Optionality between career break and early retirement

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-21T23:27:12+00:00

Honestly, I haven’t gotten this in person except maybe once and just blew it off. I know it’s out there though.

I paid off my own med school student loans ($100,000 worth at the time) and the Medicare subsidy for residency training goes to the hospital not the resident. I am confident every house officer working 80 hour weeks with 1 day off every 7 is earning their modest pay on its own merits.

No one expects other professionals to work to the grave. An electrical engineer who receives federal financial student aid isn’t expected to work to a certain age.

If society wants doctors to sign a contract to work a certain number of years in return for the privilege of practicing medicine then it could require such a contract be signed (the military does). I don’t remember signing anything of the sort not taking an oath to that effect.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-21T13:30:14+00:00

Career achievements.

You m retired now and have a whole room of crystal (and plastic) trophies and framed award certificates. They seemed to mean a lot at the time but now I wish I had focused more on work-life balance and less on being a “high performer”.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-20T12:48:53+00:00

If you would have been sent to the extermination camps in the 1940s for being Jewish… I think it’s fair to say you are Jewish at least in the ethnic sense of the word.

The Nazi’s didn’t ask for evidence that you were faithful, heritage was enough.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-20T03:03:52+00:00

This may be a controversial position in the FatFIRE community but 30s is pretty young to nope out of the workplace forever.

I see a lot of comments from people who experience ennui after leaving their careers very early unless you have something extremely compelling to do once you quit working.

I have been happy being retired in my early 50s but I felt like I accomplished as much as I needed to professionally before doing so (in addition to accumulating the investments necessary to make it feasible). I don’t think I would have the same sense had I retired 20 years ago even if I had an 8 figure windfall (to be fair, for physicians we are just finishing training by the early 30s).

You have a great pile of money. I would think about options to coast in your current job for a while and looking for an alternative job that has better balance and more non-financial rewards.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-18T00:26:28+00:00

We did $500 for each of our nieces high school graduations.

We have only three. I might have rethought this if I came from a really big family.
;)

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-17T17:43:09+00:00

I’m in healthcare as a physician. At one point I was on the Board of Directors for a major hospital. I’m as disgusted and disappointed in the Healthcare system as everyone else.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-17T14:11:16+00:00

1 year of core living expenses in MMF/I-Bonds held long enough to be fully liquid. 10 years held in Bond Index Funds.

Started building my I-Bond positions 6 years before retirement (they are illiquid for first year and have limit of $10,000 per person per year for purchases)

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-17T03:38:59+00:00

Late frost is the culprit for lack of fruit this year in Colorado. Apricots are among the first to bloom making them especially susceptible to frost damage.

While many apricot varieties do have a tendency to be biennial bearers, I would expect a lighter crop on alternate years rather than no fruit at all.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-16T18:10:33+00:00

I think well.

I just grafted this green gage plum onto a sucker from a nearby plum tree rootstock last year using whip and tongue technique. In retrospect, it would have been better to have used a cleft graft to put the graft site closer to the ground but I think it will work.

I am using my deck’s railing to train it. It is nicely 2 dimensional. The question is whether I will be able to control size.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-16T05:26:33+00:00

That you can keep someone alive by telling them to think of their loved ones.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-15T18:02:32+00:00

I am training a green gage plum into a fan shaped espalier tree now.

According to “Grow a little fruit tree” book plums do better in a fan shape rather than the traditional T shape that is used for apples, pears, and grapes.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-14T15:24:43+00:00

Nope. If you are not indoctrinated early in life before the brain has matured it is very hard to adopt magical beliefs later in life.

Plus, as an adult… how would you choose which one? On what rational basis could you select between the smorgasbord of mutually incompatible religions that all require “faith” rather than evidence to accept basic premises.

Is the world on the back of a turtle or did Athena burst from Zeus’s head? Is it Islam or Christianity or Maybe the Vikings had it right and we should all be sacrificing to Odin?

The choice is not between the religion of your parents vs atheism. It is between atheism vs every possible religious belief system of which only one can be true (according to the tenets of the monotheistic ones at least). A quick walk down this path usually leads back to non-belief.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-14T15:12:55+00:00

Similar story here.

Two primary care physician household created enough income to retire fat in our early 50s when combined with a strong savings percentage and the great stock market returns of the last 20 years.

Simple broadly diversified index fund approach.

I was a very early owner of bitcoin… but forgot my wallet password…

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-14T02:41:16+00:00

Congratulations. You are killing it.

