About 18.5% of my current salary goes to either retirement savings or pension contribution(this is my contribution only not my employer contribution)

7.65% go to fica taxes.

So let's say I have enough savings/pension to replace 70% of my salary. I am not taking a 30% pay cut in my take home amount.

Let's just take 100k salary for ease of math.

So based on 70% I would need 70k annually.

Just because I am no longer saving for retirement or paying fica taxes I have already made up 26k of the 30,000 pay cut.

Now that 30,000 was in the highest tax bracket and I was paying about 30% taxes(state and federal)
on it so that 30,000 was actually only 21k take home.


Plus I paid 2100 in tithing on that.

So at 70k vs 100k. I am actually taking home about 7100 more than when I was making 100k.