You can live well if you're rich and you can live well if you're poor. But if you're poor it's much cheaper. Personally, I think for a very regular life style, NYC to the boonies exchange rate is about 1:4 (food is probably 2x cheaper, real estate is probably 6 times, it averages to something like 4 times). Some of the expences dissappers all together (e.g. no need for a dog walker). If you can move out of NYC, you can probably live fairly well with a buck or two set aside. Just IMHO.
Living paycheck to paycheck in NYC is the equivalent of living in a 3000 sq ft suburb in the south. I never understood why people like the polluted cesspool of that city, unless you have a well paying career that is.
My total expenses dropped by 70percent: About the cost of my NYC rent : and I lived pretty frugally (by Wall Street standards) and had a pretty nice apartment (by Wall Street standards)
The wife is on board. It's hard to move to cheaper areas because all of our extended families live close by.
Nice move. Living in India : lol. Here I am getting only negative feedback from visitors who've been there. But the one coming from Japan, certain Chinese areas, many of the other South East Asians countries : very positive and realistic feedback. The C-u-l-t-u-r-e of a country is extremely important. And sooner or later one starts to notice.
Why "LoL"? It really depends on where you go. If you go to a big urban center, it's going to be a disaster. If you go to Goa and mostly lie on the beach, it's not too bad. Tons of people down-shift to India, Thailand, Vietnam and seem pretty happy. I went out to Thailand some years ago and can certainly imagine living there as a retiree.
I say do it too...It looks like you have an edge. But try to really quantify what you will lose with such things as retail commissions and exchange fees and make sure your edge doesn't lie in the firm's flow( internalization...). I have been doing it since 2007 and quality of life is really great, to the point that it would be really hard to come back in corporate world. Just driving with the sheep during rush hour makes me go crazy...
Consider all the cautions that ET members post but don't let any of them sway you if you still fell confident. Most guys that want to go off on their own do not have it well thought out. The fact that you can't scale it leads me to believe you might have a very good reason to leave. What is small $$ to your bank could very well be nice $$ for you. Good luck.