Mid 40s and retired but obviously have low moral character since I refuse to work.

I am glad there are others with higher character continuing to work, preferably in publicly traded companies so I can profit from your work and stay retired.

stonksock said:

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Mid 40s and retired but obviously have low moral character since I refuse to work.

I am glad there are others with higher character continuing to work, preferably in publicly traded companies so I can profit from your work and stay retired.

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That is the only way to make serious money today. Not by working hard in a job/career (success is limited). My strategy is to peg myself to the rich guys. They are the "market makers", who influence how things will go. I am just someone who has to surf the waves well.

If Mr Moneybags makes $10,000,000, I need to make a guaranteed $1. I am happy being a investing scavenger. Has worked for me.

Pretty easy to use FIRE calculator that uses historic stock market returns to simulate dollars left at end of retirement.

https://ficalc.app/

I'm targeting 55 (hopefully using the Rule of 55 to tap into 401k early). Assuming career and investments stay on track, the tough part of the decision is every year worked towards the end is another seven figures or so on the account balance. I'm not worried about staying busy because I see a mix of travel and church/missions involvement.

We had worked enough and saved enough. Got a financial person and handed over 80% in retirement funds a year before we left. A retirement package popped up out of nowhere. 20% cash/stock can cover living expenses for ten years. Everything said go and we went September 2024.

Made a lot of sacrifices early career to live where we wanted to live. Both kids are in local colleges. We have been in our house 35 years and worked locally in a variety of large companies. Sixth generation Texan, all our family is here. We are happily stuck right where we always wanted to be and have been most of our lives. Lucky, we are.

Top three life events, 1) meet wife, 2) have kids, 3) retire. Hopefully we will live long enough to replace 3) with have grandkids.

LMCane said:

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many of the 4% rule actually have MORE money at the end of retirement than they started!

the point should be ending up at a ZERO balance other than what one wants to donate to charities.

(for those of us with no kids)

so I am planning on at least a 5% withdrawal rate.

the historical average is an 8% annual gain on equities

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This is a good point and there should probably be a separate thread discussing withdrawal strategies. There has been some great research on this topic over the last few years and a popular new one is risk adjusted guardrails which typically start around 5% (depending on asset allocation and time horizon) and adjust your "retirement paycheck" up and down based on market performance basically by calculating monte carlo as your portfolio value changes. When your score gets too high, you get a pay raise, when it gets too low you make an adjustment in spending to stay on track.

But what you said about the 4% rule is absolutely correct. in 75% of scenarios, people following the 4% rule would end up with a real value (so adjusted down to todays dollars for inflation) higher than their starting balance. There is about 5% chance of needing to reduce spending, but in the top 10% of scenarios the person has a real portfolio value of 7x or more of their initial investment.

I'm 51. My checkpoint just a couple of months ago was 55 which just so happened to be when I get 100% equity out of our startup company.

However, that equity is a lottery ticket. Being a startup there is zero guarantee the company even exists by then. I think it will but who knows. I have 20% of it now. It's also not factored into our overall portfolio because it's vapor until it's not as far as I'm concerned.

I'm a day one employee and I've been grinding my ass for 3 years 10-12 hours per day. I'm tired and we have our number so I'm going now instead of waiting to see if that lottery ticket hits. I might stroke out by then and want to avoid that.

permabull said:

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LMCane said:

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many of the 4% rule actually have MORE money at the end of retirement than they started!

the point should be ending up at a ZERO balance other than what one wants to donate to charities.

(for those of us with no kids)

so I am planning on at least a 5% withdrawal rate.

the historical average is an 8% annual gain on equities

---

This is a good point and there should probably be a separate thread discussing withdrawal strategies. There has been some great research on this topic over the last few years and a popular new one is risk adjusted guardrails which typically start around 5% (depending on asset allocation and time horizon) and adjust your "retirement paycheck" up and down based on market performance basically by calculating monte carlo as your portfolio value changes. When your score gets too high, you get a pay raise, when it gets too low you make an adjustment in spending to stay on track.

