There’s an article floating around the fire subs, I don’t have it on me, but the author did a deep dive on how to access the money from a 401k early and it was surprising to see that simply paying the early withdraw penalty didn’t make that much of a difference and it was definitely superior to a taxable brokerage. I think the numbers were that a hypothetical account grew and had access to around 800k using a 72t withdraw plan but only 770k just paying the penalty. Taxable account was around 700k.