What if your stash could last you 30 years without investing it at all? Would you still gamble it in stocks and bonds?
Interesting usage of the verb 'gamble' considering 30 years periods of not investing vs. stocks/bonds. Maybe maybe not, depends on one's goals for retirement but that seems like an absurd scenario.
Assuming a 2% inflation rate, you would need ~41x your annual expenses if you never invested any of it (and this is if you live
exactly 30 years and would run down to $0 on the day you die). I'd be furious with myself for having worked that hard and far longer than I needed to get to a traditional* SWR that small.
*-without investing, the SWR is still 4% technically but a traditional SWR with more typical investing espoused here would be less than 2.5%. And keep in mind that the non-investing number is going down to zero while the investing number is supposed to stay near the initial level!
As many others have mentioned, it is fine to implement some measures that reduce volatility (especially during those first several years of retirement) but if you take yourself completely out of the stock market for a long period of time, you're only making it harder on yourself.
It just strikes me as a lot more reasonable work a lot less, invest to around 25x spending, keep a solid level of exposure in the stock market while retiring, monitor how things go a bit closely during the first several years of retirement adjusting as needed, and then being able to live for ANY amount of time with a small risk (that you can see coming!) that you'd ever run out of money. Then when you die, have the pile of money (that is likely BIGGER than when you retired) and give it to your family or your favorite charity or scholarships, etc.
However, we're all different. If this is where you find yourself (worked longer than you realized you had to or came into a windfall) or you had a career that you continued after FI simply because you loved it or where you choose to go after not being ignorant of personal finance, that's your choice. In the end, it's all about being happy. Money is just a tool and a rather ineffective one at times at that.