Thanks to everyone for sharing your anecdotes.
It seems to me that a large percentage of early retirees have pensions, and quite often health care coverage too. Also, for many, early retirement means in the early 60s or at best late 50s. It means fewer scary years to bridge the gap until SS and Medicare kick in.
I really think very few can (or dare to) retire in the early 50s, or late 40s. And by retiring, I mean one who needs no earned income, and that includes income from a spouse. I know several women, including my sister-in-law, who left the work force early, but their husbands still work. That does not count!
I prefer to think of it as "working our assets off until luck happened".
More like "sh!t" happened in our case!
If it weren't for my start-up ventures going belly up, and for my wife's megacorp environment getting too toxic for her, we would still be working. Knowing nobody else who retired early, it just did not seem right to us. Because of our work environments, people that we knew were mostly megacorp workers. As they all earn salaries comparable to us, surely they should be able to save as much as we have, and should be able to ER too. But they don't. Of course many are caught up on the hedonic threadmill, and do not have much of a portfolio to even dream of financial independence.
In our case, it was just too scary to think of a life without an umbilical cord to a megacorp. How can one survive without a fixed, known amount deposited to one's account every two weeks? How can one face the uncertainty of health care cost without the employer's plan? It surely did not seem possible to us.
I really admire those who threw in the towel and walked away cold-turkey, because we got to where we are gradually. First, as I left my secure megacorp environment and entered the "dog-eat-dog" small business world, my income fluctuated so much, and we had to rely on my wife's salary alone for a while. And then, as I was debating whether to go back to work full-time as my poor wife was crying her eyes out over the torment at her work place, I had an epiphany.
Hey, there are a lot of people out there who are small business owners. There are small shop owners, farmers, individual contractors, and free-lancers who have no steady income stream like us megacorp and gummint desk jockeys. The uncertainty that we were about to face, these people have to live with their entire life. And we now have a reasonable 7-figure portfolio, that most of the people out there would never dream of. Why were we so afraid?
Of course, one of the reasons we were afraid was that our lifestyle, frugal as it was, was still higher than that of those intrepid souls that could manage outside of the umbrella of a big brother. I wanted to be sure that it would work, and our situation allowed us to ease into it. Most of my friends who were involved in the start-up ventures have gone back to the megacorp world, clocking 8 hours a day, counting their time until the day they are given a little party at work, then walk out to their car one last time carrying a box of personal belongings and some office mementos.
So, I still think we are an anomaly. Perhaps not as rare as I thought until I came to this forum, but we are still a small minority. And as I did not quit cold-turkey like some others, I am not all that audacious after all.
