You are actually in a better situation than most if you can ER without needing any pre-tax retirement accounts. It distills down to a complicated discounting for taxes on those (traditional IRA, 401k accounts) vs. a nominal taxed income (e.g. an income like MMM's 'passive income' which seems to be pretty respectable (according to the WSJ article, he had 4 MM unique visitors, and is getting exponentially more by becoming yet more popular via that article... so that's at least 40k 'passive income', conservatively). I do not count on a taxed income going forward from retirement, so all I care about is not getting screwed on taxes, and there is a balance between the #1 best investment for employees (the deferred tax and sometimes employer matched 401k) and taxable accounts (which do not change much between pre and post retirement). Hope this was helpful.