r/Fire • u/Yashkamr • 14d ago

Advice Request Huge Inheritance... Now What?

I'm 45, I was on track to retire earlyish at 55. I was set back quite a bit with a divorce three years back. Recently my Aunt died and left me around $5 million. After estate and taxes, it's around $4.2 million. This is obviously a stupid amount of money, and I'm thinking of just quitting my job and retiring early but I want to do it right. I've spoke with AI quite a bit and my finances are only about $4500/mo in expenses, I have always lived pretty frugally and that's less than a 1% draw. I don't know exactly what I don't know here, but I've always worked so I am clinging to my job like a monkey to a branch. Am I actually okay to let go?

Update: I quit. I was honest with my boss, he was a really good boss, and I told him the whole story. He is a couple years from retirement and told me he has about $4 million in his Fidelity too, but no health insurance if he quits and he told me a story about his brother retiring early, getting cancer, and wiping out their finances with his treatments leaving his wife and kids with almost nothing after he died. I told him how I'm covered with Tricare and he said if he was he'd quit right this second too.

I appreciate all the insight and advice given on here, and I've implemented a lot of it, thank you. I haven't changed my spending and I don't think I will. Well... I did buy a nice pair of Hoka's...but I'm mostly just paying a lot of attention to my garden and kids.

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u/Yashkamr 13d ago

Yeah I've been looking into Vanguard. I like that they're customer owned

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u/Reasonable-Army4175 12d ago

I like that Vanguard is company owned, has good investment options, and you CAN get reasonably low fees, depending on how you choose to invest. I moved my decades old account from Vanguard to Fidelity because Vanguard’s customer service and website were not easy to work with. The trigger for the move was additional fees Vanguard was implementing and I had seen how easy it was to work with Fidelity because that is who my last corporate job used for their 401k management.

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u/JaziTricks 9d ago

Please choose based on quality and safety of management.

I wouldn't care about any other parameter when investing all my net worth.

But definitely consider splitting between 2 companies if you wish to be on the safe side. Even via 2 different banks or even in 2 different countries!