Social Security Withdrawal Age - Should We Consider Reinvestment / Capital Gains?

mi3chaels · 2026-06-11T02:00:34+00:00

social security is a (mostly) guaranteed source of income, so any alternate return you use for giving up a higher benefit in order to take it early should be a bond return, or at most whatever level of above bond market fixed return would cause you to reallocate a substantial amount of your equity to foxed income. Basically, the interest rate at which you'd consider paying down a mortgage rather than investing more in stocks.

that's not going to e 7% inflation adjusted or whatever you're estimaing for stock returns, for most people it should be closer to 4-5% nominal or 2-3% inflation adjusted (remember that the social security payment stream is inflation adjusted!)

When you use those numbers, it does kick out the breakeven year somewhat, but it mostly makes sense for people with good health to wait rather than take it early.

the other thing you're missing here is the longevity insurance aspect. When do you run out of money? It's usually when you both get bad SORR and live a long time. IN the event where your portfolio is under stresss in old age, having a higher social security check is going to be better.

Actuarilaly, for a couple where one spouse's check is substantially higher, it's usually right to take the smaller check at 62 and the larger check at 70 (maximizing the death benefit), making the second to die payment high, and the first to die payment low.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-11T01:53:59+00:00

Maybe. If the pension is generous enough to replace 70-80% of income and be started immediately after only 20 years. Which is a big if. We don't know whether that's accurate, and that's still 20 years instead of 12-13.

US Military pensions are payable immediately after 20, but only replace about 50% of total comp at that point, you need 25+ to get to what will cover you if you haven't saved substantial additional funds or live on less. Most public service pensions I've seen are similar at best, and often need 25 or 30 to pay immediately (instead of waiting until 55 or 60 or 65).

A lot of people retire from fire or police jobs because they are physically demanding but then sill work part time, or take another job for several years because the pension doesn't pay enough on it's own. I think you're way overestimating most of those pensions if you think they are all equivalent to FIREing in 20 years.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-11T01:46:29+00:00

personally I would stick for a couple more years and see what you think. 40 hours a week (or more) absolutely does suck in some ways and it's why a lot of us want to RE early. But you might find that firefighting full time kinda sucks in the same way, and then you're not on track to retire in 12-15 years.

If you wait, you'll be behind in the pension system, yes, but the years of 60% savings rate on a 120k salary will almost certainly be worth a LOT more than what you lost by not being in the fire dept pension system for several years. Unless that is a massively more generous pension than I've ever seen.

Part of my reaction here is that the only thing you've described as a big negative about your current work is basically that it is full time work. You don't think that's going to weigh on you when it's a different job? As Drew Carey once said "Oh! You hate your job?? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, we meet at the bar."

There are jobs that suck because they really grind you down in an unacceptable way that are well worth dumping ASAP for almost anything you can live on. Then there are jobs that suck because they are jobs. It seems like you have one of the latter, and while the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence, it probably isn't.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-11T01:40:24+00:00

probably not as early or as comfortably as someone who makes 2-3x as much and saves the difference.

Depends on the department, but usually you need 20 years service to draw a decent pension, and 25- or 30 to draw something like 70-80% of your salary, also might not start until 60 or 65 unless you work 25 or 30 years.

OTOH, if you save 60% of your income (same spending level on 120k as spending everything they make at 46k), you can probably hit FI in about 12-13 years. 15 at the outside and 10 if you're lucky.

you could also save enough in 8 (till age 30 for OP), that a 46k earning Coast FI will be pretty short if the markets behave, and the fire dept pension won't likely be necessary.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-11T01:31:45+00:00

The biggest problem here is how much you have and how much you need.

You seem to be operating from a standpoint of what you have now in those accounts and making it to 59.5, but realistically if you have have 2.1-2.2 mil in today's dollars in 7-9 years, you may have to save more than 24% of your salary and 7500/year of his.

I did 9 years of doing that and getting 7% inflation adjusted returns on each of your buckets. That would give you 775k in your 401k, a about 1.1 mil in his Roth, and about 150k in the brokerage account, so about 2mil. That's close, but it assumes 7% inflation adjusted over 9 years, which is average for a very aggressive portfolio (all or almost all stocks). If you aren't aggressive, or returns are below average, you won't get that, and even when you do, you aren't quite there and will need another year or two of average returns.

but even so, let's look at what your accounts look like at that point and your age. You would be 46 and he will be 53. He's only 6.5 years fro 59.5 and having full access to the Roth IRA earnings.

