Why shy away from retiring early when you needn’t? An early retirement is more possible than you think!!

For me an early retirement simply means that I no longer have to work for money and I have created enough of it to work itself for me.

I am 46 and hung my boots last week. Since then I wait in bated breath, for all I know I may have stirred a storm in my cup of tea. Nothing dreadful has happened so far and if I am any good in reading patterns, nothing ever will.

Here’s why,

At 26 I was a lead manager in an IT major. The desk that I graced smelled of bad upholstery. It at times reeked of an incapacitated future, especially when I had snappy conversations with a miffed senior or peeved track lead. Mulling in quieter moments I used to wonder what will happen 15/20 years hence when the cloud become so dense that no more data would stick to it, when the environments like Reddit   run out of inspiring ideas, when skills  will feel betrayed  and a dismayed outlook  will leave hundreds in a lurch. The rut will not take long to turn into a cesspool. For me the future felt weak and uncertain.

I now realize that our ancestors never taught us everything about future. Choices have an uncanny way of echoing narratives. We are always okay with choices what we love to talk about fundamentally but do not understand them at all.

It’s complicated but I felt nowhere anymore clearer in my choices than I did at that moment.

I decided to let go of things.

It was dreadful and I feared if I was leaving little room for a stupid decision. But then decision is where everything starts from. It’s meant to cut off all options and decide on one path. Good or terrible… decisions are the firepower that make you unstoppable.

Leaving a cushy job meant changing life forever. Everything shades dark for a while. I may easily regret it later. An unknown destiny may conspire to draw me to a choice I knew nothing about or what lay beyond. Whatever, predicting consequences makes you no less a fool. Even mystically I couldn’t have foreseen the future.

For once I felt being mobbed with a million $ decision. Did I ever get to choose wisely? All I knew that time was worth more than the money and with less time I could be making poor decisions with worse consequences.

However, I am not allergic to facing the truth.

I decided to hustle things and make the change worthwhile. Not every time charging your Smartphone wirelessly could mean a disaster is waiting to happen.

What it’s like to stray out of the way and succeed

Retiring early is not end of everything. I had drawn plans to focus on bigger things, larger projects. For once I felt for no- nonsense pep talk. I wanted to make it big and beyond. No longer a remotely paged skit to be rehearsed and updated every weekend night. No Monday morning briefs, mindless meetings, meaningless briefs. For once, I craved to shut being gaslit. Crappy, but quick and simple enough reason..

It’s ok not to be busy always and I do not underrate the rest either.

I am not a minimalist but I know how to ease into my present.

So, the first thing that crossed my mind, how much I can spend each year without running out of money if I retire early.

I surfed through customized retirement plans, advises and toyed with online calculators. There were several underlying assumptions that I decided to keep in mind, if I were going to go ahead and retire early

In most cases, the beginning happens to be your worst nightmare. People usually tend to withdraw at a higher rate and drain their resources much more rapidly. Re-balancing the corpus annually unmistakably ends in trimming of expenses. Annual spending increases every year keeping pace with the rate of inflation, howsoever hard we bite our tongue each time. These adjustments just happen regardless of  inflation even if it exceeds 10%. You just could not make adjustments to the annual distributions on your invested assets and rate yourself ‘excellent’ each time, for these are largely market driven. You are hapless and you could do no more.

The labyrinthine equations and combinations had then left me scarier. I knew that the other side of planning and investing for early retirement has an ugly face, the one which is replete with loose ends.

What those twenty years changed for me

I had hung my boots then and I don’t regret it now. A free lance developer, a consultant, an avid reader, happy family, increasing circle of influence … if this is what my choice has landed me with, I think I had figured it out right that one time. I am glad that I didn’t wait for it to happen.

I am now all the wiser about building wealth and achieving financial freedom. Research and data analyses with refined results that I have gone through over the time, have surprising takeaways. I could now evaluate the longevity of my assets using assumptions other than those I was reluctant to accept in the first place. 

At the beginning I had reckoned that we could live comfortably on about 2% of our nest egg, yet I was worried stiff that I might somehow someday run out of money. It was natural but It felt like I was on a life boat in the middle of ocean rationing what little food I had left.

I had gone from earning and saving money to hiving off it!!

Retirement is scary even for the most passionate persons who gut their entire lives working ten-to-five and then are left with a miserly retirement purse to cling on to for the remainder of their lives. And to retire so early!!… I might have bitten the bullet.

