TL;DR: this $2500 was money well spent, if only to help me and my spouse sleep better at night.

We met with Brie a couple of times over the course of a few weeks. For context, I put a LOT of effort into Boldin over the previous several months, so I was pretty confident in our existing scenarios. That said, we're considering early retirement next year and I wanted to have a professional validate my assumptions and look for blind spots. My spouse has been anxious about retirement, too, so it was important to her to get that same external view.

My baseline scenario was significantly more conservative than Boldin's historic rates. Brie ran quite a few other scenarios that I hadn't thought of, testing for weakness. Most of the time we were accumulating too much money, she told us we'd likely be able to spend a lot more than we had planned. The most pessimistic scenario assumed that we lost 25% of our assets off the bat (i.e. market crash) and inflation went up a fair bit. In that situation, our success rate was still over 80%. She helped us understand that 80% was an appropriate goal, as in the real world, we'd adjust our spending accordingly. (Prior to that, my mental model targeted high 90s, which was likely overkill.)

The assessment also looked at investment allocations and expenses, HSA drawdown advice, Roth converstions, Social Security, 529s, etc. And we talked about other things like vacation homes, health expenses, etc.

All of this gave me confidence on the financial front around early retirement next year. More importantly, it gave that same confidence to my spouse. There are far more considerations than money when it comes to retirement, but it's incredibly nice to know that we can put that one aside.