So in Scrabbler1s case, you reduced work hours/income as a phased in plan to work less and live on less, and sought to a livable level and then basically ERd when FI income equaled a number that you could live with? So you saved more when working 37.5/wk, and saved less in part time, I assume. And discovered no need to work that hard for the level that you wanted to live at. Gutsy, as I would wonder if I was taking a chance at that, depending on age.
I reduced my work hours to work less and live on less, as you correctly pointed out. I had paid off the mortgage in 1998 and greatly reduced my expenses so that I was basically living on one biweekly paycheck while totally saving the other. Even while earning about 60% of my after-tax pay in the first part-time era (2001-2006), I was still saving some of that reduced pay, as you pointed out.
There was one thing which happened in those 6 years, however, which greatly pushed me in the ER direction and it had nothing to do with income. Two years into that part-time era (in 2003), my company ended the mostly telecommuting deal I had worked out with my boss. I could still work part-time, but I had to fulfill all my hours at the office. This was devastating news for me, as it returned many of the horrors of the long, awful commute I had been able to reduce to 1 day a week.
I also knew at this time that it would be the ultimate undoing for my career. I was soon ramping up my plans to ER at some point in the next few years. I was putting together my first ER spreadsheet and figuring out my "magic number" to leave the company and began looking around for an affordable individual health insurance policy (this was years before the ACA, and New York was a far more hostile state to buy individual HI back then).
I put up with the bad commute from 2004-2006 before asking to reduce my weekly hours worked from 20 to 12 in 2007. This reduced my weekly commute from 3 days to 2, and trimmed an hour off my workday so I could get home at 6 PM instead of 7 PM. My pay was further reduced and I lost my eligibility in the group health insurance program (so I went on COBRA for 18 months). I was still saving a little bit of my even further reduced pay, but remember that I still had considerable investment earnings, just not enough to live on independently.
I hoped this further reduced work schedule would save me for a while. But "for a while" turned out to be only about a year. I became unhappy with this arrangement fairly quickly, especially as I was quickly approaching my "magic number" to retire in 2008. I had also found an affordable HI policy for 2009 after COBRA expired.
By the middle of 2008, I had hit my "magic number" and the crashing markets actually provided a huge benefit to my being able to ER because the big bond fund I planned on buying into saw its price decline by 20-25%. This enabled me to buy many, many more shares than I had first anticipated.
The pieces fell into place by the end of September, and I gave my notice at the end of the month for a Halloween end date. It was all treats, no tricks, for me that day!