I followed the 4% rule and discovered that half the battle was won

Most of us have heard about ‘The 4% rule of retirement spending”; the one that says that you can spend 4% of your nest egg in the first year of retirement. Thereafter you can adjust your annual spending by the rate of inflation. If you follow it, you shouldn’t run out of money during a traditional 25-30-year retirement. Having spent years studying retirement investment and spending, I know that relying on market is a recipe for retirement disaster.

But a combination of bucket strategy and 4% rule saved the day for me and helped me to brace for bad returns.

Here’s how,

What lies in a bucket is what will help you tide over the worst

This strategy works best when you divide your savings (it’s early to call your retirement money) between short term spending needs and long term investment needs. Its simple; just call it two buckets incarnated- Cash and Investments.

And let me remind you one thing; when investing for long term cash needs, you face a marathon and not a sprint, so don’t dare to rush.

Your cash bucket is meant to hold three to five years worth of living expenses in cash (savings, term deposits, short-term bonds, mutual funds). Remember to deduct any other type of retirement income (eg. annuity plans, money backs, social security support etc.) when you decide on the amount that you are going to put in this bucket.

For example you need a modest Rs. 8.50 lac a year before taxes and inflow from other retirement income is Rs.2.50 lac then your cash bucket for a five year horizon should hold Rs. 30.00 lac ((8.50-2.50)x 5 yrs). If you have worked for say, twenty years in a middle management job, it will not be difficult to save Rs. 70.00 lac  to Rs. 75.00 lac within this time horizon. This assumption is based on monthly earnings pegged at Rs. 75k and savings at a religious 35% of net. Interest accumulation, annual increments, DA raise, bonuses etc. are enough to keep inflation or contingency hiccups at bay.

Your Investment bucket could sail you through rough weather

Investment bucket will hold the remainder of your ‘other’ monies in  diversified  low-cost index funds. The question, however, is exactly what asset size to hold in this bucket. Is it 100% in stocks? A 50/50 in stocks/ mutual funds and bonds? Or may be something else?

Just how much stake to put into this bucket? To give you an example; adjust the annual inflation rate @4% with what you will require from sixth yr onward, anything between Rs. 45.00 lac to Rs. 50.00 lac @12% rate of return shall get you what you earn today for the next 25 yrs. Your corpus of Rs. 45.00 lac would have earned you a whopping Rs. 91.10 lac in all these years and another Rs.28.73 lac @10% for the first five years of investment.

Few of you would argue that with diminishing buying value over the years, it may not suffice to be enough. These are no more than negative voices in your head and are irrelevant. Don’t let them win. They do not serve you, so don’t give them any undeserved attention or energy.  Remember every day statistics have a strange way of revealing secrets. None of our forefathers ever lived in penury, nor shall we. What  more, at 46  your drive to learn and earn is still young.

While you make these decisions, just be watchful of your overall asset allocation. So long as you follow the 4% rule, you will survive even a Bear economy. This IWR (Initial Withdrawal rate)  is considered “safe” because it works best when things turn worst.

Add guardrails and breathe easy

As popular as the 4% rule is, it’s hard to imagine that you would follow it through a 30-year retirement. For one thing, who spends the exact same amount of money, on an inflation-adjusted basis, each and every year for three decades? More importantly, it is natural for you to cut back on your spending once bearish sentiments sink in.

This is where you need to put up guardrails.

It works simple. When the bears are raging, spend a little less than the 4% rule would permit. When bulls lock their horns, its time to spend a little more.

This ‘simple’ approach could prompt to you to ask .What do we mean by a ‘little less’ or a ‘little more’. Just how much the economy should swing up or down before these guardrails take effect. There is no end to complex spending rules but one popular and easy one says that you start your retirement with a 5% IWR adjusted annually by inflation. To stay protected from over or under spending, do not allow the annual withdrawals to go below 4% or above 6%. One potential downside to this rule however is that, every year distribution is adjusted for inflation. This adjustment occurs regardless which way the economy swings. Here you could do well to;

–Cap the inflation adjustments to no more than 6% and skip them when your asset value has slipped.

–Only 70% of your last year’s distribution determines what you will have in your purse this year. So make good the difference. Multiply 30% of your last year distribution with your portfolio’s year-end balance and then take 5% of that amount. Settling with a lesser IWR has a tendency of better leverage.

It’s Your Call

After retiring early, I’ve spent considerable time studying umpteen articles on spending strategies and I am clear on one thing; even the best planned strategies are somehow checkmated. So, it’s your call to make success happen to yourself. This world doesn’t owe you one damn thing and it won’t deliver anything without a price.

Dare take a shot and who knows success may reshape your early retired life for good!!