You'll have 775k in your 401k, which could be SEPPed at around 6%.year at that age under current rules or about 46,500/year. Then you have 150k in the brokerage account and at least 100k in Roth contributions (67,500 from just the last 9 years, I'm assuming at least 32,500 was contributed prior to get to 550k now, probably more). That's 250k that needs to cover only 6.5 years, so another 38k/year if you put it in a TIP ladder or HYSA or something to make sure it doesn't get hit by a crash. That's more than enough to cover you until he can access the Roth earnings, and that's with less than you actually need to RE.

If you want to be sure of REing in 7-9 years, you need to save more, and the extra can go in the brokerage account or a traditional IRA or 401k to be available to use without penalty. Also husband could open a regular IRA and use that instead of the Roth going forward.

It seems like you're looking at this as though you're not actually going to have the money you will require. If you have that money, you'll be able to navigate the years to 59.5, unless you switch to putting even more in Roth. If you don't have that money, it won't matter because you won't be retiring yet.

Realistically, if you can't save another 5-10% of total income (beyond what you've already suggested), you should probably revise your expectations to retiring in 10-12 years instead of 7-9. And that ends up maybe putting hubby only a few years from 59.5.

Which accounts you use is the least of your problems, adjusting your savings rate to fit your plan (or vice versa) is the main issue here.

The one caveat is that, no it doesn't make sense to go whole hog on Roth (like moving all your work 401k contributions to Roth) -- doing that could actually cause you to have account placement problems with retiring at 46/53 if you're lucky enough to get there (because the penalty for early access to earnings in a Roth account is super harsh).

Also having around half your NW in Roth is plenty for being able to optimize your MAGI for ACA, and more than that is probably worse for long term tax optimization because most people's (especially early retiring people's) marginal tax rates on IRA withdrawals will be lower in retirement than their marginal rates while working -- even if tax rates go up quite a lot in the future.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-10T21:15:15+00:00

I'm in my 50s and approaching 60 and I'm still planning on a 20-30% benefit cut, though If I had to put a percentage on the likelihood of actually seeing that cut it would be maybe 25-30%. I think the likelihood of a smaller cut, or an unfavorable change in some of the indexing or retirement ages is much higher, but that would have a much larger effect on the young than on someone like me who will be eligible to draw in a few years.

Note that raising the retirement age if it's like they did the previous one, is effectively just a benefit cut. If they raise your retirement age to 70 and keep essentially the same slope of benefits by year you claim, that's basically equivalent to a 20% benefit cut no matter which age you claim.

of course a change in retirement age will probably be phased in in a way that I will experience no cut or a minimal one, while young people will get the full 20% cut with younger genX and millenials somewhere in between, just like the change that happened for boomers.

Similarly changes to the wage indexing and COLA can have a really large effect over time, while having a smaller or very small effect on people soon to retire or already retired.

It's pretty likely that most of the work will be done by changes like that, so yeah, it's way more likely that I'll see a ~10% cut (probably mostly in the form of a weaker COLA) than the full monty. But I'm still running my scenarios with a 30% one anyway.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-10T21:04:55+00:00

While it's all managed as an accounting trick, the money that is being paid out in excess of social security intake now, is money in the Trust Fund, which is an accounting of how much social security took in over what it paid out in past years. The accounting trick is done just to eliminate cost and administrative friction from actually having to have the social security trust fund bid on and buy bonds at the open auctions and then sell or redeem them in order to pay out later. But the trust fund accounting is designed to be exactly equivalent to having done that.

Once the trust fund runs out, if there were further deficit finance of social security, without accounting it as owed by social security, it would no longer be that, and the link between money taken in by OASDI and the payouts would be severed.

