Like many in this thread, I used to run FireCalc fairly often before I retired (in mid-2018). Since then, occasionally but not much.
My comments about a few others' observations:
... checking my investment account way too much. It is starting to annoy me that I keep doing it.
This may be a bigger problem. Statistically, people who check their accounts often have been shown to get poorer results. The behavioral finance people explain it in terms of our evolution-driven risk aversion. The account is always jittering up and down and seeing all the downs rings the mental alarm bells, which in turn incline the investor towards excessive trading aka market timing.
There was a poster her a few weeks ago who reported a Fido study of their mutual fund investors. The ones with the best returns were the dead ones. (
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/964493/from-the-archives-in-praise-of-the-dead-investors) I have also been told that if an investor checks his Schwab robo account too much, the robot sends him an email suggesting that the most successful investors do not check so often.
So stop looking! Buffett: "Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell. ... Lethargy bordering on sloth should remain the cornerstone of an investment style."
My investments are about 50% rental houses, 50% money-type assets. Of the money-type assets, it's about 95% stock mutual funds, 5% cash (money market), with practically no bonds. So my rental income gives me a big cushion, while the money side of my investments are aggressively invested in equities. But I am buy-and-hold and it's rare for me to touch these funds. With that being said...
It's a lot more fun to check account balances when the market is going up than down! When the market nose-dived last March, I barely checked my balances at all for a couple of months. I figured the market would eventually turn around but I thought this would take at least a year or two (and probably wouldn't do much of a turnaround until vaccine availability was announced). Then at some point in about May or June I read that there had been a big market turnaround and it was going up again. Well, I started to check my balances again.
Now, I'm checking balances more often than ever, because: 1) There seems to be no end (and I know there will be an end, but it hasn't happened yet) to the market skyrocketing the past several months. It's hard to resist looking when my accounts are going up so fast. 2) Without being able to travel (my biggest single activity pre-pandemic), I have too much time on my hands! Once I get my vaccine shots and get back to traveling, I won't have nearly as much idle time to check balances.
So even though I currently check balances very often, I don't think I will do anything rash if (or when) there is another market crash.
... at some point, I started using the feature under the "Investigate" tab that - given a time horizon, an asset allocation and a success rate you provide - calculates the withdrawal rate that would have provided you that success rate.
This is a great feature! My overall net worth is up about 33% since I retired (less than 3 years ago). Even though I haven't increased my spending, as my assets go up, it's informative and fun to plug the numbers into Firecalc's Investigate tab and see how much I *could* be withdrawing (still at 100% success rate) if I wanted to.
This is the main thing I use in Firecalc now that I'm retired. I'm age 58, and if we don't get a stock and/or housing market crash in the next few years and my numbers keep going up, by my early to mid 60's I will likely start doing some
BTD! (I don't have any kids, and you can't take it with you!)