Jennifer, I had the same thoughts today after reading some Sussman stuff and other articles. For context, I'm brand new (< 1 month) to FIRE, investing, and all of this. I blew through Simple Path to Wealth, most MMM posts, Random Walk Down Wall Street, Stock Series, MadFientist, etc. in the past weeks.
We are a double-income (w/2 kiddos) household. I've already:
1) Reduced our household spend by 3-5k this month by taking a good hard fucking look at what we're spending. Most of it was waste.
2) Opened and seeded a Vanguard account with 100% in VTSMX (as of today,
will be VTSAX) with a $3k investment
3) Set up my current savings deposit (which is the excess amount from my paycheck) to go to Vanguard and set up bi-weekly auto investments for a portion of what I expect my paycheck to deposit
4) Set up a payment plan to avalanche our student loans (paying off mid-2019)
I bring this up because I've shared my plans with a friend whose been investing for a long time. He sent me a bunch of Sussman articles including the recent one (The Top Is Here, etc.) and said in 2017 he pulled most of his allocation out of stocks and now only has cash and some emerging market / commodities / other non-stock things. He did this because he subscribes to Sussman's internal valuation metric and said "I expect the market to lose 60% of its value in the next crash."
I said, sounds good and his insight is maybe correct, but I'm going all in* now anyway because after reading all this material, soaking it up, lurking the forums, it is pretty clear to me that Sussman and every other "pro" sometimes has good insights but ultimately, the time-tested method of just sitting back, relaxing, and having some whiskey during a massive drop while leaving your investments on auto-pilot will be what works for my time horizon to FI (currently, 10-15 years).
I am not a senior stache and I haven't seen my net worth drop down 60% but I think if you believe in staying steady, then you have to stay steady. This is, I think, what JL Collins talks about when he says that fear runs high and your will will be tested. It's being tested by a lot of people now.
By the way, my friend and I debated it a bit, and we have a friendly bet going to see where each of us nets out after 10 years. If what he (and Sussman and others) thinks will happen with a crash, in 10 years I should only have a <1% positive return and he should net out more. Personally, it doesn't matter to me, because I won't be selling in 10 years or even probably at 15 years until I reach my FI goals. In Nov 2028, he may well beat me but I don't think it matters in the longer term.
Good luck!
* - By "all in" right now, I mean partially kinda in. Since I'm just starting out, I'll do auto investments of a fixed amount but spend the rest getting rid of my student loans a little earlier. I figure, if there's a crash while I'm paying down debt, then my auto-investment will buy up extra shares. When my loans are gone, all that extra will just turn into higher fixed investments. Like others have said, because my (and your) initial stash is so tiny, a huge market drop won't materially affect us much.PS. I didn't know who Sussman was until today. When I read the article my friend sent, my first reaction was, "Damn this guy sounds like the chartists (technical analysts) Malkiel warns about." I'm pretty sure that's true but maybe vets would know better.