decide that we really want to buy a boat and a plane if we retired? Probably not, but the overcautious worrier in me can't help thinking about it.
This is such an interesting problem because you can't really talk it out with the "normies" in your life. People where we live just do not think about retiring or quitting the rat race. Also, most of our friends are still struggling to acquire a house adequate to their family needs, to say nothing of having enough saved up to live off their investments. Chatting about already having way too much, or the unthinkable luxury of not having to work, with such folks is not something I really feel that comfortable with.
To dip my toes in the pool of early retirement, I'm planning to start taking a lot more vacation over the next year. My idea is to just take vacation any time I want until I run out, and, if I want to do more vacationing beyond that, take unpaid time off. I could probably even retire in place, although we'd be much closer to the line, and I'm not sure I really want to be retired in this city.