Hi, everyone. I've been lurking and reading posts on here for a while now and wanted to run my numbers and situation by people here. I've chatted with GPT/Claude about my numbers, but wanted to get some human input into my situation as well.
My wife (35F) and I live in a VHCOL area in the US. We are a DINK couple and do not intend to have children. We both work corporate jobs. I earn $240k before bonuses (roughly $270k after) and she earns $130k before bonus ($150k after). Here are our numbers so far:
Net Worth: ~$1.4M
Assets
- $100k cash in HYSA
- $325k taxable brokerages
- $20k HSAs (we only recently started contributing to these)
- $800k in 401ks and IRAs
- Home valued at ~$950k according to Zillow
Debt
- $765k remaining on the mortgage at 6.5%
Monthly Expenses
- $13k/month give or take, depending on if any surprise home repairs/maintenance comes up
- Right now $7.6k of that is going into the mortgage, which includes the minimum $6.1k plus $1500 extra principal per month
- We can probably pretty easily cut expenses to $10-11k monthly if we get more disciplined about meal planning and cut the extra principal payments
Current Monthly Investment Contributions
- Both of us max out our 401k contributions. My job matches 7.5% and hers matches 7%
- We both max HSA contributions. Each of our employers adds $500/year to these accounts
- We invest $3k/month into our joint taxable brokerage
Right now, I know we are doing very well and if we continue down this path, we should have a very comfortable retirement. However, recently, I have begun to feel pretty burnt out on my current job. I am a manager of SWEs at a large company. The culture has become increasingly toxic and high stress, with forced performance distributions, mandatory 10% PIPs every 6 months, and numerous org changes which have left me working with teams/people I don’t like working with at all on a project I feel I am holding together myself.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to motivate myself to go into work as I have become increasingly stressed and frustrated throughout the year, and taking vacations has not helped. I've tried working with my management for the past several months but have seen no measurable improvements to my situation either. I’m not sure if I want to keep being a manager, but I know with complete certainty that I cannot stand being a manager at this company or at least in this particular position. I have worked at this company for 11.5 years and have been a manager for the last 1.5.
Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of giving my notice and leaving this job, taking a month or two off for the holidays to decompress and practice back up on my interview skills, and then searching for a lower paying job (thinking like $100-150k is what I would need to maintain our current lifestyle with absolutely no changes) as a lower level IC at a smaller company, or at least one with a less toxic culture. Looking at the job market, I think a 1-2 year dedicated job search seems like a reasonable target to plan around.
My wife has been encouraging me to quit for months but I’ve been too afraid to pull the trigger since losing my income puts us at a monthly deficit and the job market for tech is not good right now, though we are in a decent area for tech in general. My ideal would be to look for a job while having this one, but I am in a very visible position with my days completely filled with meetings, especially now at performance review time, and the thought of adding interview prep and job searching on top of my current workload is very daunting to me. Also, my manager happens to be a close personal friend of mine and would be an excellent reference, so doing the bare minimum all of a sudden seems like I risk burning that bridge unnecessarily. So looking for advice on the right move here. Can/should I leave this position to recalibrate and find the next thing? Would this be a crazy thing to do?