But what you said about the 4% rule is absolutely correct. in 75% of scenarios, people following the 4% rule would end up with a real value (so adjusted down to todays dollars for inflation) higher than their starting balance. There is about 5% chance of needing to reduce spending, but in the top 10% of scenarios the person has a real portfolio value of 7x or more of their initial investment.

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https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/literature/whitepaper/spending-retirement-assets-final-whitepaper.pdf

People just don't spend their money and the FA's love it. Not me. I'm going to have a 6-7% withdrawal the first few years and can adjust as needed with guardrails and especially when SS kicks in. I'm going to enjoy what I worked hard for these years.

Just wanted to plug chatgpt for this stuff. I've been messing with the new gpt5 and it's working much better than previous versions for this kind of thing. I had it model a 95% prob of success target value to withdraw a 250k real dollars post-tax until age 95 and plot those values (red line) and then run a Monte Carlo using 10% return and 15% st dev to see how things might look in the future. This took less than 10 minutes. Love nerding out about this kind of thing

The youth of our senior years are limited and the cost to spend them working is steep. At least that's my conclusion a year in which includes feedback from many other retirees. You're ahead of most probably in that you've identified your destination and dream home if you will.

JustAGuy100 said:

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Pretty easy to use FIRE calculator that uses historic stock market returns to simulate dollars left at end of retirement.

https://ficalc.app/

I'm targeting 55 (hopefully using the Rule of 55 to tap into 401k early). Assuming career and investments stay on track, the tough part of the decision is every year worked towards the end is another seven figures or so on the account balance. I'm not worried about staying busy because I see a mix of travel and church/missions involvement.

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That is awesome. Thank you for that.

This webpage also lets you try some guardrails strategies where you can add flexibility to your spending and see how it plays out.

It is less technical than risk adjusted guardrails but still interesting to use to test flexible spending withdrawal strategies.

One thing to point out is this only uses historical data and a statistics based monte Carlo will generate 5-10% more negative scenarios that have never happened in history. All that to say don't be surprised if you generate a scenario with this tool that works 100% of the time but only has a 90-95% Monte Carlo success rate when running the same plan with a different tool.

Savings withdrawal calculator

Just found this calculator (compliments again of Chat GPT). It does more of what I'm practically interested in with the Advanced settings. You can enter in your initial portfolio amount, years of withdrawal, expected growth rate, and plug in an amount you want to have left in your portfolio (for heirs and charities, for instance) at the end of that term. It lets you reverse engineer what you can withdraw monthly to target that amount to leave behind.

infinity ag said:

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stonksock said:

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Mid 40s and retired but obviously have low moral character since I refuse to work.

I am glad there are others with higher character continuing to work, preferably in publicly traded companies so I can profit from your work and stay retired.

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That is the only way to make serious money today. Not by working hard in a job/career (success is limited). My strategy is to peg myself to the rich guys. They are the "market makers", who influence how things will go. I am just someone who has to surf the waves well.

If Mr Moneybags makes $10,000,000, I need to make a guaranteed $1. I am happy being an investing scavenger. Has worked for me.

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This is absolutely untrue unless your definition of "serious money" is hundreds of millions. I've known hundreds of people who made serious money working hard. I've also known hundreds of people who've made serious money investing in those people. It's whatever floats your boat. Neither is wrong or right.

But I've also known people who had serious money and were miserable. If you aren't happy without money, no amount of money is going to fix that.

I was laid off a few weeks after I turned 60 in March. Still looking, actually have a few things that look good and maybe working Sept 1. Need to work until around 65….I have a 12 year old and a daughter in college.

But I have really enjoyed the summer off, gave me a taste of retirement. I liked it! Spent some time hauling around the kid and hanging. But time to get back to work, I still have alot left in the tank, and the kid is about to head back to school.

jja79 said:

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The youth of our senior years are limited and the cost to spend them working is steep. At least that's my conclusion a year in which includes feedback from many other retirees. You're ahead of most probably in that you've identified your destination and dream home if you will.

