I just need to make up my mind when enough is enough to RE with minimal downside financial risk. To me - that's a Firecalc result with no failures at an income level that allows me to still put money away for a rainy day (eg tenancy issues, unforeseen maintenance etc)
How would you even model that?
This is one of my big frustrations with using rentals for ER: being unable to reasonably predict the future based on the past. FIRECalc doesn't model rental properties well at all (for good reason, there isn't a ton of data on the subject, and it's so variable and situational).
So let's say I'm going to net 52k (like the OP), and expenses are 50k.... 100% success rate, if that continues (I'm even LBYM). But there's no way to know the actual failure rate, because maybe an economic decline happens in the area where your rentals are located. Maybe a disaster happens that you don't have covered by insurance. Maybe your expenses are higher than projected, or vacancies.
You can try to take all that into account in your net figures, but once you hit a certain reasonable estimate you're left with "my (estimated future) net is higher than (estimated future) expenses.. I have a good amount saved in cash reserves.. guess I'm good to go."
There
is no modeling in FIRECalc. You plug in your expenses (50k) and income (52k) and you can have a portfolio of $0 (needing reserves aside) and still hit a 100% success rate.
Now sure, you could be in a situation where net doesn't cover expenses, maybe you get 52k net and have 60k expenses. Well then all you're really modeling is if your portfolio can take 8k/yr (at a 4% SWR, that's 200k, 267k at a 3% SWR).
But FIRECalc, my favorite retirement calculator, is basically useless with FIREing off of nearly all rental income.