Ask HN: Do you have the courage to abandon your high paying job?

Now I work as a freelance consultant and am starting with two new ideas. BUT this time I will do it differently.

I will most certainly keep working my "regular" job until I have traction with one of the other ideas. I have a high paying job, could of course cut all expenses(this is not fun a few years in btw!) and live of very little. But the other option with a high paying job is to invest all of the excess pay into whatever endeavor you are planning. You most likely have enough excess pay to hire one or two other people to work on your idea while still working your day job.

This even gives a little more meaning to your daytime job as it then finances your future startup.

Yes do it ! You re gonna move in a less expensive place, just stop working, you can live at least 1year without working if you cut your expenses, it will give you all the time to figure out what to do with your life. And if you finish nowhere after 1year, just get an other of your boring stressfull, high paying job !

If you are too scared and don't want to "loose" 70-100k by not working, just find a part-time job, work like 2days per week as a freelance, it will be enought to sustain yourself with a low cost life style, and give you 3 more days of total freedom to work on your personnal project...

Damn, stop being scared. You can get a job again, if it doen't workout.

Around the time my first kid was born, I took a look at the profits from my little handful of SaaS products and decided that, even though we were happily living off it, it wasn't really "put a kid through college" money. So I picked up a remote contract.

But, SaaS being Saas, business picked up. After a few years, the product business was bringing in more than any full-time job I'd ever had before. But I had negotiated my "Bay Area Rate" for this contract, and was therefore also bringing in a significant fraction of what the OP describes each year.

House paid off, savings saved, no money troubles on the horizon, but it still took a long time and a lot of effort to convince myself to drop that contract. When the getting is good, it's really hard to deliberately stop the getting.

But I did. Took the kids out of school for half a year and hopped a flight to Southeast Asia to show them how mommy and daddy used to travel with backpacks and sleep in tin huts on the beach. Then slowly settled back in to working on the business stuff, when the weather didn't favor being outside, implementing all those things I'd had to put off for 5 years and shaping them up to be the solid revenue stream they'll need to be going forward.

But yeah, it's tough to do. Well worth it though.

To the OP, though, I'd recommend getting your spending sorted out. The math above doesn't work out for me, and it sounds like you've ramped your lifestyle up to consume most of that half million a year. Don't pull the plug until you have that comfortably down to around $50k all in. Otherwise you'll burn through your $1M savings in, well, 2 years. That would be no fun. And completely unnecessary.