(I'm cutting back on blog posts for the next few months of travel, but I wanted to put out the word about one of the best FIRE books I've seen in years.)
Darrow Kirkpatrick just published his second book, named after his blog.
I don't know whether he posts on MMM, but he's Mustachian. I met him at FinCon12 and we've swapped e-mails over the months since then. He's a software developer whose company was progressively acquired by bigger firms. He's extremely analytical and thorough, and he digs very deeply into the unknown and the unquantifiable. He's been financially independent for a few years, and his spouse wrapped up her teaching career a year or two later.
They've developed their own definition of badassity. They're both rock climbers, hardcore back-country hikers & tent campers, and mountain bikers. They're frugal about the basics and spend thoughtfully on their passions. When their son launched from the nest they sold their Tennessee home and traveled America for months in a minivan, eventually finding their new home near Santa Fe. They're going to keep renting for a few more years and they may return to the RV lifestyle.
Darrow excels at pointing out the uncertainties and improbabilities of financial independence. He is not afflicted with "Just One More Year" Syndrome but he keenly understands asset allocation and the sequence-of-returns risk of the first few years of FIRE. He also describes the emotions of having to sell some stocks & bonds every year (even during down markets) and the flaws of the 4% SWR. If you worry about surviving years of retirement on today's assets, Darrow completely understands the emotion-- but he also deals with it constructively while living life on their terms.
His book reassures about the surprises surrounding your retirement planning. He covers each of the usual steps in planning financial independence, but he also explains why some aspects are so hard to estimate. He offers several different ways to handle health insurance, taxes, and inflation while still sleeping comfortably at night. He reviews the best retirement calculators and suggests methods to set up your retirement income. (His blog posts on retirement calculators are the best I've ever read, and his book has an entire section on them.) Finally, he explains how to handle decades of retirement uncertainty by keeping your spending at about 3%-5% instead of blindly following a set of rules about safe withdrawal rates. The end of each chapter lists the action steps for your own planning... while you're deciding when to set your last day at work.
Best of all, he points out that FIRE may still have some unpleasant surprises. He reviews his personal experiences to show how he worked through the fears and probabilities of every step.
By the end of the book you know that the water's fine, and it's safe to jump in. You might not know whether it's the right temperature or how deep it is, but you won't land head-first on a rock.
