stepford
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
The main question many posters ask in their first ER forum post is "Do I have enough?" The answer, as many always helpfully chime in, depends strongly on age and spend rate. But I've noticed, almost independent of these factors, we tend to say NO to any nest egg under $1M and some variant of "You have so much you should have retired years ago" to anything over about $4-5M.
Granted this is a fairly broad range, but I think it reveals our assumptions about spending - that pretty much everyone needs something over $30-40K/yr to live on and anyone should be happy with anything over about $200K. While there are clearly those for whom these assumptions are incorrect I see this bias time and again in our responses to these initial posts. In other words, we mostly have middle to upper middle class ER lifestyles and tacitly assume everyone else should do the same.
Granted this is a fairly broad range, but I think it reveals our assumptions about spending - that pretty much everyone needs something over $30-40K/yr to live on and anyone should be happy with anything over about $200K. While there are clearly those for whom these assumptions are incorrect I see this bias time and again in our responses to these initial posts. In other words, we mostly have middle to upper middle class ER lifestyles and tacitly assume everyone else should do the same.