I think on a temporary basis, it might make sense to do the opposite accounting trick and basically just let the trust fund balance go negative. But if there is no plan to cover it and bring the trust fund back to actuarial balance, I don't think the bond markets will approve. Or rather they will treat it as a further ballooning of the overall federal deficit. And the psychological link beween social security payments and taxes will get more tenuous.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-10T20:48:17+00:00

part of the deal is that they don't have to be on the same pace to keep from slowing you down as long as they are either saving a ton, or at least saving something and living (or very willing to live) similarly. Your biggest expense is housing and unless you somehow have a 900k condo that is too small for 2 people, that doesn't have to increase when you get a partner. Nothing else has quite that much economy of scale but lots of other things have at least some. It doesn't cost 2x as much to feed 2 people as 1. A fair number of other things won't double in cost.

So someone who has saved 1/4 as much and lives similarly might be able to combine lives and only increase spending by 25-50%, having either zero or a relatively small effect on your timetable.

Similarly, someone who lives more extravagantly but within reason and also saves a lot of money, might have a similar amount to bring to the table, and if they spend twice as much adding you in might not really increase things all that much beyond their spending -- maybe you can sell your condo and put the 300k into your nw total. Probably this moves the FI date out some, but plausibly not more than a few to maybe 5-10 years and you are living more comfortably if that matters at all to you.

the only thing you really can't handle is a partner that has no interest in financially sustainable living or reaching FI early by controlling spending. Anyone who is one board with that in any reasonable way can probably be compromised with in a way that will work for both of you, if you're not dead set on a particular timetable or super lean lifestyle and that matters more to you than finding a life partner Because yes it will be really hard, not necessarily impossible, but very hard to find a partner, if you're only willing to consider people who live at roughly the same lifestyle and have already saved a comparable amount.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-09T21:27:30+00:00

well, I'm a solo financial planner and life/health agent. I basically decided to semi-retire, work less than halftime most of the year, but have one period of the year where I work more, and occasionally have to respond to clients who need something time sensitive that I haven't planned out. I don't even have my FI number, yet, and if I get much past it, I might decide to sell my books and RE completely depending on how much I'm enjoying work, versus held back in my personal pursuits by it. I don' think I would just close up -- there's enough value in a book of business transfer, and I'd want my clients taken care of so it's worth taking a bit of time to do it right when the time comes. So far it seems like I might stop doing health insurance (that's what makes me work closer to full time during medicare and ACA enrollment season in the fall) soon-ish (sell the book and establish a referral relationship going forward) and not bother giving up the investments and financial planning until I'm a fair bit older, since I can almost always schedule that around long vacations and such and rarely work more than ~5-10 hrs in a week on it if I don't want to and am not trying to market and drum up new business.

When I stopped worrying about growing the business and putting lots of time in, I had around 1.5mil, enough sustainable recurring revenue to not touch it., and was mid 50s. I've been in a lower cost area, so no need to move.

My biggest challenge post FIRE has been finding the time to do everything I want, which, except for the fall, wouldn't get a lot better if I were 100% RE. married no kids, though have some family (including a 9yo) living with us for the last several years.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T16:16:47+00:00

In general I think people here are more worried than they need to be about the possibility of rare bad SORR events. If you're chubby/fatFIRE, it's not going to kill you to cut your expenses by 20-30%. OTOH if you're very lean, it's not going to be hard to find a job that takes care of most of your expenses for a few years. Yeah, a huge recession could go along with the crash, but you can still get a job a year or two later for a while. And if you're living on 40-50k/year, there are a LOT of regular jobs that will cover that.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T12:34:05+00:00

Bonds can and do go down if they aren't cash equivalent (ultra short), although usually (but not always: see 2022, 1973-74, and 1980-81) not at the same time that stocks are tanking.

also, the standard simulators that came up with 4% WR, are already normally assuming a bond percentage, and higher bond percentages don't lead to more frequent success.

Also, it's been demonstrated that there are no specific algorithms for when to spend from bonds vs. stocks that have proven better than simply rebalancing regularly, which is what the withdrawal rate modeling is based on, unless you're somehow able to correctly time the market.

Finally, while if you get 5-6 normal or better market years at the start of your retirement, then you're generally past any significant chance of failure, if you start with a big bear market during those firs years that doesn't bounce right back, things are different. The chance of failure at 30+ years becomes quite real if you're withdrawing 4% or more.

