After sharing how one man retired at age 41 with a household net worth of $4 million, I thought it would be good to share another story about early retirement from a completely different situation. This story comes from money trauma and how it is being conquered.

One of the complaints about the $4 million retirement post was that it was unrelatable. For some old-fashioned people, it was hard to imagine having two kids and a high-earning wife. While others thought only working for 14 years after law school was an unreasonably short amount of time to amass wealth.

In my opinion, working 60-hour weeks for 14 years burns you out sooner than working 40-hour weeks for 21 years. I’m also very pro-women who want kids and a well-paying career. More than half my classmates in college were women. And the managing director at my last job of 11 years was a woman who also had three children. She was a rockstar!

Whatever the reasons people aren’t able to relate to others, I love reading about how people achieve their personal monetary goals. There are always some useful nuggets of wisdom to absorb.

The following is a guest post by 38-year-old Stacy on how she overcame money trauma, left America, and retired to Taiwan with only about $600,000.

The following is a guest post from a long-time Financial Samurai reader named Joona. He shares his secret to retiring at age 41 with a $4 million net worth, a wife, and two kids ages three and six.

I really love hearing about early retirement case studies and how my writing has helped people reach their financial goals. After all, I’ve been writing about my own case study of achieving financial independence since 2009. It’s been a fun journey full of twists and turns.

Previously, I had written about how retiring early with $5 million is extremely difficult for families in expensive coastal cities. Therefore, reading this case study on retiring early with $1 million less is particularly insightful. Take it away Joona!

If you want to build above-average wealth, you need to be dynamic in thought and in action. The world is ever-changing, which is why you should stay flexible.

Those who remain rigid will suffer the consequences: less money, fewer friends, less meaning, and lower levels of happiness. If you don’t believe me, identify the unhappiest person you know. Chances are high they are set in their ways.

Being able to see the other side of an argument is a beautiful thing! It is absurd not to acknowledge another person’s point of view. Maybe if more of us did, there would be no more wars. That would be nice.

In finance, everything is yin yang. A negative is often counterbalanced by a positive. In this current environment with high inflation and rising interest rates, your dynamic safe withdrawal rate in retirement can now increase.

Let me explain why.

Decumulation is the process of spending down your net worth so you don’t die with too much money. If you die with lots of money left over, you’ve essentially wasted all the time and energy it took for you to accumulate that money.

At the same time, nobody wants to run out of money before they die. Given our health and energy tend to decline as we age, we may be less capable of earning money in the last quarter of our life. Therefore, it’s best to die with at least enough money to cover all our death-related expenses.

To live our best lives, we should ideally have the smoothest consumption curve possible. However, I have a feeling as personal finance enthusiasts, most of us will end up working for too long and saving too much.

Therefore, let’s discuss the best age for decumulation. This topic is important to me because I’ve decided to enter the decumulation phase this summer starting at age 45.

Wow! Even Tom Brady is going back to work after experiencing sequence of returns risk after retiring. Playing for 23 years in the NFL is a lot. At age 44, I hope he doesn’t injure himself. I’m on a retirement kick, so let’s keep the subject going.

Sequence of returns risk refers to the risk of receiving lower or negative returns early in a period when withdrawals are made from an investment portfolio. Withdrawals are made from an investment portfolio usually during times of financial duress or more traditionally, during retirement.

If you happen to retire before a bear market hits, you face sequence of returns risk. Therefore, it’s generally better to retire near the bottom of a bear market rather than near the top of a bull market.

If you retire near the bottom of a bear market, your finances have already been battle-tested. Chances are higher good times will return while you’re still unemployed.

One of the things I enjoy is debating with still employed people about the appropriate withdrawal rate in retirement. I like hearing about all their money plans for after they leave a steady paycheck behind. The debate is not really a debate as I mostly just listen so that I can have something to revisit in the future.

You see, I used to be one of those people who thought I knew what post-work life would be like. I had all these estimates about how much money I’d spend and what I’d do with all my free time. As I grew older and more experienced, however, my views about retirement have evolved.

Even though it’s been mostly a bull market since I left work in 2012, we did experience a correction in 2018, a 32% crash in March 2020, and now another correction in 2022. The NASDAQ has technically already entered a bear market. The S&P 500 may not too far behind.

It’s hard to know what you don’t know. This is why being open to the unexpected is wise. Writing about different viewpoints is insightful. However, if you are a betting man, you should seek to make bets with people who don’t have as much information or are overconfident about the information they have. Over time, you will make a lot of money.

Let me share with you a conversation I had with a recently retired lawyer who used to disagree with my proper safe withdrawal rate in retirement. Let’s call him Jack.

My main thesis is the 4% Rule is dead. Further, whatever withdrawal rate you think you’ll use once you retire won’t happen. Instead, you’ll withdraw at a much lower rate in the initial years because you’re so accustomed to saving and investing.

So you’ve survived the pandemic. Congrats! Now there’s potentially World War III to deal with. Damn it. If World War III does happen, we should learn how to prepare now.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does have the possibility of starting the next World War. Imagine. Belarus joins Russia in the war. NATO fights back. The West levies massive sanctions against Russia. China backs up Russia. China invades Taiwan. Then the U.S. finally steps up.

If the U.S. gets heavily involved, then our citizens become at risk. Once a nuclear bomb hits America, billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg can retreat to over 700+ acres of now private Kauai land. He’s probably in Hawaii already.

Even Mark’s buddy, Facebook ex-board member and early investor, Peter Thiel has a private jet gassed up and waiting to fly his family and friends to the most expensive place in the world, New Zealand, if World War III ensues.

But what about the rest of us poor saps who can’t afford to buy out indigenous people or cough up $20,000 an hour for a 12-hour Gulfstream 650 flight across the world? Are we commoners screwed? Heck no!

We must stand our ground and fight for our freedom as the ungodly rich flee our great nation! If we survive, we can then rebuild our own empires. In the process, we can confiscate the properties of those who fled and permanently ban them from returning home.

Your financial independence number is the amount of money you think you need in order to be free. Unfortunately, if nothing changes in your life after reaching your financial independence number, then the number simply is not real.

In this low interest rate environment, some people continue to believe once they achieve a liquid net worth equal to 25 times their annual expenses, they’re financially independent. Yet, once they get there, they continue to work at a job they dislike for years.

Why? Fear. They fear not having enough money to safely retire early or do something else. They fear a bear market will wipe away 20%+ of their net worth. As a result, they continue to work in order to accumulate even more money.

So much about money is mental. Since leaving my day job in 2012, I have seen countless examples of the one more year syndrome play out. If you actually want to change your life, please put the 4% rule to rest.

If you’re thinking about retiring, it’s better to retire in a bear market than in a bull market. I’ve been “retired” since 2012 and I want to explain why this is so. I put retired in quotes because these posts don’t write themselves. I also did some fintech consulting work for several years since I left my day job in finance.

Living a comfortable retirement life is all about managing expectations. You generally don’t need as much as you think to be happy because the freedom you gain more than makes up for lost income.

However, if you retire at the top of a bull market, and don’t change your risk profile, you might get screwed. The day you retire will be about as good as it gets.

If you retire at the bottom of a bear market, even if you change your risk profile to be conservative, your financial days will likely only get better. A recovery makes retirement living so much easier.

No matter how good we get at forecasting the future, we tend to extrapolate too positively for too long when times are good. While those who retire in a bear market will likely forecast lower returns than reality.