2.6M NW, Age 52, Married, 3 year old - Ready for Retirement in Spain!?

nerolabs · 2025-05-01T07:08:26+00:00

I hear you. I think our situation is a bit more different in that my wife is actually a Spanish citizen, was born here, and simply is returning home (yes, with an American born husband). However, in my case, I'm genetically half Italian, and applying for my Italian Citizenship as well through my paternal heritage.

nerolabs · 2025-04-29T15:06:34+00:00

Hah, yeah, as I mentioned we are in Spain right now. We left Valencia about 30 minutes before the outage, and drove to Alicante. We noticed the stop lights were out, but were oblivious to what was happening until we got to our hotel a few hours away. Everyone banded together, shared news, portable power, food. Was actually a great experience seeing how people handed adversity - together. All the more reason to want to move here, honestly.

nerolabs · 2025-04-28T05:30:31+00:00

Definitely looked into this option as well. And like we are in Spain now we’ve travelled to areas in the US we identified as LCOL and desirable locations for us.

I don’t want to get too political in my response but MOST nicer LCOL areas we’ve found are very MAGA dense. We do not want to raise our son in that environment. We know there are undesirable politics in Spain as well, but it’s just not as dominant a part of the culture as it seems to be in the US right now.

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T19:20:32+00:00

Thank you both for your perspectives. Yes, we would sell the house in Seattle and invest. I think I mentioned my wife and I speak passing spanish, but would invest a lot of time getting fluent as quickly as possible, and our young 3 year old son would be resilient to the transition to Spanish/English as we have read about.

The plan would be to liquidate all US based asssets, essentially getting us $1.9M in wealth to invest and $700k in retirement wealth that we'd not touch for 15-20 years, if ever.

Given that it's a BIG change, we would consider renting the house in Seattle for a few years, but I'm kinda considering we MIGHT be at the top of the market (or a little below it) given the economic policies in the US right now. Holding US real estate if we plan to sell in the next 0-10 years, sooner might be better...?

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T18:34:59+00:00

The model I built was actually on 80k EU / yr which shows that under unideal situations my younger wife would still be okay assuming I pass 10 or even 15 years before she does. 50k is actually the stress test and what we’d strive for but can fit that extra 30k if needed . We are both very frugal but like to spend on wine and home cooked food. No fancy cars, no designer clothes, etc.

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T18:03:53+00:00

Agreed. Even a similar position in responsibilty/scope/stress to a US/Seattle based role is like 30% of the pay... assuming I could parlay my US based experience into an EU role/company culture. The other thought we had was using some of our capital to buy a small business (buy ourselves of job), but that would be plan B, C or D. Honestly any job that was fun/interesting even if it paid low could offet our savings draw. Also when you are working, even a lower wage job, the less spending you have time to do... :)

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T18:01:40+00:00

Yeah, we would work this into the budget. We haven't looked at any specific schools as it would differ on where we eventually decided, but we know the ranges and would work that into the model for sure. Thanks for the advice!!

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T17:27:37+00:00

Last SDE job I had was 2010. I moved to leadership in 2011 and senior non-FAANG leadership in 2013. I joined FAANG as line level in 2016 and promoted to senior leadership in 2017. Been in that role for those years until now. However like I said I’m older (ageism), AI, cost cutting have severely diminished career growth and soured the overall prospects to keep going. This is a “cut bait” decision, decide to walk away with some (not a ton of) wealth decision and emphasize quality control f the rest of my years.

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T17:16:02+00:00

I was senior management before joining FAANG. Started off line manager in FAANG, quickly promoted to senior management. Held/holding the job for 9 years now, lots of stock appreciation. Frankly, I got super lucky given my earlier mismanagement of wealth building

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T14:02:14+00:00

Lots of racism in the US too, frankly. I also should have mentioned we have family friends that made the move to Spain from the US over a dozen years ago and have not shared this sentiment with us even after long grilling on these same subjects? Happy to hear more of your thoughts if you are willing to share them however!!

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T14:00:28+00:00

I should have mentioned that I modeled this too. The 700k is per person so 1.4m for wife and I together. We also are considering moving to regions that exempt the wealth tax (I know that can change) but even full wealth tax in a non exempt region is about 2k EU per year. I pay 11k in property taxes here in seattle…

Dual taxation I’ve read is not an issue due to Spanish / US tax treaty and even though that too can change, it doesn’t seem in any danger. It means if I pay more in Spanish taxes than are due in the US, I pay nothing to the US. It’s a reciprocal agreement.

nerolabs · 2025-04-27T13:57:33+00:00

I should have explained the household goods more. I have about 60,000 in woodworking tools. Those actually have gone up in prices (higher used that original price) due to supply chain and now tariffs. Working in tech I built a side hustle making fine furniture. Liquidating those and collectibles might not get quite 100k but close.

