Clearly this depends on how much you need to make per year, and on how much risk you're willing to tolerate, but given those variables it's not hard to calculat

Clearly this depends on how much you need to make per year, and on how much risk you're willing to tolerate, but given those variables it's not hard to calculate. We can get 5% return at basically no risk, which is on average 2% real yield post-inflation, so you need 50 * N where N is your 'salary' per year. Which is twice what @patio suggests, because I'm allowing a lot less risk than he/she is. So if you want $100K/year, you need $5M. As has been mentioned in other similar threads, that's "do nothing" money. You'd need a lot less for "do anything" money, where you would continue to work but could choose most any job regardless of what it pays, and/or could work less than full-time.