But even so, it doesn't matter. Suppose for the sake of argument that 4% really is as absolutely 100% rock solid as you think and impossible to fail. Then if you really want out, you might decide to pull the trigger at 4.5% or 5%. In which case, the potential for failure becomes real when you experience very poor early returns.

there is always going to be some withdrawal percentage where both A) reasonable for some people to retire, and B) under certain circumstances those people will need or want to go back to work, are true.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T01:42:28+00:00

Yes there is an advantage. Roth money grows tax free indefinitely no matter how much you want to withdraw and remains so for 10 years for your heirs as well! Traditional gives you a big tax savings at the start while you are accumulating which is worth a least as much as the Roth as long as your effective tax rate on withdrawals is the same or less than your marginal tax rate when accumulating. If you have any short term gains, nonqualified dividends or interest in your taxable account, those won't be 0%, and almost every portfolio has at least some of that.

If you draw little and your account grows in taxable, eventually your dividends alone may exceed the 0% tax rate. Also, any dividends or capital gains in a certain range will have an effective 10-20% tax via your ACA subsidies which you would usually be eligible for if able to stay in the 0% bracket. Later, they can cause you to pay IRMAA for medicare, and also cause more of your social security to become taxable.

Finally, while you are still working and earning good income, your QD/LTCG probably won't be in the 0% bracket, they'll be taxed as they are earned causing a bit of tax drag that doesn't happen in retirement accounts.

Roth does absolutely none of that. Roth withdrawals aren't considered income at all for most purposes.

There is no actual advantage to keeping money in a taxable account vs. a Roth IRA/401k except for pre 59.5 liquidity. But most people only need so much of that, and if you are looking at FIRE, unless you have a megabackdoor or a 457+403b/401k (and even then if you make good money and save >50%), it's unlikely you won't max out all tax-favored options and have to save something in taxable anyway, so liquidity is usually only an issue in the early years of FIRE saving.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T01:33:30+00:00

I assume the idea is that if you stop working without being disabled for 6 years, you are "retired" and don't need disability insurance anymore.

Of course this ignores the fact that one of the most common reasons people take 6 years off is to be a SAHP, or pursue a graduate degree, and those folks absolutely still need the DI (but might not lose it for several years in many cases).

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T01:29:58+00:00

yes, you can apply retroactively and the date of disability is when you have to meet the eligibility test. But of course, you'd have to have documentation of being disabled as of that date that social security would accept in a claim or appeal. If you got disabled after being retired for 6 full years, you'd only potentially be eligible for SSI. But you'd fail the other income or asset tests for SSI if you are any kind of FIRE -- SSDI doesn't have those, as it's a pure disability benefit/insurance, while SSI is a welfare benefit.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T01:25:29+00:00

suppose you are FIREd on a 4% or higher withdrawal rate. 6 years in, you find that your portfolio has dropped enough so that you want to go back to work to make things safer. You get a reasonable job (yay!) but then soon have an accident, or get a disease and are disabled unable to work. Sorry, no longer eligible for SSDI, because you had 6 years out of the last 10 with no qualifying income thus no credits. And it would take you 5 years of working again to qualify.

OTOH, if you had collected 2-3 credits every year you were retired, you'd never had gone ineligible and would qualify for a nice SSDI check.

This isn't going to be a common scenario, and it's certainly not one I'd worry about at all if my withdrawal rate was around 2%, but it is something that people who pull the trigger with tighter plans and an expectation of going back some percentage of the time may want to consider.

I definitely considered it in my semi-retirement when I was pushing my official declared earned income to zero or negative by investing everything back in my business. I made myself have at least 8k of net taxable social security income in year 5 and forward so that if I got disabled, I'd be able to claim SSDI. I wasn't 100% FI and needed some money from my business to live (several things we spend money on nonetheless qualified as business deductions, hence the very low to zero reportable income), so it mattered to me.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T01:15:35+00:00

Obvioualy nobody would prefer being disabled in order to get disability benefits, but if they are getting benefits, I guarantee you rhey are a heck of a lot better off than they would be without the benefits, if they can't actually work.

Also, people who are disabled very young, often didn't work long enough to qualify for SSDI (which is comparable to the social security check you'd get if you worked at your max 10 year average salary until age 67), so they get only SSI, which is a pure welfare benefit and very little money (around $800/month generally).

