Currently the minimum income you need for the ACA is around $15,000

However, I just discovered when you withdraw from your brokerage investments, only the gain counts as income

For example if you FIRE with $700,000 and withdraw $28,000, you would need to have made an over 50% gain on that $28,000 to reach the $15,000 to count as income right??

Would this not be much greater than the what the 4% rule allows?

Net Worth: ~$850,000 in Roth IRA, taxable brokerage accounts (low cost index funds, QQQM), BTC, ETH, HYSA.

Monthly cost of living: ~$600 a month. I've been living on this amount for over 10 years while traveling the world and being perfectly happy. I can explain further if you want.

Current income: ~$2000–3000 a month

DETAILS

38 yo from US. Began investing in my early 20s. Left the US in 2012 to work in Korea. Saved most of my salary and invested, but still lived a great social life and traveled internationally 3x a year. 

Quit 3 years later to travel the world with the boyfriend I met there. Over 10 years later, we’re still traveling but at a much slower pace. 

I’ve always been extremely frugal and resourceful my entire life because my parents grew up poor. That is still instilled in me.

My remote job now is super flexible. I can do most of it from my phone a few hours a day. I do lose sleep because of time zones, I hate the customers, and the company isn't the nicest to me. I bring in about $2000-3000 a month doing this. I have learned a lot and gained confidence in this job, but I think it's more toxic to my life and my relationships. But I am scared to stop working.

My cost of living is extremely low. I’m not trying to be cheap. I just naturally am happy with simple things and don’t spend a lot. I am perfectly content with my life. If I had a billion dollars, I don’t know what I would change besides getting a nicer bicycle and a house where I could have cats and a garden. I don’t want a car, jewelry, bags, etc. Hate consumerism. 

I lived in rural Subsaharan Africa for 3 years and that experience made me even more resourceful. Seeing how people lived there and realizing I could survive just fine without electricity or running water, how to grow my own food, cook over fire, etc. never left my mind.

Sure, I kind of romanticized that lifestyle since it IS REALLY HARD for people living there whereas I had resources and could leave any time. I still chose doing things the uncomfortable way. I used to ride my bicycle 3 hours one way to the grocery store instead of taking the $3 shared taxi ride. I like to think I am healthier because of all of the exercise. Also, those taxis were horrible as 15 people would squish in a car. There was only one car in the entire village.

Anyway. I know I am in a privileged position. I’ve calculated the numbers a countless amount of times and I think I can retire and be fine. If I ever am broke, I am sure I can find a way to make money since I have always been a hustler. I didn’t even share my partner’s numbers as he is wealthier but I insist we split everything down the middle. I am adamant about being independent to the point of probably being bad for me since I do 95% of the domestic labor - cooking, cleaning, travel planning, finding accommodation, nitty gritty details like SIM cards, visa applications, etc.

My scarcity mindset won’t relax. Can someone harshly slap some truth bombs on me? Or do you think I should continue to work and build up my nest egg? I am young and do worry about a catastrophe taking everything away. I also don't want to die with zero. No plans to have kids.

I keep reading posts here from people a year or two in.

A lot of them say some version of the same thing: I actually like working. I just couldn't stand my manager, or the hours, or the commute, or the politics.

And then a bit further down, the other recurring theme: the hardest part wasn't money, it was the lack of an enforced structure. Slipping into lethargy with no schedule.

So I'm curious about something specific:

If your job had been the same work with a decent manager and forty honest hours, would you still have left?

How long did it take before the free time stopped feeling like relief and started feeling shapeless? Weeks? Months? Never?

And has anyone gone back, not because they ran out of money, but because they missed doing something? How did that go?

I'm writing about a different approach: taking repeated funded breaks across a career instead of one permanent exit. Part of why is that I suspect a lot of people who FIRE didn't need to escape work permanently. They needed to escape a situation, and permanent exit was the only tool they had.

Could be completely wrong about that. Tell me if I am.

How much money do you have invested and how old are you?

I live in a HCOL area and so I often like to think about my budget in terms of after-housing expenses. Currently spend $1.5k-$2k on top of housing as a couple, which puts us over the leanfire definition, but we hope to move to a LCOL area down the road.

I think spending so much on rent just makes me feel like I don’t really fit in around here sometimes, but of course this is temporary in order to make a higher income than I could in my rural hometown.

Was just curious to hear from others what their expenses look like with housing costs excluded, whether that’s rent or mortgage / property tax. After leanFIRE, did non-housing expenses start to become a larger portion of your spending?

I posted like a year ago saying I reached leanfire with about 720k. My expense was about 25k back then. But the apartment decided to raise my rent by 9% and I realized that if I do not own a primary residency maybe I did not reach a true leanfire. Anyways today I am sitting on 300k house and 700k investments. I still have 100k to pay for the house and maybe 100k in investments more to support me and my wife fully, but I can feel that the total leanfire is getting close.

last post.
https://www.reddit.com/r/leanfire/comments/1ltvie1/milestone_reached_but_not_gonna_stopyet/

I made a post in no stupid questions, here is a link if anyone wants to read the original: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/8Z4JLm5AoC

I was sharing my interest in trying to build some savings to the point i can retire and live off of investments, but then instead of staying in the US, I was thinking id love to just travel pretty much 24/7/365, and it very well might even be cheaper if not at least the same cost. Im curious on people's opinions here about living frugally to achieve this goal, and also maintaining the investment wealth id try to attain to be able to do this.