Tiny adventures, gaming, FIRE, all curled up

[flexagon]

This week's weirdness was going in to the Zillian office to pack up my stuff and an ex-employee's stuff. I went on my scooter -- haven't taken public transit in four months now -- and a security guy walked me to the desk area and watched me pack. The place was sparkling clean, because apparently the cleaning staff is still on duty and bored as hell. So I got all the stuff for both of us, bungee-corded most of it to the scooter, walked to the nearest post office where I boxed up and mailed the ex-Zillianaire's stuff (and sent my foam roller to my friend), and then scooted all the way home with just my stuff. Still heavier than ideal. I guess at some point it seemed smart to have a toolkit at the office? All I really wanted at this point was my framed certificate that marks me as a 10-year veteran and has my start date on it. I'll give away the toolkit tomorrow.

I had extra time at work this week due to a "no meeting week", and caught all up on reviewing documents despite the above (and taking mid-day breaks to play Outer Wilds). Then Saturday I drove a Zipcar down to see norwoodbridge, which freaked me out a lot less this time, now that surface transmission is not seen as so much of a thing for coronavirus. I wore gloves but didn't worry about wiping things down. Seeing him was nice (Outer Wilds, Black Mirror, Snakebird, sex and a lobster roll) and now I won't see him again for 3 weeks due to the stupid virus... his kids are returning from a road trip to one of the high-risk states, and they have to quarantine so he's joining them.

Press handstands are the real-life puzzle I can't solve. Judging by last week (active pike/straddle class, press handstand class) an even better pike would continue to help a lot.

I listened to this really interesting podcast on ways to sanely adjust spending after you retire early. It had some reassuring numbers! Intriguingly, you know how a 4% withdrawal rate is generally considered a "safe" plan for a 30-year retirement? They re-ran all the numbers for 50 years and the safe rate (by the same method) is 3.5%. This is beyond awesome for me -- I've been running my calculations on a staggeringly conservative 3% for years, and I'm above all my targets. Their math says I could actually retire early, I mean earlier than planned. But everything is so wack, and I'm still earning so much, and WFH is so chill, that a couple more years still sounds like a decent Plan A.

I feel tiny and curled-up, like my cat who loves to sleep in a cardboard box in the kitchen. Life is small.

Comments

[ckd]

My current retirement "plan" is to stay at "Z" for at least a few more years. I have several reasons, but one of the big ones is the Rule of 55 which would let me withdraw from my 401k without penalty as long as I leave Z after the start of the year I turn 55.

That leaves me with a bunch of options for getting through to when my pension and SocSec max out; taking those late is my insurance against living too long for my money, though like you I've been using a really low withdrawal rate in my calculations so the risks were already lowered. (SRE with a degree in business administration = looking for a really good financial SLO. :-)

[flexagon]

Ah, thanks for the "rule of 55" thing. Good info, and good reminder on some accounts not being touchable for a while. My nest egg is not primarily in my 401(k), but it's true that under my current plan I won't be able to touch it for some time after retirement, and the same is true of other IRAs. So I need to make sure that my touchable savings is enough to safely get me through the first 15 years.

Your plan is a fine plan, if you can put up with tech for that long! I don't count on Social Security at all, and pension... what is a pension. I'm of the "trust no one" school of savings.

The podcast I listened to had really interesting numbers on what happens when you DON'T get the worst-case scenario. Most people's nest egg multiplies a whole lot rather than actually drawing down, and yet we have to plan for worst case because we want to be safe. Raises the interesting specter of needing to come up with decent ideas of things to do (someday) with insane amounts of money, just in case we're not wildly unlucky.

https://www.choosefi.com/flexible-spending-rules-for-early-retirees/

[ckd]

I've put up with tech this long (helped quite a bit by my, shall we say, overrepresented demographic aspects). At the moment staying in tech is better for my mental health than retiring, because it's better for my physical health than traveling the world the way I would like to spend my retirement time doing.

I'm not really counting on SocSec, but not counting it completely out either. The pension is from MIT, a nice bit of luck in that I was an MIT employee for a while due to the Broad Institute's organizational structure during the early years. I figure MIT is likely to stick around for a while.

Treating "sufficient money to live on" as the minimum SLO (with enough 9s to make me feel safe), the fairly likely set of scenarios where my money winds up running ahead of the curve by enough to grow even after my baseline expenses are handled simply increases the error budget. (In this case, a literal budget. :-) In the Before Times world where my discretionary spending went mostly on travel, that would mean higher frequency, longer trips, and/or nicer experiences (business class instead of coach, etc) when times were good, and less/cheaper travel when bad. Now, who knows if/when travel will even be a thing again?

I've found ERN's Safe Withdrawal Rate series pretty interesting (despite its length), particularly around flexible withdrawal rate rules for longer periods than a traditional retirement. The mixed "core/adaptive" framing that Kitces discusses also seems like a good model to use given how much of a gap I expect to have between "what I need to live on" and "what I would spend if I had more than enough money".

[flexagon]

Yes -- at least tech is giving us all stuff to do that feels kind of useful, while we're all stuck at home. I don't even really like travel but I want to be out and about anyway! (At least I think I do -- my memories of all that seem super trippy right now).

Anyway, I wanted to say thank you for both those links. I read them both and STILL have them open in tabs because I kind of want to write to my financial advisor about some of this. He's nervous about my plan for a long, long retirement and I'd like more detail on why. It's possible he just hasn't worked with many FIRE types before. I also like the "core/adaptive" idea but have been planning my retirement on my real annual burn rate, which isn't particularly lavish but is well above "core", too.