Last November, I quit my stressful job in software engineering and tested the early retirement waters, learning tons of lessons along the way. Naturally, most people assumed I'd reached Financial Independence. At Camp FI in January, I heard the phrase “You're FI now, right?!” numerous times, and I was always careful with my response: “The wife and I are on the cusp of FI”. So are we FI or not?? The question is simple, but the answer is… complicated.
Market Volatility Blurs The Line
According to the idealized budgets I've set up for the wife and I, our annual spend is about $25,000 per year. Multiply this by 25 per the 4% rule, and we need a portfolio of $625,000 to support this annual spend passively forever. And our portfolio did indeed reach this number earlier this year!
But then the market dropped down a bit… and we dipped back under that particular magic number. In fact, we've crossed above and below this line many times these past few weeks thanks to daily market volatility. But it makes no sense to say we were FI on January 30th but weren't on Feb 5th. Instead, it's better to look at Financial Independence as a smooth continuum of benefits, with various milestones along the way. This is in line with the ‘Stages of FI' J.D. Roth and Joshua Sheets wrote about over at Money Boss and Radical Personal Finance. I've summarized just a few of these benefits here:
- FU Money Benefits
- Confidence to walk away if a job goes against your values
- Ability to quit a job and have months before you need to find a new one
- Lean FI Benefits
- Basic passive financial security for all essentials (food, shelter, etc.)
- Can spend months or years looking for new jobs with no fear of running out of money in the short-term
- Flex FI Benefits
- Full passive financial security if you stay flexible
- Can probably start early retirement if you stay conscious of your expenses and reduce spending/increase income during downturns
- Financial Independence Benefits
- Full passive financial security
- Work is truly a choice, forever: your money works so you don't have to
- You have ‘enough'
- You can pursue passion projects with no concern for money
- FAT FI Benefits
- An abundance of passive financial security, with all the frills
- You have more than enough
I'm comfortable saying we have most of the benefits that come with the ‘financial independence' milestone. We have passive financial security. The wife continues to work by choice. I'm able to test out early retirement and figure out how I want to spend my newfound free time. I'm in no rush to find new work, and if I do take another job in the future, it will be something that I enjoy, rather than taking whatever I can get to ‘pay the bills'.
So I'd say we're somewhere between Flex FI and FI, closer to the FI side. This makes a lot more sense than saying we can passively support $24,999 in annual spending but aren't FI yet. You see, the line is blurry; thanks to market volatility the resolution of a portfolio is in thousands of dollars, not singles! But this isn't the only issue when it comes to answering the question “Are you FI yet?”
Previously we discussed the Early Retirement Equation, which helps you calculate what savings rate you need to retire exactly when you want to. But there's a much simpler equation to calculate how much money you need to achieve financial independence:
Annual Expenses / Safe Withdrawal Rate = Required Portfolio Value
Super simple, right? Only two variables! The problem is, there's a ton of assumptions going on behind the scenes of those two variables that need to be questioned.
What Are My Annual Expenses?
This seems like a simple enough question… you track your money via online tools like Personal Capital for a year or two, create an idealized budget, and bam! You have a high degree of confidence in your annual spend. Let's compare budgets! Here's ours:
Budget Item | Annual Spend |
---|---|
Auto Insurance | $600.00 |
Auto Maintenance | $600.00 |
Business & Side Hustles | $577.00 |
Entertainment | $2,315.00 |
Family & Gifts | $600.00 |
Gasoline & Tolls | $600.00 |
Groceries | $2,400.00 |
Gym & Fitness | $383.00 |
Health Insurance | $2,400.00 |
Internet | $660.00 |
Mobile Phones | $660.00 |
Pets | $480.00 |
Property Insurance & HOA | $900.00 |
Property Maintenance | $600.00 |
Property Taxes | $2,346.00 |
Restaurants | $2,000.00 |
Shopping | $1,800.00 |
Travel & Vacation | $1,200.00 |
Utilities | $2,400.00 |
Miscellaneous (Cushion) | $3,000.00 |
TOTAL | $26,521.00 |
One of the key assumptions of the Early Retirement Equation is that your spending before early retirement, during your accumulation phase, will be the same as your spending after reaching early retirement, when you start drawing down on your portfolio. While this simplifies the math, it may not reflect reality! That's why it's essential to leave room for flexibility, since you can't know your future annual expenses with complete certainty. It's really important to get this number as close as possible; if it's way off, you might not save enough money… or on the flip side, you might work years longer than necessary!