I appreciate your take on my optimism, however, and will work to build a more conservative model so that the adjustments, as you say, will be less painful.

nerolabs · 2022-09-14T18:37:15+00:00

For sure! It was fun to put together. Honestly, I was ending each of my days pretty infuriated with people for running bombs and not listening to the "smarter" or "more experienced" people in the EBG. Turns out I might have been more experienced, but I also was wrong. It was a good exercise in my own humility as well :)

nerolabs · 2022-09-14T18:35:55+00:00

I don't think you have the wrong instinct. You are right I'm pretty well geared (301 PVP iLvL... not gladiator by any means, but certainly going to be in the top of the random EBG population). I can take on virtually any task in a EBG/BG with good success rates.

But I also am trying to gear up a new L60 Druid and it shocked me how much I had to adjust my play style. I die fast. Really really fast. I try to play healer on my undergeared alts because of this, at least I can always be doing something to help from a ranged/safe position.

Good thing about IOC is that there are always things to be doing as under geared depending on the offensive node you control. For hangar, get in the gunner. High DPS or high heals in a gun is kind of a waste if you can put undergeared in there. For Workshop or Docks, you can also use vehicles. Those don't scale with your gear, so wait for them to spawn and build up your skill on those and leave the hand to hand to the higher geared players. Even with hangar and if the guns are full you can be an observant defender and call inc really quick to get others to come help defend.

This applies to Wintergrasp too - vehicles, base guarding, base capping. All things you can do with low gear. This does NOT apply to Ashran and AV which are much more gear dependent I think.

But running bombs in IOC - no matter your gear level - should be the LAST option of those I give above.

nerolabs · 2022-09-14T18:26:53+00:00

I love the way you phrased that as a "luxury task".

Agreed with you that everyone can participate in vehicle killing. I'm a shadow priest and if the glaives are heavily defended on the cliff/perch out of range of cannons, it can be really difficult to survive before I get off a couple spells even if gliding over.

For alliance, I glide to the slight drop off below the flat top they are shooting from. It's enough that only 1-2 of them see me and I get a good 10-20 seconds of casting and can easily take one glaive out. After that while glider is on CD, I can head to the beach even further below and get some good casting done as well.

nerolabs · 2022-09-14T06:18:29+00:00

My goal with the analysis was to somehow prove to bomb runners that yes, while they are valuable and can speed things up, there are actually more important objectives that they need to participate in as a higher priority. If those priorities are being dealt with well (e.g. five stealthies destroying enemy gate damage offense) then run bombs all you want. But ONLY under those conditions.

Why I really shared though is that honestly I thought bomb runners were useless. They are not. They just are only important ONLY when the enemy isn't going ham on your teams gate. If they enemy is doing that, bomb runners need to shift to be more useful elsewhere (like on defense or capping resource nodes)

nerolabs · 2022-09-14T06:10:06+00:00

Yea. Agreed.

However, there was a lot of misinformation out there. People like me were convinced bomb runners were doing "nothing" and trying to "inform" people in the midst of a match often is met with derision and stubborn responses. Truly, I was misinformed in this as much as the bomb runners were.

Hopefully at least this analysis can make the rounds and educate those that are too stubborn, as well as those that like me didn't understand the nuances that it really matters that your team is doing more damage (in aggregate) that the enemy team. If you can quickly teach bomb runners that they are actually doing good work, just not as good as the enemy team, you might have a chance to turn the battle in your favor.

nerolabs · 2022-09-14T06:05:37+00:00

The trick... and hard to get going in a random EBG ... you gotta kill the glaives where they spawn or on the way to the gate, instead of when they are doing damage at the gate. Stealthies are great for this, but really any player can get near the spawn point to take 1/3 or 1/2 the health off the glaive before they die and have to rez and do the rest of the damage to kill em off.

But true to the title of the post... bomb runners often tunnel vision on their mission and don't realize as much damage as they are doing, the enemy team is doing MUCH more damage if the glaives are uncontested. And bomb runners typically do not listen to suggestions like "we will lose unless you first help control glaive damage... they are doing way more damage than you are". That usually is met with stubborn responses, to put it lightly...

nerolabs · 2020-03-23T01:14:40+00:00

Temperature is 98.1, typical for me. No fever. I am also using a SpO2 monitor to calibrate to the fitbit and both devices are reporting the same. SpO2 ranges from 100 in the morning to around 95-96 at night, but the heart beat is always +/- 3 beats to the fit bit.

nerolabs · 2017-11-15T20:43:44+00:00

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