I’m not sure if having a 2 million mortgage loan while having no job is doable/responsible. Anyway, I don’t even know what I’d buy, I don’t know where I should live.
It was only meant as a comparison. 2M net worth when nice real estate also costs 2M.
I feel like I’m paralyzed by indecision, anxious about all things that could go wrong and losing what I worked towards for many years.
Then it’s simple - continue renting and stay flexible. 
If you need work to have direction, so be it.
But having “FIRE numbers” at least gives you confidence you can change that whenever you wished.
You don’t need to decide and have the full-flegded plan today.
My FIRE number is whatever I’ll have when turning 50.
I think I’ll go with that. Old FU numbers I tried to estimate have been reached and surpassed and I am still working. Sure, costs have gone up, but some of those can and will be dialled down at some point, so I think I also need a deadline, and 50 is a good one.
Bojack, if you’re feeling so lost, have you thought about a sabbatical or mini retirement?
Also, how do you feel about your work, if you say your life is tailored to it, I’m guessing you do not dread it. So, nothing wrong with continued work. But, if you’re paralysed by indecision, you need to take some risk, do something different in your everyday life.
edit:
I do not pretend to tell you how you should live your life. For some reason I’m just passionate about your case and try to encourage you to get out of your routine.
But by all means, tell me if I’m out of line.
Sort of matches my (delulu) projections too,
which - combined with Bojack’s 3% SWR - should cover today’s expenses of ours.
Of course life (and inflation) will happen in the meantime, but it’s nice to have a “target date”.
I find it really interesting because this seems to be the default path (I’m perhaps a bit earlier in the journey, but my net worth now would have seemed enormous when i just started working, though now i feel I’m just at the cusp of not being poor 
)
I retired with way too less money, had like 700k in my 2nd pillar. But anyhow, I went to Central America where live is cheap and you don’t need a heating system. Not even air condition at like 1000M over sea level where I did live, eternal spring.
But then something strange happened: I had more time for my stock market strategies and started to make real money there. Never ever in my live I made that much working. Should have stopped working at 20, not at 51…
Actually I made that much money that I could even come back to live in Switzerland, the most expensive place in the universe. The tax laws here are better for stock market investors due to double tax treaties with the U.S. and no capital gains tax.
My assets are still growing at a fast pace, but I suppose I could lose easily 70% of the value of my stock portfolio and still have more than with what I started when FIREd.
And of course I had a lot of luck: I just left my house alone for 2 years and in this time a direct train to Zurich was added and they changed the construction zone of my land. I did good not selling then. Now I could lose 100% of my stock market investments and still be better off than 12 years ago when I FIREd.
I mean, what is the problem? In the worst of worse cases you have to work again, still better than having worked the whole time. I had a really good time the last 12 years and as I am getting old I probably will not have that much fun in the future.
No risk, no fun!
I don’t use ETF but build my own ETF with two mechanical strategies that I describe and log in this thread.
Well then something went really wrong on the way there haha 
I‘m serious though. A simple number might not make me stop working. That‘s why I have this goal of retiring at 50 with whatever amount of assets I‘ll have by then.
Mine is 8-10MCHF. Eating out daily 300chf x 365 x 55years ~`6M and buy a property 2-3M
If you eat out daily, you can probably reduce your life expectancy to 25 years and shave 3MCHF off your FIRE target 
If you want to spend 300 daily that’s an annual cost of 100k. If you want to live in a real estate worth 3m, that’s another 100k per year. (nobody else gonna chip into that cost, you will pay alone?). With the classic safe withdrawal rate of 4% that puts your nest egg at just 5m.
Btw it you want a gourmet style food every day in your life, I predict that within the next 10 years you might just buy a humanoid robot who will be your personal chef and will cook you some michelin star meals for a far lower cost than 100k per year.
If only we (especially males) had a fully developed brain at that age. 
You would certainly not have the same wisdom, making your mechanical strategies much harder to stick to.
In many cases the right question is:what is your FIRE number NOW? Also FI is not always same as RE number. Our FI number has moved due to lifestyle choises (travel) and especially moving to Switzerland (2-3X’d expenses). FI number was 2M chf before CH, is today 5M (200k annual burn). But as we plan to RE abroad, likely our FI number then is 3.5M.
