Let the records show that on 18 September 2025 I resigned from my job as a corporate lawyer.

Why?

Work pressures had been constant for months and almost all of them were due to mismanagement. Changes I’d requested to make the associates’ (junior lawyers) lives better were paid lip service. Boundaries I’d agreed with my firm were simply ignored. In their drive to meet clients’ every whim without any kind of expectation management, associates were thrown under the bus in one-line e-mail taskings amongst a flood of incoming e-mails.

At my peak I had 8 bosses across different departments demanding that I handle 23 different transactions, all of which it would be nice to get out ASAP – can you prioritise this?

If everything is top priority then nothing is top priority.

SierraWhiskyMike

One of the three associates signed off sick for a month, and then we were really boned.

Still, we persevered, dreading each long day and wasting all weekend in recovery.

Then, on the morning of 18 September, I sat at my desk. I pulled out my notepad, like normal, and stared at my to-do list.

And that was all I could do.

I just stared at the damned thing, getting angrier and angrier, for an entire hour.

Then the fire alarm went off.

As the corporate horde shuffled to the fire muster point where no roll call is taken, I walked off and called Lady SierraWhiskyMike.

“I can’t do this. I won’t work for these clowns anymore. I’m sorry.”

Reception

The universal response from family and friends has been one of relief.

“FINALLY!”

My wife, my parents, my best friends – basically everyone outside of law – has been beyond supportive. They’ve been congratulating me.

Turns out that I’ve been zero fun to be around for the last couple of years and most people were worried.

How I feel about it

Being a millennial burnout stereotype is irritating. How the hell did I get through a 10-year military career only to get mentally buggered by an office job that pays well?

That moment of freezing up was terrifying. I considered that I might be having a stroke of some kind because I somehow knew I needed to start working but couldn’t physically move.

Initially I was ashamed of calling quits. I’m almost certainly going to take a massive income hit, and that means we either drastically reduce our savings rate or Lady SierraWhiskyMike has to carry more costs burden.

But after work, she took me out for pizza to have what she called “a celebration”. And then I realised that in pursuing the money I’d been making her life worse anyway.

Not bad per se, but being around a grumpy bastard all the time is tiring.

So now I feel lighter. Much lighter.

I still have to work a 3-month notice period, but I don’t care about the hours. I just need to survive my workdays, try not to burden my colleagues too much, and go home.

Our finances

We did a quick tally of what we need to survive last week, as fortune would have it (or perhaps I subconsciously knew this was coming).

My personal spends, if I just do the bare minimum I need to survive?

  • Half a monthly mooring fee: £350
  • Half electricity and gas: £30
  • PAYG top-ups for the iPad and my phone: £30
  • Half of the dog’s vet bills and maintenance: £200
  • One bag of dog food: £75
  • Half of the car and boat insurance: £45
  • Half of the food: £300
  • Guitar lessons (max per month): £200

TOTAL: £1225

Obviously there’s no transport, clothing, beers or other discretionary spending in there. On the other hand though, we already have next year’s mooring fees saved up, so I don’t technically need to pay them for a year.

Which basically means that I can take a month or two off before I have to find work again.

The low spending also means I can survive quite happily on a minimum wage job. In fact, minimum wage on the island for full-time work comes to about £1,675 per month. OK, I won’t be adding much to the investment pot if I earn that, but I’ll be able to live basically the lifestyle I do now while having more free time.

Which was a gods-damned revelation.

CoastFI

I’m so grateful that we sprinted to CoastFI!

Resigning from a well-paid corporate job would be terrifying if I had to worry about the future.

We live on a boat so I guess we’re not as secure as if we’d owned a house outright somewhere with a garden for growing vegetables but slightly on a hill to mitigate sea level rises in future. That would be a much more secure position, granted.

But we don’t have a mortgage. We have between us something like £180,000-200,000 in investment assets plus some public sector pensions. We also have something like thirty years before expected state retirement age, so we have time for assets to grow and time to do a cheeky recovery if things start going to pot in the next ten years.

It’s not unthinkable that if we do nothing our investments might quadruple over a 30-year time frame. £720,000-800,000 plus public sector income is more than enough for two frugal people who don’t have expensive tastes.

