I agree with everything you said, but as an intellectual exercise, care to tackle the OP's question?
-W
OK. I'll put up something we can poke a stick at.
Baseline: a $1 million 'stach invested in your standard FIRE AA and you take the 4% WR, thus $40k in year 1
Taking that $1 million in cash and investing in real estate, wow, I'm pretty sure you can exceed $40k (just ask ARS). Let's see.
So I take my million and get a property portfolio. Lets assume 5 properties at 200k each, rented out at 1% 'rule' so $2000/mnth each
Assuming 50% 'rule' for vacancies, taxes maintenance and prop management fees
Monthly cashflow
In- $10,000
out- $5000 (prop taxes, repairs, insurance, vacancies, fees etc)
net $5000 = $60,000/yr*
*this will be tax free cos' you can deduct the expenses and depreciation (just depreciation probably over 25k/yr).
so from our $1 million we're pulling a tax free 6% WR. So, by ratio, you'd need 33% less 'stach to generate that 40k WR. Real estate wins (and enables much earlier time to FIRE - how much do value should we assign to that extra work free % of your life?)!!!
And if you are smart, pick the right areas, and gain some benefit from scale, you could probably do (a) better than the 1% rule, (b) reduce expenses to less than 50% and (c) cover quite a bit of your normal expenses (like car, phone, office) from your pre-tax rental expenses. Leverage could probably boost cash on cash returns even further.