Here is a study mentioned that suggests 4% for 30 years is not even close in today's environment, but should be more like 2% or even less. So, if you believe it, withdrawing more than 4% with goal of later withdrawing 4% would contradict this one; especially if your time horizon is longer than 30 years, which is the time interval usually studied for regular, not early, retirement:
Maintaining flexibility with retirement spending is important.
I think there are two flaws with that study.
First, it's trying to determine the max withdrawal rate-- the maximum that a retiree could spend every year without paying any attention to any outside economic factors. It's similar to Raddr's hapless Y2K ER who's been blissfully ignorantly spending his 4% every year since Y2K, no matter how dire the projections seem.
Real human ERs don't do that. Some would say that humans can't do that, whether they ER or not. Everyone reduces their spending during bad economic times. "Unfortunately" for the research community, it's darn hard to model... except for Bob Clyatt's system.
Second flaw: Assuming that a 4% SWR means starting at 4%. Yeah, maybe that's what the procedure says, but the math is that some scenarios will start out at 5% or even 6% during down economies. The theory is that the economy will recover, so will the portfolio, and what started as a 6% withdrawal rate will ease off to less. The overall portfolio spending will run out at the same time as the rest because it's followed the overall 4% math.
However the math's not very reassuring. I don't know about you guys, but I'd be terrified to ER at a 6% initial withdrawal while expecting the bear market to go away in a few years. But my feelings are irrelevant because I'd
never be able to convince my spouse to have that sort of faith in either the market or in me.
Yet Ty Bernicke has shown (anecdotally, anyway) that annual spending drops over ER. Another study recommends starting at 4%, monitoring the portfolio until it approaches "game over", and then shifting to annuities. Social Security might even be the only annuity necessary. Surely there's an intermediate "gray area" among these alternate scenarios where variable spending and some annuities would boost success.
I think the FIRECalc advantage is being able to run a portfolio and a withdrawal rate against history-- because we humans are too quick to assume that "this time it's different" (and its corollary, "... but it will never change again".) If FIRECalc gives encouraging results (success ratio over 80%) then I'd really scrub the numbers hard for variable spending. I'd annuitize a bare-bones income and invest the rest in value & dividend stocks. I'd definitely cut back to part-time work as soon as I could.
The "problem" with a 100% successful SWR is that it practically guarantees you will have at least a penny left over. In fact, the effort & assets required to boost the success rate from 95% to 100% means that at least 95% of the time you'll have a
lot of money left over.
I much prefer using FIRECalc as an initial goal and then adding safety features like Otar's "red light" annuity system or variable spending.
Those insisting that 4% is over should read Bernstein's "Calculator from Hell" articles in the FAQ archives and then consider (at a minimum) Bob Clyatt's 4%/95% rule.
Speaking of "this time it's different": When my daughter was in high school she read a lot of Jane Austen. (I certainly never would have learned what follows, because I don't have the patience to read Austen.) Our daughter had heard us talking about 4%, so she was excited to see Jane referring to "four percenters". It turns out that 19th-century British investors would put their portfolio in long-term 4% bonds and live off their income. Due to the British colonial system and their gold standard, they were effectively maintaining inflation (in the British Isles, anyway) at zero percent-- for an entire century. Note that this modern research article recommends also investing a portion of an ER portfolio in inflation-adjusted bonds. The 19th-century four-percenters would've felt right at home with TIPS.