We might have to rent housing in our old age when we become too frail to sail, but we can be reasonably confident that we should be able to afford to do so and have a bit of choice about where to do that.

If we’re not going to be secure and comfortable then no-one else will be, either. FIRE can’t really prepare you for the collapse of the capitalist system, so to the extent that this happens we’re all in the same boat (HA!) anyway.

So I’m approaching this impending unemployment with a sense of optimism for the future.

What’s next?

The plan is to divert my investment monies into a cash pot for now, and keep spends low except for the wedding and a visit home next weekend that we’ve already planned for.

Assuming that I just live lean until Christmas (apart from things like a wedding I’m going to in November) I can probably put aside £7,000 during the notice period., which ends just before Christmas.

That means I can take January off entirely before I need to do anything.

We might do some travelling in January, so I don’t think it’s going to be a six-month hiatus before I return to the world of work, but I can at least work out what I actually want to do next with my life from there.

Lady SierraWhiskyMike’s income is more than sufficient to carry my basic living expenditure (except guitar and my phone, obviously – that’s on me) indefinitely, so if I start something that takes a bit of time to build or if I work part-time while trying something else on the side that’s fine. It was her idea.

I think I’m probably going to use the first half of the year – if not the whole year – trying some things out. Maybe I’ll do some temp contract work.

Yeah, but you must have some idea?

My gut feeling is that I don’t want to return to corporate law, or at least not in permanent private practice. Being forced into ridiculous and easily-avoidable positions by uncaring managers and petty bureaucrats is just awful.

I would consider a maternity cover job in future maybe, because a nine-month legal job is (a) survivable if you keep your eyes on the prize, and (b) well paid enough to give me 12 months’ living expenses after it ends, so I could afford another career break.

I’m not too hot on taking another office job in general. I’m not sure they suit my temperament. I like taking action and getting stuff done, and offices tend to reward mindless process and self-imposed obstacles to success. The culture of mass e-mails needs to die in a hole, too. E-mail is supposed to replace post, not be an instant messenger for when you can’t be bothered to think for yourself.

Maybe I’ll go back to pub work? I used to enjoy that. Or maybe I’ll try my hand at freelancing online so that I can make a job that’s location-agnostic. That would be useful!

So it’s going to be a time of career experimentation.

I’ve also toyed with getting more sailing qualifications and trying to break into that, but I don’t really want another job that takes me away for weeks at a time when my dog is effectively nearing the end of his life. I’d like to enjoy the time I have with him. Sailing jobs can wait.

Lessons from this whole debacle

Lesson 1: Burnout is very real

While I’m totally pissed that I’m now a millennial stereotype, I can absolutely confirm that burnout is a real thing.

Having experienced a rocket attack and now a near miss mental breakdown, I can say on balance that the rocket attack was better. The risk of death just felt surreal at the time, whereas I was very aware of being locked in a rage and grabbing my pen in a death grip without being able to do much about it. Certainly wasn’t great.

Lesson 2: Living lean is powerful

It’s hard to scale down an expensive lifestyle, but it’s dead easy to have a cost of living that easily fits into minimum wage employment.

Living cheaply makes the Fuck You Fund stretch so much further. If I need to take six months off, I definitely could. I’d probably reduce my guitar lessons but it would be doable.

But if my burn was £2,000 a month (which is what I’d thought it was – turns out we save more than I think) then I’d need to go from this job to a moderately well-paid job, which would probably mean being stuck in corporate world or looking for another lawyer job.

Instead, I have freedom of choice.

In a choice between freedom or indulgence, I tend to pick freedom.

Lesson 3: CoastFI is superpowerful

Even if I wasn’t living lean, being CoastFI has brought me incredible peace of mind.

Let’s say I end up with a minimum wage job and go back to spending every penny I earn. What actually happens to me as a consequence?

Um, not a lot. My eventual retirement is still looking pretty damned likely. I should be fine.

I would have preferred that I didn’t have a mental health near miss, but I don’t regret having sprinted to reach CoastFI. I’m not overly worried about my future, and for good reason. All I have to do now is try to avoid drawing from the pot too early – let’s say, the next ten years – and we ought to be comfortable indefinitely.

My financial independence campaign continues!