For those who just retired, how are you feeling about it? @sol?
Meh, the only thing I worry about is that I'm totally not worried at all, but maybe I
should be? Like I'm not even exactly sure how much my accounts have dropped, which is an absolutely shocking thing for someone like me to say given that I spent the last ten years of my life obsessively tracking my account balances on a day by day basis.
Part of my reason for not worrying is that after I picked a retirement date in about April or May, the market bumped like 10% while I was still working and by the time I officially did my last day in August I felt like I had a solid 10%+ buffer, such that even an immediate correction would still put me at a number I was comfortable with. Part of it is that I'm not 100% stocks, so when the market drops 10% my assets drop by something less than that. Part of is that I have several other little income streams (rentals, etc), and a huge buffer of accessible assets I could tap if necessary, but so far I have needed neither. If things got super dire, I could sell a rental and immediately pocket over 100k after taxes and fees, and that sort of cash buffer would support my family for more than long enough for me to find another way to make more money, if it came to that. It hasn't! I've been actively turning away hints that I might dip my toe back into the workforce. Screw that noise, man, working is for suckers.
But honestly I think the biggest reason I am not at all stressed about the current market declines is that retirement has handed me a completely new mindset about money. Now that I've FIREd, it's like the money side of things is just solved, and I don't worry about it anymore. I don't stress about making purchases, I don't stress about market gyrations, I just don't generally consider the financial side of most decisions. I mean I'm not blowing huge amounts of money on stupid shit, but after decades of frugal living I've developed a pretty instinctive understanding of what my expenses are and as long as I'm still living the same kind of life I've always lived, then I have confidence it's all going to work out.
Okay, you convinced me to go check the markets and put dollar amounts on my hypothetical losses. It looks like the market is back to where it was in July? Was everyone freaking the fuck out back in July? Does the extra four months without a positive gain since then somehow justify a new freak out now that wasn't justified then? Suddenly all of this talk about "major losses" seems kind of silly to me. No matter how big your paper losses look, if you're right back where you were four months ago then you really haven't lost much of consequences. Some years you'll be negative for an entire year, and that happens all the fucking time! Like every four years, on average in the historic record, on our way to that ~9% long term CAGR.
I am back to not being worried at all. Financial freedom is great. The markets go up, the markets go down, I am still rich either way.