And, of course, I'm starting a blog.
LOL. Thats hilarious.
Also, remember that a 3% SWR on a diversified portfolio has never failed, for any length of time for any economic conditions. So you don't need to earn as much as you will spend in retirement, you only need to earn enough to reduce your withdrawals down (from presumably something near 4%) to 3%. For most people here, you can do that with a part time minimum wage job.
This is an extremely important point to this conversation... Of the failures, the biggest factor is early losses in the market. If you take the '73 crash from a 45% correction to a 33.75% correction then we are all looking at a 5% safe withdraw rate. Its that big of a difference.
On $40,000 a year with a 1MM stash, all you need is a 10,000$ a year
rate of payment gig to make it very survivable. You don't even need to work for a full year (since many downturns are several months long or so). Reducing the withdraws from 4% to 3% on 40k a year requires that 10k a year part time gig
only for the duration of the correction. Given that we don't market time, you could generally just wait until the portfolio hit the number you fire'd at and (historically speaking) it should be fine.
10k a year in that scenario is $192 a week. At an abysmal 8$/hr, thats still only 24 hours. Or 12 hours a week if you could find 16$/hr.
It does seem that many are either "happy-go-lucky just get another job" -or- "you can never work again!!!" when, in reality, it would take very little to make the failure a success.
(Another side note: basically all failures initiate at the beginning of FIRE, as in the first 2 years... Not 30 years down the road. Grandpas not going to flip burgers, but 45 year old retired early Mr. Awesomesauce might have to find a 10$/hr side gig for 20 hours a week for a few months.)
(And Yet Another side note: Recessions end. If a FIRE'ee couldn't get a job due to such a recession, there is no reason they can't do any of the aforementioned jobs a few years later when the economy recovers. Yes they lose some to compounding and pulling out equities for living expenses at the worst time, but they also have the financial flexibility to survive and work in better years, albeit just slightly longer...)