The wife and I actually disagree on our number. I think our expenses will go down a tad after she retires from full-time work, so I want to support a $25K annual spend. The wife wants the flexibility to spend even more in FI, and would like to support an annual spend closer to $35K to enjoy luxurious, stress-free financial freedom. So who's right? Should we split the middle? I thought my number was already luxurious with its built-in $3,000 miscellaneous cushion! Unfortunately, this isn't the only assumption we need to question on our quest for FI.
Is My Safe Withdrawal Rate Safe?
As I've discussed here on the blog, the 4% rule is a great place to start when deciding your annual Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR). The 4% SWR is a result of the Trinity Study, which showed that 96% of the time, a 50/50 stock/bond portfolio with a 4% annual withdrawal rate lasted at least 30 years. This SWR is equivalent to saving 25 times your annual spend.
The Mad Fientist wrote an excellent article about how the success of a portfolio is primarily predicted by the volatility in first 10 years of withdrawals, giving rise to a discussion on sequence of return risk. Dropping to a 3% SWR hedges that volatility, but you’ll have to save 33 times your annual spend instead of 25.
In contrast, choosing a 5% withdrawal rate (a.k.a. Flex FI) will help you reach FI quicker, since you only need to save 20 times your annual spend, but remember that this requires more flexibility, particularly if your first 10 years of FI are rough market years. The 4% withdrawal rate, then, is a nice middle ground and is the SWR I'm using in my own calculations.
I seem to be in the minority in the FIRE blogging space, but I actually think the 4% rule is extremely safe! Why? Because it assumes (1) I'll never earn another dime in my 50+ year retirement, and (2) my spending is completely inflexible. Both of these assumptions are ridiculous for me, and the majority of the FIRE community.
A Cushion For Your Cushion?
But what if I want to build a safety margin right into my SWR? Remember our discussion of the FAT FIRE milestone, where we bake in an abundance of safety and luxury in retirement by simply reducing our SWR? This is a perfectly valid approach, but could be unnecessary if you already have a safety buffer built into your annual spend, like I do. The wife likes the idea of building cushion into both equation variables, but the cost of that cushion is substantial:
Joel's numbers: $25,000 * 25 = $625,000
The Wife's numbers: $35,000 * 30 = $1,050,000
That's a difference of $425,000, and a huge discrepancy between our desired portfolio values! As you can see, relatively small differences in your base assumptions lead to drastically different FI numbers! But this makes sense; our philosophies are different, our risk tolerances are different, and our ideal FI lifestyles are different. We're different people! The wife also enjoys her current job, which probably influences her preferences on these items, just as hating my job shaped my own ideas on the subject.
There are even more assumptions we didn't discuss: What if you don't need your money to last forever? What if you want to slowly drain your principal as you age, passing away at the ripe old age of 108, with only $5 left to your name? If portfolio preservation and leaving millions of dollars behind isn't a priority for you, then perhaps a higher SWR is appropriate?
Summary
There are so many assumptions to consider when calculating a FI number that works for you and your family. Mess up on either your annual spend or your safe withdrawal rate and your early retirement date could be off by years, not months! Once again, the key here is flexibility; give yourself the room to change plans along the way, and as the wise Miss Mazuma said at Camp FI, “Don't frugal yourself into a corner.”
So are we FI? Possibly. Even after all this discussion, I don't know the answer for sure. If we're not, I'd wager we're at least past the proverbial FI event horizon, and reaching FI is more of an inevitability at this point than anything else. The wife plans to keep working another year or two. I plan on making some money with my writing and music side hustles, and might even pick up some part-time software work later this year if I'm feeling particularly ambitious!*
The interesting thing is, since I quit working the job I hated, I think about money significantly less often. I no longer check market performance every day. I spend more time on fun stuff, and less time obsessing over numbers. My advice echoes that of J.D. Roth: Live the life you want to live, and let financial independence be a side effect, rather than the goal.
