What would it take for me to quit teaching? That's a question I've wondered on and off, because that's essentially what retirement is. You quit your job because you don't depend on it anymore, and you're free to do whatever you want. & 29 might sound too young to be thinking of retirement, but the common idea seems to be that there's no such thing as too early to start planning (seriously, the most basic recommendation for retirement planning is to plan ASAP). So, what would it take? The answer is pretty simple, at least for me - & probably you too, so long as you don't have a boundless appetite for consumption.
I'm a pretty basic guy - I would need housing, food, enough money to travel & gamble, and last but CERTAINLY not least - I would need some meaning in life. That's everything that teaching provides for me, at least the very major parts. The first 3 parts - housing, food, $ to travel and gamble - can really all just be boiled down to one thing: money.
For my lifetime, I would be surprised if I spent more than 3.5 million on all of that combined. About 2 million on a forever home + property taxes for 60 years, 660k for food ($10 meal for the next 60 years, which I think is on the high end), which leaves ... 840k for traveling and gambling - or about 28k/year, for the next 30 years. Again, I'm using high numbers ON PURPOSE - to contextualize how far money can go and to show that, if you mess around with the numbers FOR YOURSELF, you could actually come up with a real, tangible number that would work for you to retire on.
Another thing to consider is that my figure for housing doesn't even take Daisy into account - if we were to split that number right in half, my theoretical share of housing would only amount to 1 million and reduce my retirement figure to 2.5 million. There you have it - at a monetary level, I could retire if I somehow found 2.5 million, post-tax dollars.
What about the meaning in life? I like to think I'm a pretty customer-facing guy. I enjoy helping others and there's a slew of skills I would love to pick up, so a few occupations I could dive into are: card dealing, bartending, personal assistant, and concierge - those are just some of the many options I'd be open to, and to my knowledge I wouldn't have a particularly tough time getting into those.
So, there you have it. My plan is to find $2.5 million and slide into some other job where I get to work with people/get the satisfaction of helping others.
If that doesn't work out, I can always teach 'til 65, retire to collect my pension (which works out to 96% of my working salary), and hang out until I kick the bucket - but that's a worst-case scenario 😅.
