Reddit mentions of Get a Life: You Don't Need a Million to Retire Well

Don't be upset with the people here. Many find your situation laughably easy because they are already living for much less than it costs you. However I'm sure you are earnest - you are looking over the edge of a cliff and need to know if it's safe to jump.

The house value is meaningless unless you plan on moving so you can just ignore the whole thing in your calculations. With your invested net worth, you can safely spend $22k per year for the rest of your life (well ~99% probability). If you used the 4% rule for a 95% success rate, you could spend $29k per year.

I wouldn't hold onto the 2.8% loan. Sure it's a good interest rate, but you don't need the leverage. This article should help you visualize the effect of leverage. Making it your last action of work to pay it off would probably smooth out the road a bit. I'd have a talk with your father and tell him that you are getting ready for retirement and you'd like to pay it before you finish.

I'd say that you can't FIRE quite yet unless you are willing to cut expenses. Can you reliably live off of $1800 a month in your budget? That's not a spending level that's objectively difficult, but it may take some getting used to.

What you can do right now is to start bringing your expenses down and practice living off of the amount you would have if you were FIRE. If you need to burn some vacation to have some free time to simulate the cost savings from being home, do it. Doing the trial run right now will tell you more than years of playing with calculators.

You should go ahead and start working on kids. 35 is already pretty old for having children. The chances of conceiving go down, the chances of birth defects go way up. It may take a while for your wife to get pregnant. The reason why I suggest this is that you'll be able to take FMLA leave when your child is born, which will help with the next step.

After you've got the trial run handled, you go ahead and jump in the pool by taking a leave of absence. If it's paternity leave, your work can't legally stop you from taking 6 weeks. Otherwise, you should be able to negotiate some type of leave (perhaps 4 months?) while you take a "sabbatical." You'll know that this is your retirement, but they won't. If the first try at retirement doesn't go well, you can just go back to work when your sabbatical or paternity leave is done.

I'd recommend you read the book Get a Life: You Don't Need a Million to Retire Well. It covers a lot of subjects you wouldn't really think about going into retirement.

If you are in great shape, healthy, happy and have great relationships with your kids and great ties to your community, then your retirement is going to be awesome with or without a lot of money. If you lack those things, then no amount of lobster dinners is going to make if fulfilling.

There are diminishing returns to your happiness when compared to your income. Those returns may even be negative if you are spending your time doing something unfulfilling to earn money that won't increase your happiness.

You should read the book Get a Life: You Don't Need a Million to Retire Well There are certainly things you can do to improve your retirement, but they may not be in the realm of earning more money.

Also, you imagine that your retirement life is going to to be one big adventure where you travel all over and do all kinds of interesting things. I'd wager that you'll be sick of it in a year. Have you even tried doing it for a few months? If you can, why don't you try doing it now and see if it's something that you are willing to do for the rest of your life? I suspect that getting a house, taking care of grandkids and coaching the local little league is going to be more fun than endless nights on a sailboat.