RE number is even worse. Used to be 3.5M, then 5M then 7M. Now breaking 8 digits and still havent pulled the plug 
. If you ask me right now, would I quit if balance sheet showed 15M? Yes. So right now RE number is 15M, 50% more than what we have. Which is tge average answer people give to that question!!
This is also boiling frog syndrome. If I would have won 10M in Swisslotto, I likely would quit next day, but saving and investing day after day, year after year seems to move the goalpost
Not proud about this but it is what it is
I’m not sure how that helps me. The problem is that I do not have an idea of what to do when not working. My life is not set up for this. As in, I do not have friends to spend time with, my partner works full time. Also, I would worry about getting accustomed to not work, getting lazy, and then finding it hard to go back to work.
Let me give you an example. Since lockdown, I’ve been working in home office, only going to the office once a week. I would dread to have to return to the office 100%, I hate it. It’s a big source of anxiety for me: having to return back to the office and waste time in public transit.
Another source of anxiety is the sweet sweet money that my current arrangement earns. I would not like to get out of the loop and then struggle to find a well paying option (and one that allows home office). It just feels like my current deal is too good to walk away from.
But if my contract didn’t get extended and I struggled to find one, I would use that opportunity to “try out” being unemployed.
I am good at it, my boss/customer is very happy with my work. It is not stressful. Like, I do not have to worry about deadlines or long working hours. If there’s anything to complain, I don’t think like I matter. As an external, I am less important than a junior internal. The work has its boring moments. Imagine being responsible for building a piece of a component of a system, with primitive and limited tools.
I have not felt for a second that you were out of line. I mean, I write this stuff exactly hoping for someone to take interest and offer some input. Also, I try to develop a thicker skin. There are some ways people talk that trigger me, but this is not one of them .
People give 15 million as their average answer to the early retirement amount needed? Surely this has to be some limited group of high income individuals?
One more thought: maybe, psychologically, it would be easier to retire when holding cashflow-generating assets? You see how money flows in each month, and it’s like 2x what you spend, then you might decide that this looks stable enough to stop working.
But when holding some volatile stocks, which you have to chip away at to finance your life, feels quite insecure.
I don’t know, like… we invested a lot of effort to get to where we are. We went to school, we studied, passed exams, learned languages, went to job interviews. And now we’re here, in a well paid job that millions would die to have. And we should just quit and do what? We’re “rich”, but we do not own a house, we have no kids. Our nest egg is only going to be enough if we give up the dream of having more and are satisfied with a lower-middle class lifestyle.
I was referring to the “50% more than we have right now”, not 15M which is certainly not typical ( nor does it objectively make sense, which is my point of my post - these number may not be rational). +50% : That is the typical answer to when people fell rich. Insert your own X
My reading was, “however much someone has now, they feel they need 50% more to feel secure”
i also agree with this psychological trick but at the same time I know that due to the equivalence of dividends and returns, it’s just that. Given that I only want to invest in VT-like ETFs, I think it reduces to saying that I would be comfortable with a 2% SWR or whatever the dividend yield is on global ETFs. (If you were getting 2x your spend on this it would be like a 1% SWR which is clearly too conservative when i put my rational hat on.)
However, given previous trends, I think if I actually got to this point I would probably feel nervous anyway and still end up moving the goal posts!
I think another way to view things is that there are levels of FI and once you have achieved some baseline, anything further you accumulate allows you to safely inflate your lifestyle in a financially responsible way.
When I was kid £1 million was a fantastical amount of money. Earning just 6% would have given you £5,000 per month which would have been a fortune at the time.
Now we fast forward and accounting for inflation, that £1m would be worth £3.3m today and at 6% would give you £16,500 per month which is still a fantastical amount.
Of course, today interest rates are closer to 4.5% whereas back then it was double digits.
I think it is quite common to move the goal posts, not just because of inflation, but also due to lifestyle inflation and getting used to what you have so that you want a little more to give you security (hence the 50% more replies).
My FIRE number crept higher until I said this is stupid. I am trying to build in safety, but the bigger risk is now that I die before retiring because I’m trying to build too much margin.
Instead, I’ve said that I’ve reached my number and am FI. Now, it is just a couple of non-financial factors which are holding back the RE part.