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Your conclusion is correct.

He Who Shall Be Unnamed said:

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Savings withdrawal calculator

Just found this calculator (compliments again of Chat GPT). It does more of what I'm practically interested in with the Advanced settings. You can enter in your initial portfolio amount, years of withdrawal, expected growth rate, and plug in an amount you want to have left in your portfolio (for heirs and charities, for instance) at the end of that term. It lets you reverse engineer what you can withdraw monthly to target that amount to leave behind.

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Karsten is Him on withdrawal analysis.

But you need to be retired to afford the time it takes to read the 50+ posts on the subject.

https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/

The best tool I have seen to calculate withdrawal rates in retirement is income lab. Unfortunately its a tool ment for professionals so it's probably too expensive for an individual investor. It does have a $20 trail for the first month if you want to mess around with it .

It uses Monte Carlo risk guard rails to set up a flexabke spending plan and then allows you to back test the strategy and see how your spending would have had to change if you retired before major events like the great depression and the dot com bust follow by the 2008 collapse.

It really helps framing what a monte Carlo number really means and if you had to make an adjustment how much would that be in these scenarios. It's much better than thinking "90% chance of success means 10% chance I am homeless"... It's more like "90% chance I will never have to reduce my spending and 10% chance I might need to cut back for a few years". The system also gives spending increases if you retire into a bull market which helps with the problem of underspending in retirement.

If you are looking for someone to run a financial plan for you I would highly recommend finding an advisor who uses income lab or if you are tech savvy, pay the $20 and generate your own report if you can do it in 30 days before the price goes up. (Probably worth going that route first bc it would cost way more than $20 to get an advisor to run a plan for you)

Edit: I wanted mention I do have a critique of the program. For the Roth conversion calculator it doesn't take into account time value of money or the sequence of return risk of moving tax expenses forward in early retirement

This is an awesome thread!

Would like to retire in about 2 years when I hit 60. I want to trek in the woods and mountains (just day hikes), learn to fly fish, and become a better photographer. We have a little place in Idaho that fulfills that trekking need. Already spend the summers here (thanks to COVID I mostly work remote). We're in a good spot (our advisor agrees). My biggest concern in health insurance. Hope do I bridge the gap? On a high deductible plan today, max my HSA, and don't touch it. My wife has chronic pain, her treatments are non-negotiable, and expensive. I have some research to do...

Healthcare.gov you can see how much it costs right now and budget for it

Where in Idaho? Your plan sounds similar to mine.

MAS444 said:

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Where in Idaho? Your plan sounds similar to mine.

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Teton Valley - Driggs. Bought in before all the Cali people drove up prices.

JustAGuy100 said:

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Pretty easy to use FIRE calculator that uses historic stock market returns to simulate dollars left at end of retirement.

https://ficalc.app/

I'm targeting 55 (hopefully using the Rule of 55 to tap into 401k early). Assuming career and investments stay on track, the tough part of the decision is every year worked towards the end is another seven figures or so on the account balance. I'm not worried about staying busy because I see a mix of travel and church/missions involvement.

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Are there any critiques to this model? Is it missing anything important? I'm not sure if it accounts for down years properly, but when I plug our data into this it certainly makes me feel great about things. We basically have Gilded Age, absurd money that will get left behind if we live to 90.

It's hard to believe it, frankly.

It uses historical data of all consecutive year datasets for available data (past 130 years or so). It also accounts for inflation. The default is 80/20 split equities to bonds. This does not account for hyperinflation or a black swan, other than those major financial events that have happened in the last 130 years or so. I think the defaults are on the optimistic side, but you can adjust some things to decrease the optimism.

Sequential historic results are generally better than Monte Carlo results because 5-10% of the time monte Carlo will select samples with extremely bad (or good) results that have never occurred in history. If your portfolio is 95% on a typical Monte Carlo it will likely pass every historical rolling 30 year period.

I wouldn't call it a a problem with that page because its good to run your plan in several different ways and it helps mentally make sense of what a Monte Carlo score means in a historical context.

