This analysis is incomplete. What you haven't included is the stress which you will have when you no longer get a regular paycheck deposited in your bank account. That will suddenly make you extremely aware that you no longer have any safety net at all. This stress may impact you, may impact how you can work on your trading strategies, and will certainly impact your family. Have you asked your wife how she'll feel if you suddenly no longer receive a regular paycheck?
Wherever you are you take yourself with you. In other words changing your circumstances won’t change yourself but changing yourself will change your circumstances. As for family get your head straight. Family is meant to live for and gives meaning to your life - otherwise you’re a fool.
There is a big difference between a job or a casino and playing the market with an edge. Not easy, not an answer to other problems, but a chance to gain freedom and scale. Is the pursuit worth it? You better decide ahead of time. Keep in mind that as kids grow up, they need(actually want) less attention. Need to be thinking long term and try to maintain a healthy balance. That is the hardest part imho. "You are exactly where you need to be." - unknown. @Sprout, we should start a thread where we only speak koans
I'm in the second world so a rule-of-thumb answer is by setup, difficult. In a first world it'd be "simple" as you put it, keep your high paying job, save aggressively and compounding will take care of you. In a thirld world it's also "simple": get the fuck out of there if you can. GDP PPP per capita where I live is around $25k / year. In the US it's $60 / year. In India it's $7k / year. In Congo it's 800 bucks / year. I myself am making around $70k NOMINAL / year so relative to local costs, it'd be like making some $150k / $300k in the US, depending how you measure. Living in a high cost local area (highest, actually), I'd say it's more like $150k. Higher than average but not enough for what Qlai has nicely described in a later post: "freedom and scale".
Leaving aside that I'll likely NEVER accept defeat, you have to also consider the serious disadvantage / handicap you're fighting with. It's a rough competition and if you don't work in the RIGHT place in the industry, you have far less resources to invest in winning this game. I'm saying right place because 99% of the "finance" job are just as crappy from a trader career point of view as not working in finance, perhapse even more detrimental since you're usually also bound by unfair IP contracts - even though you don't work in research / trading and there's no time or projects allocated to you for getting experience with that, should you work on those exact things (trading & R&D) as a side project outside the job which doesn't allow you to do that - IP contract says if you're successful they own that. At least that's what mine said and eventually determined me to tell them go fuck themselves. And the most important resource is TIME. Not money (beyond th epoint where they buy enough time), not computational resources now that with little money you can have in your pocket a phone which has more computing power than what NASA used two decades ago to go galaxy collision simulations. Before debating weather I'm right or wrong (legally or morally) for being unsatisfied with my job, I think I should first point out what would be a job where I'd be satisfied. 1) Work. I'm not a slacker. I'm working 12-14 hours per day. What I'm against is the notion of "work" being dictatorialy defined by an employer, manager, boss. Whenever I want to work on something and the current employer says: "nay", another employer doesn't hire me for it, a boss says "stupid idea or just no time for it", all these push me and humanity back to where we never departed from: slavery. I'm fine with giving SOME effective work time to whatever an asshole thinks it's better for me (and it's actually way way better for them). Problem's the current 8 hours work day system is calibrated just so that ALL that effective energy is swept away from you and it's not in your control. So back to those significant words "freedom and scale", I want the freedom to invest my work in whatever I see fit (and I control it) for enough time and when I have enough energy so that it matters. Not hiding like frightened rats under the domination of dinosaurs: "but you can do ANYTHING ... outside of work". That's 8 hours job + 1 hour lunch + 3 hours commute so after the system has extracted what amounts to all your effective energy, you're free to go fuck yourself. Thanks system but go fuck yourself back. 2) Money. They give you power to buy freedom, to scale, in general to be in control of your #1 instead of "the system".. So yeah, I want and can make use of a lot more money than just what I need to at least buy my escape from the Gulag. And will use them to first correct #1 with a "simple" incremental improvment: reduce work time from 8 to 5 hours per day. This way there's enough vital energy left for those like me to be able to invest their work in alternatives which are not dictated and controlled by a corrupt and disfunctional system. So capable workers won't have to beg and depend on the whims and incompetence of the corporate ladder above them. But before that I just need to escape myself.
I'm smart enough to be able to do anything, from aerospace engineering to microbiology, got admitted top of the class at the hardest technical university in the city and one of the best in the country. I want, need the freedom to choose what I work on and all the options I had so far were far from my desires and capabilities. At this point I no longer buy the line that "it's me", in fact "it's them". It's the system and I hate it with the fervor of a bolshevik - just because this is the least crappy system that retarded humans were able to put in place so far doesn't make it stink less. I'm choosing finance because it's the only option that offers enough leverage so that a smart INDIVIDUAL might make a difference. Of course it wouldn't hurt some help from my lucky rabbit foot
Make no mistakes, I'm a family man. It's just that you can't always take advice from risk-adverse persons (i.e. wife) when you know that long term success or even survival depend on taking some calculated risk (although with all calculations, you can never accurately predict the future). Ideally there would be some mutual agreement where both parts get some benefits out of the deal. I've presented her the plan to resign and go full time on my savings and darn thing, today I'm free to work all day on my trading business. Just a few days ago when asking the same thing with reasonable arguments (but not prepared to push the nuclear button) she was like no way, she can't find enough energy to take care of the kid by herself a whole day during the weekend.
You say you are earning the equivalent of $150K US for where you live but you are comparing it to slavery and being imprisoned in the Gulags? You sound very ungrateful for what you have. Every person i know who earns good money in IT counts themselves very lucky. No one i know earning that kind of money would describe it as anything close to slavery. So whats with your attitude? I can only assume you aren't really making as much as you claim you are.
Assume what you want. But from your post, you're fully aware that the state of things is some unstable and unlikely lucky flip of chance rather than the deterministic result of hard work and education, so we should shut the fuck up, bow our heads and thank our overlords for the chance of earning a loaf of bread in a sea of hungry folks, while tears of gratitude run on our faces. It's fucking worse than communist-time propaganda, at least then we KNEW it was all bullshit. ( Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19006797 )
At your claimed 70K USD nominal a year, you are easily in the worlds top 1% of earners. Admit it or not, but you are part of the 'overload' class. There are the real 'oppressed' in the world who are earning less than $1 an hour to give you the lifestyle you take for granted today.