For those that are POST-FIRE, I was wondering if your net worth has grown since you starting drawing from it?
Only approaching one year in, but yes, it has.
Also, how what does it look like when you first pull the trigger? Do you keep a years worth of expense $$ in the bank and replenish your bank account monthly with what you draw from investments?
We have cash flow from rentals, but for a more traditional WR, there are lots of withdrawal strategies. Some favor several years in cash, some favor replenishing monthly, some favor a once/yr. withdrawal, etc. Lots of blog posts and literature on this.
How common, do you think it is for your net worth to continue to grow after retiring early?
Very, very common.
The longer your ER, and more aggressive your investment strategy (i.e. more equities), the more likely it is.
For example, using cFIREsim default numbers (40k spend, 1MM portfolio for a 4% SWR, 75/25 allocation, 30 year retirement--95.69% success rate), out of 116 total 30-year periods, after 30 years:
In nominal dollars, 19 of them ended with less than the 1,000,000 you started with. 97 ended with more.
In real (inflation adjusted dollars), 41 ended with less, 75 ended with more.
So if you're just looking at straight dollar amounts (which most of us tend to do, we don't naturally, intuitively discount for inflation), about 84% of the time your portfolio would have risen (and, in real dollars, 65% of the time it would have risen).
That's with you spending down on it year after year, not earning another dollar, not adjusting your withdrawals down in bad years (down markets) or as you get older and spend less.
The majority of the time, portfolios go up if you're using a 4% WR and have a decent (> 33%) amount in equities, with us doing nothing (and we tend to do
something if things start going wrong).
If my net worth wasn't growing (not every year, but over multi-year periods), I'd look at that as a caution sign to take a closer look.