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Comment by deanmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I am currently at $3M liquid and plan to pull the plug at $5M, which hopefully won’t be in too long because I have private equity in a pre IPO unicorn…

My biggest fear is running out of funds, so I will maintain an irrationally low withdrawal rate of 1-1.5% during the first ~5 years of retirement, and up my spending after that, in the statistically likely event of those 5 years of frugality eliminating the sequence of return risk. I am 34.

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Thanks for the good data, and congrats on your own success. We can’t really get our burn rate below 2%, but it’s also not much higher than 2%. Interesting point to be more conservative in early years, but I don’t think we have that much control on our dial. We live a fairly modest lifestyle, probably own 1/4 of the house we could for example, single POS car is paid off, that sort of thing, but no weird unsustainable FIRE life hacks. So the good news we don’t have to scale our lifestyle down, because we never overdid it, bad news is, we can’t scale our lifestyle down any further realistically unless it means eating at a restaurant zero times a month instead of once or twice a month.

If you don't mind sharing, how you was able to mass $3M liquid at 34? Any way congrats and keep it up :)

Nothing too crazy:

- Very aggressive frugality: living in Silicon Valley on $30-40k a year and saving about $1M over a decade of work, with an average salary of $250k

- Some stock options I had from a previous employer went liquid and netted me about $1M

- Index funds investing did the rest. Never sold any position

Thanks mate for sharing. Nothing too crazy is wise in long term. Keep it up :)

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