I'm curious about how people plan to time withdraws during FIRE, and couldn't find a thread about it. (Please direct me there if it already exists. I have terrible luck with this forum's search function.)
We are still a ways from RE, and we'll almost certainly have DH's pension (inflation-adjusted) which will cover a lot of our expenses (and will probably be able to cover everything if we needed to cut back and make that happen.) For now, we are toying with keeping 9 months of projected expenses in cash, drawing down to top that off every quarter. The idea is that we will have three quarters we can use to delay in a down market.
So if our projected annually expenses are $60k, we'll start with $45k in the bank for a Jan 1 retirement. Assuming the market looks decent (and assuming we've spent on pace to be at an exactly $60k/yr pace), we'll draw down $15k an April 1, and again July and Oct 1. and so on. However, if the market is shit on July 1, we can keep living off the $30k we have remaining from the April 1 balance of $45k (likely cutting expenses at least slightly, but let's ignore that for simplicity), and we can keep putting off withdraws until Jan 1 when we'd be more or less out of money.
We've semi-settled on that plan because it's fairly simple (withdraw 3 months expenses at a time, with a 6-9 mo. cushion), but allows a decent amount of flexibility for avoiding withdraws in down markets, while also allows us to keep most of our dollar soldiers at work in the market. (As of now, I've not really defined what I consider enough of a down market to warrant putting off the withdraw.)
But I'm super open to other ideas or critiques of this plan. I'm only just starting to consider this part of the FIRE reality, which is amazing but also a bit overwhelming. Shifting the focus from "earn and save" to now looking at the After is wonderful, but's a whole new set of issues and decisions.