That is my beef with tools like Boldin, they focus on monte Carlo without really explaining it. In reality 85% Monte Carlo is really good and anything over 70% is probably workable if you are willing to make adjustments. But most YouTubers I see championing Boldin are bragging about getting 95-99% scores bc that app makes saving a high score game. Those people are likely working way longer than needed or spending way less than they could

I made an example plan just now in income lab to show you guys many of you can probably retire much earlier than you thought.

I made an example couple 58F and 60M assuming they retire now and paid into social security while working. I chose a pretty conservative setting as well and it shows them starting out with a 6.76% withdrawal rate on their portfolio as being safe



It also shows the upper and lower guard rails for when they can increase spending and when they might need to cut back and by how much. The reason they can start so high is because eventually social security will kick in an cover a chunk of their expenses so its okay to spend more early on.


You can see the yellow is the so called "hatchet" as your portfolio won't have to do all the heavy lifting forever. You can test this plan throughout history and see how bad it would have gotten. So if this plan was run by someone who was unlucky and retired right into the great depression how would it have worked out?



As you can see they did have to make a spending cut in this extreme scenario, but they eventually recovered and never ran out of money. In this plan the spending went from $67600 a year to $58200, both well above starting at 4% of their initial million portfolio.

I drove through Driggs just abut two weeks ago on my way to Coeur d'Alene. Beautiful country out there.

Awesome, thanks for posting that. Just curious - do you know what rate of return on the portfolio they used for that calculation? I would assume you could just scale that down or even up to "TexAgs rich" sized. I am guessing they don't take out taxes on that money in the model. Do you know of a simple calculator that you can plug in numbers based on whether the funds are held in taxable versus nontaxable accounts? Something non-financial pros can use? The Gubmit do take a bite, don't she??? Thank you

Makes me wonder how these "Retirement Financial Advisors"

are going to keep charging 1% per year (likely over $100,000 of your money over your retirement)

when you can just use Claude or GPT5 or Gemini Google AI!!

I would rather pay PermaBull $200 to create scenarios for my 1.4 million portfolio than 1% per year of my total value to a Financial Planner!!

it seems if you have over $1.5 million and $3300 per month social security that you can have a pretty decent retirement. for a single guy, no kids, no alimony payments.

everytime I watch a youtube video by a CFP one says "retire now"

the next one says "don't retire or take social security until 65!"

My only issue with this is that the Retirement Paycheck is way too low in your scenario. For me anyway. Looks like a neat tool though.

I have a similar tool in Tiller that does this analysis factoring SS payments, annual spending, growth %, etc.

YouBet said:

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My only issue with this is that the Retirement Paycheck is way too low in your scenario. For me anyway. Looks like a neat tool though.

I have a similar tool in Tiller that does this analysis factoring SS payments, annual spending, growth %, etc.

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I think the purpose of this scenario was just round numbers... $1million being the basis. There are tons of people online that think 4% is too risky and you need to be 3.5% or even 3%.

If this number is too low, start incrementing the basis. Do you need double/triple/quadruple the income?

This is TexAgs bro. Up that number by 10x and we are in my territory for annual spending.

I could try to dig into what assumptions they are using for asset classes but your asset allocation and location absolutely impact what the withdrawal rate can be. Also how much you expect to get in social security and/or pension create a large impact as well as long you need to live off that money before those kick in. The tool does calculate taxes (as well as irmaa surcharges). In this example the taxes don't really come into play until after social security starts up (a couple who is MFJ taking the standard deduction would owe 0% on LTCG so their hypothetical tax liability would be $0 first year in retirement since I hold the bonds in the Traditional IRA to avoid the tax drag)

For this example I had 750k in traditional IRA, 150K in Roth and 100k in after tax. Overall portfolio allocation was 60% us stocks 10% international stock 25% mid term t-bills and 5% cash/short-term-tbills.

Here is a youtube video from one of the creators describing how to create your own set of guard rails

Yep!

I used firecalc extensively as I was running worst case scenarios. Great tool!