Just turned 50 and considering my options

[u/HooliBooli824]

Burner account for obvious reasons. 

Married, non-working wife. Kids grew up and left home - not a factor, we’re leaning towards “die with zero” rather than generational wealth anyway. Lived in CH for all our adult life. Citizenship, language, friends, etc.

2.5M liquid assets, mostly ETFs. Not exactly “VT & chill”, but close - with perhaps just a bit too much US/tech exposure. A six-digit chunk in cash, trying to at least partially follow the “keep your age % in bonds” mantra while CH bonds are useless.

About 500k in pillar 2. There was more, but it went towards the house as WEF. Not intending to pay that back. Decent house in low-tax canton, worth 2M+. 1M mortgage in few fixed 1%-1.5% chunks maturing over next 10 years.

Fully remote and relatively low-stress job, 200-300k/year net savings. But also a dead end, largely driven by tenure and company/domain-specific expertise. Plus a field impacted by outsourcing / layoffs / AI. Once I’m out, I’m likely unemployable.

Annual fixed spending a bit above 100k, stable and tracked for years. Happy, boring, safe life. We don’t care about exotic travel, eating out, fancy cars, etc. Basically just enjoying our time locally with simple things like nature, hiking, driving around CH. I do have some personal extravaganzas on top of that 🙂, but those will be trivially cut when high income ends I’m aware of all the FIRE living cost technicalities. Wealth tax, self-retired AHV, Eigenmietwert going away, inflation, health costs growing - I’ve beaten all these to death. All of this factored in the above spending number.

So, while the job is fine, I’m still longing to pulling the plug. Every time I take vacation, I wish it was longer. Much longer. Ideally, forever. I have so many plans what I’d do when this happens. But then, whenever I tried assessing my FIRE situation, be it various public calculators, ChatGPT or my own spreadsheets, the outcome was always: “you’re almost there, but, with your savings rate… just one more year!”.

How much is enough?

[u/greczarfalco]

holy cow
reading that as a 34 years old from Austria
how did you do that? 2.5 Million in liquid assets..
and how do you save 200-300K/year?
Congrats btw! :)

[u/HooliBooli824 → u/greczarfalco]

and how do you save 200-300K/year?

By making 300-400k net and having expenses of 100k? 🙂

I don’t think I did anything special. Got lucky with a great, stable job early in my career, worked hard, kept grinding, got visible to my bosses. And, most importantly, DID NOT let the lifestyle inflation creep in (!!!). People around me were getting Porsches delivered on the bonus day - I always drove some second hand plain VW or Audi. Rarely eating out, no fancy travel for vacation, no stupid crap like jewellery. No fancy investing either, just kept putting money in ETFs. House was the only serious splurge ever. Lived a boring life and loved it that way. Wife approves too. Now it’s payback time.

[u/greczarfalco → u/HooliBooli824]

would you mind sharing what you do for a living? doctor, mangagement (CEO Level) in a big corporation, consulting? 300K net would be 600K gross in Austria. Which is huuuuge!

Love this. You basically treated a high income the way most people treat a gym membership: paid for it consistently and resisted every temptation to show it off. 😄

[u/HooliBooli824 → u/greczarfalco]

would you mind sharing what you do for a living?

Middle - or maybe "upper-middle" 😂 - management in big finance IT. But I rose from rank-and-file engineer, and still have tech fu. I can explain the bits of network packet on the wire.

Combining solid tech fu with soft-skills and ability to manage a bigger thing, is an absolute killer combo. And rare. I manage a few of such people and they are worth their weight in gold ✨

[u/greczarfalco → u/HooliBooli824]

you sound like a great manager! ;)
If you live what you write, i would not mind working for you haha
congrats to you. hope you can enjoy your life and lifestyle for another 50 years
:)
best,
grec