FIRE with $1.7~mil when the majority is in Bitcoin? – 1 YEAR UPDATE

TLDR; Was laid off in October 2024, initially didn't know what to do and made a post in December 2024. Decided to find another job and keep working, but the job market had other plans. Took/taking a break, learned FIRE doesn't magically fix everything. Put some steps in place to help protect me from market downtrends, at least for a small number of years.

So here's my original post a year ago

RECAP:

You can read the original post for more details, but I'll do a short recap here. I was laid off from my tech job in October 2024 when I was 40. My FIRE projection excluding BTC was that I'd hit my goal ($1m) around age 55. BTC had taken off and was somewhere around 70% of my net worth. I personally had around $1.1m total net worth (excluding our house) the day I was laid off, and that had ballooned to $1.7m by December 2024 when I made my original post. I wasn't sure what direction to take and calculated I could do fine on a $30k yearly budget at least starting out (but would probably want to raise it more later on once I was well established in FIRE). I had $51k in cash, so I had a large buffer while I figured things out.

The majority of the responses in the original post seemed to boil down down to "don't" but with different takes such if I do then liquidate the majority of my BTC, or that if I was adamant on staying in BTC then keep working until I had enough to survive a massive dip. There were a few BTC supportive posts, but they were the minority.

SHORTLY AFTERWARDS:

So my mindset in the near term future after the original post was that I would keep looking for a job in earnest. Though I was optimistic on the long term future of BTC, the fact it could be very volatile in the short term, it was a heavy part of my net worth, and I guess just hopes that given more time maybe I could use BTC to fat FIRE. In general I'm not an extravagant person, and most of my big hobby spends for physical goods are things like a nice gaming PC, cool stuff for my home lab, etc. which in reality cost barely anything compared to other hobbies that involve things like owning a boat or RV. The only thing potential fat FIRE would do for me is a lot more traveling. We get to travel a pretty reasonable amount now, but to do much more would require us both to not be working so we're not beholden to an allotment of vacation days. As far as job searching, I ironically had to ration my applications while receiving unemployment benefits to ensure I had enough jobs to apply to each week to meet my required weekly quotas. Once my unemployment benefits ran out around the end of January, I greatly ramped up submitting applications.

THE REALITY OF THE TECH JOB MARKET:

So by the end of April I had applied to roughly 200 jobs but had only about 5 interviews, maybe less. Most of these jobs were for remote positions which is what I'd been doing since probably a year before COVID, but there were some for local positions. I think the one that broke me was for a local position that would be a hybrid position. I'd been going through a recruiter for it and he seemed like the a very straight forward person that didn't want to waste either of our time, unlike some other recruiters. I thought my skill set was a great fit for the job description and the recruiter informed me the company intended to move fast and it'd just be me and one other person being interviewed.

The first interview would be remote and would be with basically the entire small team I'd be working with, as well as a manager from another team they work closely with. I thought the interview went great. Once hearing more and asking questions about the position it gave me the impression that I was probably a little overqualified, but not so much that I'd expect it to be a risk of not being selected. The pay was decent and the people seemed great so I was completely onboard if I got an offer. They still had to interview the other person, but I was feeling pretty good, especially essentially having a 50/50 chance. Sure it'd suck if the other person being interviewed edged me out, but I was feeling pretty confident. Less than 48 hours later the recruiter contacted me to give me an update. He stated the company decided not to move forward with either of us. He seemed surprised and said he told them in that case they're probably not going to find someone they want that's local. If the other person had just been a better candidate than me I would've been disappointed but could have accepted that. Them choosing neither of us just kinda ate me up since I thought the interview went great and had absolutely no qualms about being able to do the job, combined with the fact I'd already been looking for months with no real progress.

At that point we had a couple upcoming trips, so I decided I was just going to take a break from looking until those trips were done. All the rejection was just making me feel terrible and keeping me from being happy.

AFTER I STOPPED JOB SEARCHING:

So once I took a break from job searching, my mood started to improve without having to constantly confront what felt like the looming shadow of rejection and failure. It wasn't overnight, but it was a gradual improvement. I was feeling better and enjoying things more. I had said I'd start job searching again once our previously mentioned trips were over. When that time came however I just wasn't feeling it. I'd been seeing headlines about more and more layoffs, and did a small search and it wasn't really looking like things were any better. My wife was fine with things as long as I could pay my portion of bills, trips, etc. so I decided to just not look anymore for an indeterminate amount of time until things looked better or something.

FIRE DOES NOT MAGICALLY FIX EVERYTHING:

I'm not one of those people that makes work my entire identity, so to me work was more just of a way to pay for my life with the bonus of sometimes there's projects I do find enjoyable. While I was working I had all these notions in my head like "ah, if I didn't have to devote so much time to working I'd have all this well rested time and motivation to do other things like learn a foreign language, maybe make an indie game, and so on". Turns out, I'm just bad at large time investment for things like that if they're not required even if I have plenty of free time.

I do have a friend that FIREd a small number of years ago and I believe he said something like it took him a year (maybe 2?) to feel fully detoxed from working. That might be part of things too. Though I don't necessarily with full 100% confidence declare that I'm FIREd now, it has been 14-ish months since I've worked. Now the first 7 months of that felt kinda terrible due to still being adamant about continuing working when the job market wasn't receptive, along with other unrelated stressors in my life happening during that time as well.

I guess in a way I'm still finding myself and learning how to live in this new reality. For instance I feel like I'm still having to unteach myself some mental habits such as just sitting around procrastinating for no real reason because I subconsciously don't feel like I'm "allowed" to have fun yet because I haven't been productive (even if there's not really much to be productive on a given day if everything is taken care of).

At this point I'm fine with continuing to not work at least for the time being. If the job market was much better where I could get a job for my skill set without mentally torturing myself for months then I might would be onboard. If nothing else to have some cash flow and set myself up for an exit on my own terms. It's probably all just about getting numbers that make me feel more comfortable though. If something insane happened like BTC going to $500k then I'd just laugh at the prospect of looking for a job.

CURRENT FINANCIAL SITUATION:

I'm currently at $1.6m net worth. I've been living off cash I already had so far, so no assets have been sold yet. I'm going to close out the year about $3k under my $30k budget. It probably would've been more than that, but we've had an unusually high number of unexpected repairs this year. I still have enough cash left to make it through at least half of next year. My original plan in recent months was to sell enough BTC to give me 3 years worth of cash in December, or before that if it got "high enough". I didn't have a set number for the latter, but I did want to sell some when it was $125k in October, but unfortunately we were on vacation during that time and I didn't have access to it to sell. The recent dip did spook me because I've had the somewhat arbitrary criteria of selling no more than 1 BTC to get me through the next 3 years. The dip of course made me worry it could dip further and be too low to meet that goal by the time I run out of cash. To alleviate this worry I ended up moving 1 BTC to an exchange and set a stop limit order to sell it if BTC dips to $81k. That combined with my existing cash would give me enough for 3 years of budget along with a little extra.

Maybe it's just me being greedy hoping it goes back higher, but at least this way I'll have cash to ride things out if BTC does crash "too low" for a small number of years. I should've thought about something like this sooner, especially an order for it to auto-sell on the high side instead of just deciding a time to manually sell. I guess I just had December in my head because it'd be a nice clean time at the end of the tax year where I'd have a much better idea of other taxable income for the year (such as my wife's) to get a good rough estimate on how much I could sell before owing capital gains taxes.