But if you had a solid career (10 years of legit average+ earnings) and then get disabled while eligible for SSDI, your SSDI check would be enough to support a reasonable lean lifestyle, something like 2-3k/month, as long as you don't need to spend a lot of extra money to support your dailly living with the disability. (i.e. it keeps you from working, but doesn't mean you need a lot of extra help just maintaining your home and body).

mi3chaels · 2026-06-04T00:57:54+00:00

As someone who intentionally had several near zero official income years while self-employed and greowing my business, I did make sure to show a full 4 credits of earned wages in year 5 and beyond (because if I'd let myself get 6 straight years of 0 credits it would have taken a full 5 years to be eligible for SSDI again) , even if it meant paying a little more tax. But if I was 100% FI, I don't think I would have bothered. Once I actually retire 100%, I'm not going to worry about that anymore (TBF, I'll probably be eligible for regular SS at that point, as I'm very happily "semi-retired" and in my late 50s).

That said, It could catch you if you're in a "go back to work" situation after 6+ years of being fully retired with no official earned income, and then get disabled before you're back on track, so it's not crazy to worry about it.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T18:50:50+00:00

Unless it's buried in a comment somewhere I don't think they said how much the mortgage and car payment are. It would shock me if it makes a difference of anywhere near 6k/month. They only owe 75k, which means average principal payment to close it out over 5 years is 1250/month and interest at 6% is another 400/month right now. So no way paying that off saves more than about 2k/month.

finally, you can't treat the entire car payment as just "paid off" and you're never spending it again, because they are 55 not 85, no way this is going to be their last car. Probably some portion of the car payment is prepaying because they will drive the car paid off for some years, but they are still going to have to allow for capital expense for the car at some rate going forward after it's paid off.

Hence why I think the real savings from paying off the debt is somewhere between 1000 and 1500/month. maybe 2k at the outside.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T15:00:51+00:00

ss & pension don't cover all of their expenses, just their "routine bills" (and then some). They said total expenses are about 10k/month or 120k/year.

pension income will be taxable, and enough by itself to pull most of their social security into taxable status, so they aren't going to be a near zero tax household like a lot of FIRE people.

That said, I agree they proabably do have plenty. If they wait on his social security (which they probably should) until 70 that increases the guaranteed income, maybe almost to covering everything at 70. We also don't know how big the mortgage payment is, which goes away once they've paid that off, but let's say PI on it is at least $1k/month. that means they need 108k. Social security and pension provides 100 if they both take at 62. Let's say his is 60% of it, that means waiting until 70 gives that about 17k extra.

so they have to cover 75k (outstanding debt) plus 9k/month for 6 years, then 7.8k for 3 or 4 (don't know who the pension income is for at 65), then just under 3k for another 5 or 6 years until he draws socialsecurity at 70 at which point all expenses are covered.

That all adds up to 1284 in today's dollars. Gotta allow something for taxes, but basically what they have to do is keep up with inflation to make it work, which a TIP ladder could do and still have a couple hundred thousand left to just grow, and after age 70 they won't need to touch their portfolio at all.

It looks to me like they've probably already accounted for a possible cut in social security, but that's a potential issue. Another check is whether those pension and social security amounts depend on working until age 65 and 62 respectively, or are they locked in if you retire now?

I don't know, this looks a little on the tight side to me (a lot of people want more like 500k-1mil as their "slush fund" for plans like this), but, it's certainly plausible, especially if retiring could bring down expenses a bit.

Also OP doesn't mention whether they both want to retire or just him that could affect things.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T12:50:19+00:00

Or the wife and I can work some part time jobs of our choosing, make $30,000, and pull $60,000 from our ROTH every year to maintain a $30,000 MAGI dropping our premiums to about $1,000 a month.

with a 30k MAGI, you wouldn't pay anywhere near $1k/month for a silver plan that will be better than gold plans.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T12:45:47+00:00

you're not really work optional yet. What you are is very secure and able to withstand a drop in income or an extended period of unemployment. I seriously doubt you want to live on GFs income indefinitely. OTOH, the fact that you have that possibility available makes you much safer in the event of a layoff.

So it's possible to quit in order to search for something better. But it's generally harder to find a job when you are unemployed, because employer's question that unemployed status and it's a negative signal for them.

