I have realized that investment returns are real for a long time, but only recently have I actually sat down to calculate how much I make per year just on dividends alone without ever touching the principal. After accounting for all taxes, margin interest, leverage, and tax exempt municipal bond distribution I came up with about 13 dollars per hour 40 hours per week is what my yield is paying me. I consider this to be barebones FI, for if something were to happen to my other income streams it would provide me enough money to pay my bills, and eat and maybe put gas in my car, but not much else. I was reading an article a while back, and it had some really solid points that I'm sure a lot of Mustachians already realize, and that is that even if you don't want to FIRE and like your job, once you reach a high enough net worth, you could actually be losing money through time and opportunity cost by working a 9 to 5 gig. At a high enough net worth, if you were to simply spend your time at Starbucks daily poring over business articles, balancing investments, looking for new business and growth opportunities, finding ways to decrease your tax liability, working on ways to decrease cost of living, focusing on business start up ideas etc., you could actually have a higher return at that point by efficiently utilizing your time vs. wasting it to contribute a small amount more to your stache that the 9 to 5 job would give you. Anyways food for thought, I'm always interested in stories or comments and ideas related to this topic.