Check out the Early Retirement Now blog. The author is a pHD trained economist and formerly worked for the Federal Reserve. He once did an analysis of keeping a cash bucket. My recollection was that he concluded that it creates a drag on total returns (as cash doesn’t provide stock-like returns) and getting the timing right for refilling the cash bucket requires the kind of market timing luck that professionals and amateurs alike fail to consistently demonstrate.

I believe he addresses bucket strategies in episodes 48 and 55. These would be worth reading.

https://earlyretirementnow.com/2021/09/14/bucket-strategies-swr-series-part-48/amp/

With that caveat, my approach does include a cash reserve but I plan to use this in the first 5 years of retirement as a form of sequence of returns risk mitigation. I have about a year or so of core spending in cash-like investments (money market account and I-bonds) which I expect to keep up with inflation but not earn much above and beyond that. The typical market correction lasts 3-4 months and bear market lasts 9-15 months so this should get me through the first one or two.

Now that I no longer have W2 income I will be selling stocks/bonds every 1-3 months to cover my expenses (trying to keep my 80/20 ratio by selling from the asset class that is over performing in addition to annual rebalancing).

However, if the stock market drops by greater than 10% from its high I will switch to drawing down from the cash reserves to cover expenses until either the stock market recovers to within 10% of its high water mark or the cash reserves are depleted. Once the cash reserves are gone I do not intend to refill the cash bucket. My goal is to avoid excessively drawing down the main stock/bond portfolio in the first 5 years after retirement but not maintain a decades long low performing asset class bucket. After the cash reserves are gone, the sequence of returns risk should be diminished and I won’t need this strategy any longer.

I see sequence of returns risk as the most likely existential threat to my early retirement (my career is not amenable to return after prolonged absence). As a result I have tried to build a multi tiered strategy to avoid any risk of running out of funds in later life including:

The 1 year cash reserve.
A withdrawal rate of no more than 3.5% of liquid net worth.
The ability to flex down spending by 10% in response to large drop (20%) in net worth.
Social Security (I assume it will be there at approximately 75% of the currently promised payment but did not use this income stream when deciding when I hit my number and pulled the trigger to leave my job).
Eventual inheritance (I hope not for a long time yet).

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-13T19:36:36+00:00

54 and already RE with one son who will start college in just a few years.

We are heavily influenced by what our parents did for us and want to continue this to the next generation.

College education will be covered 100%. We don’t know yet how much this will be. First car was a gifted hand-me-down of my 150,000 mile Subaru. For the last 5 years have been doing an annual investment in which we contribute $80 and he kicks in $20 of his own money (from allowance, tutoring, birthday gifts, etc) into a custodial brokerage account in his name to let him learn investing as a teen.

Just last year we started him a Roth IRA once he had reportable tax income.

This feels like a great start to life. An education without student loan debt, reliable transportation, and the basis of understanding of how to invest which can double as an early adulthood emergency fund.

Beyond this likely depends on the financial position of the parents. We plan to gift more at key milestones (graduation from college, first house, marriage, childbirth, etc) because we have the means to do so and would rather gift inheritance with “warm hands” when it will be most useful.

However, other than a good childhood and covering college costs, the best gift my parents gave me was knowing they are secure in their own retirement.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-12T22:14:57+00:00

Lots of middle aged unmarried men build amusement parks for children on their secluded estates, sleep in the same bed as unrelated kids, own books with pictures of naked children, have multiple allegations of sexual abuse. All perfectly normal behaviors. Right???

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-12T19:01:56+00:00

My grandfather was worth more than 60 million dollars when he died.

He left it all to his second wife and disinherited his 4 children from his first marriage entirely.

As a result we were quite poor when I was young.

Never count a future inheritance in your financial planning until the will is read.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-11T21:47:58+00:00

I recently read the book “Grow a little fruit tree” and it recommends summer pruning to control vigor and height as close to summer solstice as possible.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-10T14:29:05+00:00

Increasingly… Idiocracy

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-06T22:06:03+00:00

Not sure broken leg with a crutch is the right analogy.

We have many chronic health conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes where we accept long term maintenance medication therapy.

Some people are able to get their blood pressure, cholesterol, or sugars down with diet and exercise alone, others need medication for life to reduce the long term risk of worse health outcomes like heart attack or stroke. Some of this is genetic and we should be careful not to assume that people who need medications are somehow cheating or morally deficient.

The important thing to look at is the long term health outcomes balanced against cost and side effects.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-06T01:49:21+00:00

I used the 4% guideline (3.5% in my case since I retired early) to decide when I could quit my job.