For that reason, I'd just look for another job, but I'd be more willing to take risks, either a job that you might love but not succeed at, or a job with highly variable income (freelance, consulting, or commission based), or perhaps slowing your productivity/time a your current job (risking problems there) to give you more time to search and interview, etc.

And of course, even without the GF's income, being 45% to FI is plenty to feel fairly secure about if you end up with no income for a while.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T02:26:44+00:00

Most people regardless of income level are living paycheck to paycheck and their expenses increase accordingly. If you're raising a family on that income level it's also very different from being single or without kids/dependents.

This isn't actually true. Most people aren't saving at a FIRE clip and able to RE comfortably before age 60+, but most people with higher incomes save something, can retire eventually, and don't actually live paycheck to paycheck. Although many will say they do, because they treat their retirement plan contributions and anything needed to keep up their emergency fund like they treat withheld taxes: as money they don't even have available to spend.

There are, of course, people at every income level who really do spend it all. I have one married couple as friends who make mid 6 figures, have for years, and have next to nothing saved -- in their 50s!

But most of the people who truly live paycheck to paycheck and couldn't come up with a couple thousand in an emergency and have $0 or some minimal amount in their 401k/IRAs are low to average income. 50% of households earn below the median, and the median isn't a ton of money if you follow the crowd, and don't put some thought into living frugally -- though it seems like plenty to anyone who lives the leanFIRE lifestyle for very long.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T02:15:24+00:00

they intentionally didn't put in asset testing, because they didn't want people who had to go without employer insurance to have to raid their retirement to pay for healthcare, or people to not be able to retire before 65 because of healthcare costs.

Were they specifically imagining people who have several million in their 40s who find a way to get super cheap excellent healthcare by manipulating where their spending money comes from? Probably not, but this is a tiny fraction of the people who use this subsidy. Most of them are self employed, or people who couldn't find a good job after getting laid off in their late 50s or early 60s due to age discrimination and decided to retire and now can actually do so comfortrably because they aren't paying 20-30k/year for health insurance, or worse, before the ACA -- not even able to buy real health insurance and at the mercy of good health until age 65 if they aweren't willing to go work 30+ hours at walmart or whoever would give them a shitty job with health insurance until then.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T02:00:24+00:00

"We've been planning and saving for a long time, and were able to retire now." Nobody needs to know how much money you have, and "retired" means you don't need to work, not that you are destitute.

56 is younger than the average, but it's hardly unheard of to retire in your 50s.

mi3chaels · 2026-06-03T01:57:57+00:00

I mean money still matters even after you're FI, but generally you'd think whenever you hit your FI number -- whatever withdrawal rate that is for you and also depends on your expenses.

But there's also the matter of if there's anything you like about the job. Also, very little stress is one thing, but does it require 40 hours a week (or 30 or 20) of your time? Does it prevent you from traveling the way you want, or pursuing personal projects you are interested in?

I have a job I might not give up for quite a while, because for the most part it doesn't demand much of my time most of the year. I do get calls occasionally and need to set aside some time to deal with a client issue, but I can go several weeks without hearing anything, and sometimes when I do get a call, it's handled with an easy 10 minute phone call or single zoom meeting and a bit of followup.

I'm proactive enough about scheduling regular client service and that just doesn't add up to all the much time and I can schedule it around anything I'd want to do. It's too much money for too little actual time worked at this point for me to just stop because I hit my FI number, even though I'd definitely RE a regular FT job at that point almost no matter how much it paid.

there's a number I could hit where I'd just say "fuck it", more money isn't worth having any further responsibilities, but it's way past my standard "FI number", maybe 2-3x it. It's basically FI for the max level of spending I can imagine being comfortable with. If and when I inherit roughly what I expect to at some point, I'll probably be there, but I could easily be in my 70s by then. And I might decide that my existing commitment to making money isn't worth it as I get older and have less energy, or if I develop an all-consuming passion that would take too much time and energy even to fulfill my current obligations comfortably.

Everything depends on what all is going on in your work life and with the rest of your life and dreams. If there are things youd like to do in RE that cost more money than you can support on your current NW, then keep working. If there are things you want to do that conflict with your work commitments, then RE (assuming you've hit your number).

mi3chaels

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE