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Early retirement

Early retirement can be at any age, but is generally before the age (or tenure) needed for eligibility for support and funds from government or employer-provided sources. Thus, early-retirees rely on their own savings and investments to be initially self-supporting, until they start receiving such external support. Early retirement is also a euphemistic term for accepting termination of employment before retirement age as part of the employer's labor force rationalization. In this case, a monetary inducement may be involved.

Savings needed for early retirement

While conventional wisdom has it that one can retire and take 7% or more out of a portfolio year after year, this would not have worked very often in the past. When making periodic inflation-adjusted withdrawals from retirement savings, can make meaningless many assumptions that are based on long term average investment returns.

The chart at the right shows the year-to-year portfolio balances after taking $35,000 (and adjusting for inflation) from a $750,000 portfolio every year for 30 years, starting in 1973 (red line), 1974 (blue line), or 1975 (green line). While the overall market conditions and inflation affected all three about the same (since all three experienced the exact same conditions between 1975 and 2003), the chance of making the funds last for 30 years depended heavily on what happened to the stock market in the first few years.

Those contemplating early retirement will want to know if they have enough to survive possible bear markets such as the one that sent the 1973 retiree back to work after 20 years.

The history of the US stock market shows that one would need to live on about 4% of the initial portfolio per year to ensure that the portfolio is not depleted before the end of the retirement. This allows for increasing the withdrawals with inflation to maintain a consistent spending ability throughout the retirement, and to continue making withdrawals even in dramatic and prolonged bear markets. (The 4% figure does not assume any pension or change in spending levels throughout the retirement.)

When retiring prior to age 59½, there is a 10% IRS penalty on withdrawals from a retirement plan such as a 401(k) plan or a Traditional IRA. Exceptions apply under certain circumstances. At age 59 and six months, the penalty-free status is achieved and the 10% IRS penalty no longer applies.

To avoid the 10% penalty prior to age 59½ a person should consult a lawyer about the use of IRS rule 72 T. This rule must be applied for with the IRS. It allows the distribution of a IRA account prior to age 59½ in equal amounts of a period of either 5 years or until the age of 59½ which ever is the longest time period without a 10% penalty. Taxes still must be paid on the distributions.

Calculations using actual numbers

Although the 4% initial portfolio withdrawal rate described above can be used as a rough gauge, it is often desirable to use a retirement planning tool that accepts detailed input and can render a result that has more precision. Some of these tools model only the retirement phase of the plan while others can model both the savings or accumulation phase as well as the retirement phase of the plan.

The effects of making inflation-adjusted withdrawals from a given starting portfolio can be modeled with a downloadable spreadsheet that uses historical stock market data to estimate likely portfolio returns. Another approach is to employ a retirement calculator that also uses historical stock market modeling, but adds provisions for incorporating pensions, other retirement income, and changes in spending that may occur during the course of the retirement.

Effects of job satisfaction on retirement age

Section 1

Effects of marital satisfaction on retirement age

Section 2

Recent research on influences on early retirement

Section 3