My wife and I are both about 45 years old, and we hope to be financially independent in about five years around the time we’re 50. We plan to achieve this by using a Roth IRA conversion ladder to fund our living expenses before we’re 59.5. Since we’ll need to wait five years after the first conversion before we can withdraw from the Roth IRAs, we’re also saving up an “early retirement fund” to cover our living expenses during those five years. It appears that by the end of this year, we will have enough saved in our various retirement accounts (403b’s, traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, HSA) to fund our living expenses beyond age 55, but we’ve only saved a small portion of our “early retirement fund” in a taxable brokerage account to get us from age 50 to 55. So, we’re wondering whether we should stop contributing to our retirement accounts at the end of this year so we can focus entirely on funding our “early retirement fund.” By doing this, we would miss out on the tax advantages of contributing to our tax-deferred retirement accounts, but we assume this is a better option than paying penalties for withdrawing from our retirement accounts before the age of 59.5. (Our employers will continue contributing to our retirement plans regardless of whether we stop contributing, so we wouldn’t lose employer matches by doing this.) What do you advise? Thanks!