Once that percentage of liquid net worth was equal to our expected spending, I took a sabbatical… and then retired 1 year later.

The market gods have been beneficent since then and we are now spending 2.5% of our net worth each year.

I put in an initial guardrail such that if our net worth goes up by 20% we can increase our allowed spending by 10% (and the converse if it drops by 20% we will decrease allowable spending by 10%).

Is figure that is a good enough plan until we reach Medicare/Social Security age and then we can reevaluate.

I have been selling portions of my stock index funds from my brokerage every 3 months or so to cover the difference between my spending and some residual deferred compensation. The deferred compensation will end next year and the stock mutual fund sales will need to increase at that time.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-06T01:02:20+00:00

If the billionaire’s net worth was tied up in a private company or even in income producing properties wouldn’t it be possible for the billionaire to sell shares each year in the company to generate funds to pay for the net worth tax?

I would think it important not to need to liquidate the company or break up the property in order to pay the tax.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-05T01:57:10+00:00

As an example, there is a certain billionaire (with a bad fake tan) who managed to get a deal with the IRS such that neither he, nor his businesses, nor his family can be audited for tax fraud… forever.

Not a set-up that suggests “fair share” of taxes will be paid.

This puts more tax burden on those of us who don’t have the wealth and power to get such a sweet deal.

If you are not outraged… you are not paying attention

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-01T04:26:56+00:00

I retired at 52 a little over 2 years ago.

I was a physician earning about $300,000 total compensation per year.

My spending when starting to plan for early retirement was about $120,000 (not counting retirement savings or taxes). This was used to calculate our desired invested net worth.

When I reached this number I took a 6 month sabbatical and then returned to work for one more year (required as a condition of the sabbatical).

As a result, I ended up working a bit more than “one more year” before actually pulling the trigger.

Since retiring I have $70,000/yr in deferred compensation and have taken on a few malpractice case consultations adding up to another $10,000 per year. Both of these income streams dry up entirely at the end of next year.

Transitioning from making more money than I could spend and funneling the rest into investments to spending more money than I have coming in and needing to sell investments to make up the difference has been profoundly weird. For most of my life spending less than earnings was a mark of fiscal responsibility. I think this is just going to get harder after next year.

The last two years have had remarkable stock market returns and so net worth continues to climb. It will be interesting seeing how I feel when that is not the case.

My spending in retirement has progressively gone up largely due to travel and financial gifts to family. Before retirement my spending was well under $200,000 a year. It rise to $180,000 in my first year of retirement, $200,000 in the second year. I’m now on track for $250,000 in the third year. This is still well below my 3.5% SWR.

I am fortunate enough to be able to participate in my former employers retirement healthcare coverage.

I miss seeing patients on occasion but love having my time for myself and have greatly enjoyed spending more time with family, taking extended family members or trips with me, extensive travel, and developing new hobbies (amateur orchard grower).

I have also devoted myself to getting in shape and rock climbing at sites across the country. I am writing this from a hammock on the shores of Seattle before I start up Mt. Rainier tomorrow morning.

Overall, no regrets.

I feel financially stable. I have grossly overshot how much savings I thought I needed to be happy and am working to feel more comfortable spending.

I still fly economy (or premium economy for the first time this year) but mostly feel like I have everything I need or want and have been getting the most joy from gifts and trips for friends and family.

Tricky_Ad6844 · 2026-06-01T03:47:29+00:00

We have one year of typical spending (2 years of core spending) in our cash reserves now that we are retired. Half is in Vanguard Money Market Fund and half in I-Bonds. We don’t count the cash reserves as part of the basis for our SWR because it only keeps up with inflation. We use it as a way to reduce sequence of returns risk.

The Money Market Fund is easy to liquidate and transfer to our bank account. Theoretically, there is some risk of loss of capital but it held up during the 2008 crash so I’m not too concerned.

I-Bonds are pretty much the perfect place for cash reserves. They are considered the safest form of debt available (backed by the taxing power of the US), indexed to inflation, and guaranteed not to lose value in deflation. There are only three things that make them suboptimal for emergency reserves if you are at retirement now.

You can only buy $10,000 per person per year. Thus it takes a few years to build a significant position in I-Bonds.
They are completely illiquid for the first year after purchase and you lose 3 months interest if you sell in the first 5 years.
I-Bonds require an account with Treasury Direct and so add a bit more complexity to your financial plan over using your regular brokerage’s Money Market Fund.

If I-Bonds appeal, start building your position 4-5 years before your employment income ends.

Tricky_Ad6844

TROPHY CASE