In my vast boredom, I’ve seen Wallstreet: Money Never Sleeps multiple times and afterwards always find myself thinking about this quote.
“The amount of money you would need to be able to walk away from it all and just live happily-ever-after. Everybody has one – it’s an exact number – what’s yours?”
So what is it? What’s your number?
and don’t say more:)
i’ve been thinking about that alot lately. I’d want some land to grow my food. Enuff $$ for necessities,car,fuel . A minimum of appliances. Off hand i’d say half a milion,most of which would be for land and building supplies.
8,675,309
nm
$1,500,000
I keep thinking enough to live on the interest alone and be comfortable. 2.5 million would be me walking out the door… Fuck you money, the amount when your done…
I think island trips and a cabin in the mountains.
enuff to live off the interest is a good idea.
I retired with about $960,000 in my retirement account on which I get an annuity of over $80,000 (they are losing money big time on this) plus around $600,000 in savings, some of it in tax-free accounts (similar to 401(k) in the US) on which I am now drawing. Pretty happy with my lifestyle. The only thing I would do differently if some angel gave me an extra million would be always to fly first class. So about $1.5 mil works for me.
$100,000.
(My needs a few. I’d be on the next plane!)
My wife and I are pondering this as we speak.
I reckon £500k would be plenty to purchase a couple of rental properties and provide a perfectly adequate income for our very modest tastes. There’d be a good lump left over to set aside and use for occasional luxuries and when state and personal pensions kick in 20 years hence we’ll be nicely comfortable.
We’ve never hankered after expensive cars or houses so as long as we can ski, hike, cycle, sail and golf now and again and have a bit of land for some tomatoes and onions I reckon we’ll be happy as Larry. Austria would be the favourite location for this little vision.
We’re about £100k off that target so if you gave me that now I’d think seriously about giving it all up.
Somewhere in the $5M-$10M range.
So how you doing? 
I know someone who is years from retirement but has reached her “number”, and has quit her job. Found a legal loophole that lets her live off the 401k interest, a 72 t, replaces her income with interest carried over.
work work work, then play before you are one foot in the grave.
It’s an exact number, but it can’t be determined in advance. I’d want enough that I could live off of a safe portfolio of investments (which, note, is different from a portfolio of safe investments) for the rest of my life, and given my lifestyle and an interest rate, I can easily calculate that, but I have no way of knowing what the interest rates (or dividend rates or whatever) will be for the rest of my life.
2.5 mil
2.5 million. I live in SoCal, so I’d need about a million for a house. The rest is to live off of.
$1,868,522.34. And not a penny less.
Is that you Jenny?
10Mil. I’d go with the 2.5mil like others are saying, but I’d be an anxietous wreck worrying the ecconomy might take a dive or some major issue would occur causing me to have to go back to work.
I need that 7 million buffer zone before I could truly relax.
Two or three times in my life, when the Powerball jackpot has gotten really big, I’ve bought a ticket - and then been slightly terrified of the idea that I might actually win. I’m in my early 40’s, and I don’t know what I’d do with myself for the second half of my life if I didn’t have a day job. I know that sounds pathetic, but the reality is that my job is pretty good, and while my hobbies are entertaining and I wish I had more time for them, I’m not sure I would be happy filling all day every day with them. What I would like, I think, is to maybe just to double or triple my vacation time. Maybe someday when our nest egg is big enough I’ll just switch to working half-time.
Theoretically our nest egg is at that point right now where one of us could indeed go to half-time work (earning enough to live on but not saving nearly as much), but that assumes a continuously robust ROI going forward, and it also seems weird for only one of us to work half time wile the other continues to hammer away as a FTE. Maybe in 10-15 years we’ll have $1.5M+ stashed away, and we can think about cutting back our work hours. Another 5-10 years down the road we’ll be in our mid-60’s; our nest egg will be closer to $2M, we’ll both start receiving SS disbursements, and I’ll also be pulling a pension, and then we can quit our jobs completely if we want to.
$10 million, to be absolutely sure and just walk away. I’m young enough that I still have to cover the house and kids expenses, I still have a lot of travelling I’d like to do, and I’d have a lot of exposure to unexpected market events from the number of years that I (hopefully) have left to get through. So while there’s a 95% chance that $4 or $5 million would be enough, I’d want to double that to eliminate most of the remaining risk.