So while it makes for interesting blog fodder, the actual answer to the question “Are we FI yet?” is: who cares?
*I know, even I'm surprised by this! But I took for granted the value of all the little social interactions in the workplace. Some part-time work, with some cool people, on something I'm actually passionate about might be just what I need.
Interested in starting your own Financial 180? You've come to the right place. The math is easy: create a gap between what you earn, and what you spend. If you can save half your income, your working career will only be around a decade long! Want to shorten it even more? Read on to see exactly what expenses the wife and I cut from month to month. Track your progress against the milestones of FI, and gradually build up your own savings snowball. Check out the books and links in our resources section and jump-start your journey to FI. The you ten years from now will be glad you did! Ready? Start here.
You’ll be there no problem since you still have income flowing in. Like you said in the past, worst case scenario you’ll need to find a job for a year or two if there is big economic crash in the near term but that isn’t that big of a deal.
When is the wife thinking about retirement?
Good question. She’s enjoying work right now – lower stress R&D world, cool boss (who you happen to know)… could be one more year, could be… ten? Who knows. The good thing is, if and when things stop being fun, she can walk away with no issue, so it’s really just about enjoying the ride.
Re: portfolio preservation. The 4% rule does not assume that you are trying to preserve your principal. It defines success if your portfolio’s terminal value is positive.
Also, the Trinity study never used Monte Carlo simulations, only historical data. Though of course many studies have done Monte Carlo simulations since then
Thanks for the heads up – I tweaked some wording to make things clearer. The preservation portion was referencing a classic MMM post that I forgot to link in!
Hey – thanks for the shout out!!
The whole FI path changes so many times along your journey, whether you are doing it as a single or as a couple. So many variables at work that can change it all in an instant…housing, healthcare, babies, divorces, etc. Of course, the market going up and down doesn’t help! 😉
As of this year, I hit my OG FI number and decided to slow down a bit. If hitting that next level takes a year or two more than the pace I was going before, I can live with that. The goal is to get there with gas left in the tank!
Yes! Leave yourself some wiggle room. Things change. What you thought was the perfect FI budget at the start of the journey might not be true by the end. That being said, that still doesn’t mean you have to keep working like crazy, particularly in a traditional W2 you don’t enjoy (like I did). It’s all about finding balance. Speaking of work/life balance- I loved the pics from your road trip!
Is the reason Alexis continued to work because she wants to be at that super safe and flexible $35k/year number, or because she truly wants to continue working? Those seem to be vastly different answers to me.
That’s a great observation… I suspect it’s a little bit of both, but I’m not certain. I’ll see if I can get her to deep dive on this. I’ve been wanting to do a Q/A post with the wife, maybe this will be the catalyst to make that happen!
Your health insurance number seems outrageously low to me. As you get older, it will go up by a lot. Even a high deductible plan can cost over $1000.00/month. You might want to follow along with this recent podcast series as he works through the numbers: https://rogerwhitney.com/212-healthcare-before-medicare-aca-and-cobra/
Hey Monika, thanks for the feedback. My number is based on a predicted spend of about $200 / month for high deductible health insurance. I check the ACA health exchange each year to follow the trends, and for 2018, our insurance would have been about $20 per month after subsidy. So, I’ve allocated ten times that amount for our future spending.
If ACA goes away, I have enough $ in HSAs to ride it out for a while, and if needed would move to a state that had a good private exchange. Everyone’s situation is unique; the wife and I are young, healthy, and flexible in where we live / what we spend our money on, so this number works well for us for planning purposes.
I totally agree with you when you say the 4% rule if extremely safe and I would add another reason for that. If you have 1M, you can spend 40k every year forever and still not touch your capital. At the end of the day, you still have 1M “extra” to use during your lifetime! Plus, of course, the fact that I am sure you will get more money throughout your lifetime + expenses normally do decrease when you don’t work.