Big financial change coming for us

[Gailete]

Maybe I missed that part. I was always told there's no sense in leaving a job, no matter how stressful, if you can tread water and keep things afloat there until you find something new or get your business off the ground

Actually it can be pretty amazing what can open up to you when you leave the stress behind. If nothing else it clears out your mind enough that you can see more opportunities in life. I left a job I loved (once the main crew left) when due to 'office politics', a soon to be ex-husband, and developing three bleeding ulcers in one swoop said it was time to go. I suspect Disney Steve would have said it was past time on the ulcer issue alone. I left knowing I had a chunk of money in a retirement account, etc. that could sustain me for several months just fine until I found something else to do. As things worked out I found a new well paid job that I was still working at until I became to ill to work on a daily basis. This was a job I could have probably lived with for the rest of my working life but it still had many stressors, such as driving in snow and blizzards, etc. Crazy as it seems, I found my dream job when I could no longer 'work'. I sell things on line and my customers don't know that when they are buying something, I'm flattened out in pain upstairs! Last week on top of everything was kidney stone time. 5 days of horrible pain, nausea, etc. As long as I could send out orders once a day, my business kept going basically without me.

So yep, I'm with the group that when things are too ridiculous at work, go find something sane to do. No job is worth a bleeding ulcer or anything else.

[snafu]

Life's too short to be unhappy and with your support DW can follow her wish to go in a different direction. Best wishes for a successful business venture that DW enjoys. The real issue is how to continue her retirement plan. For the short term can the sums garnered from your medical survey be re-directed to a short term investment a/c until the business has sufficient income to meet the requirement for SEP? She'll have lots of write-off for mileage, space ratio mortgage, utilities, supplies, equipment, and more. I suggest creating a form to track her hours spent on business...it resembles the forms used by lawyers to charge off to clients. Perhaps DD will work with DW to develop a business plan. This will be important in a year when she'll want to access her accomplishments.

[scfr]

Not at the moment. What she'll probably do is stay home for the summer and look for something in the fall.

When/if she is ready to look for another job, if she is interested in a work-from-home option that offers quite a bit of flexibility, send me a PM. It's 100% legit and therefore not high pay.

Re her current 401K, will she be leaving it at her employer or rolling it in to a Rollover IRA?

As others have said, once her business is in the black, definitely look in to options like a SEP IRA.

[disneysteve]

When/if she is ready to look for another job, if she is interested in a work-from-home option that offers quite a bit of flexibility, send me a PM. It's 100% legit and therefore not high pay.

Re her current 401K, will she be leaving it at her employer or rolling it in to a Rollover IRA?

As others have said, once her business is in the black, definitely look in to options like a SEP IRA.

For the moment, we're going to leave the 401k where it is. The possibility always exists that she could find a new position with the same company (it is a large hospital system in the area with 3 hospitals and dozens of off-site offices). So just in case she ends up working for them again in the near future, I won't mess with it quite yet. She has been checking the internal bulletin board for job listings so that is a possibility.

If she settles in somewhere else, I'll probably roll it over to Vanguard where the bulk of our investments are. Little by little over the next few years, I want to start consolidating the array of accounts we have accumulated over the years and getting things to Vanguard for the most part. It will make retirement much simpler when the time comes.