Comment by ahelwer

I think his definition of "retired" is pretty simple:

his family could cover all of their living expenses from investment income alone.

When you think about it, this is pretty much what we mean by "normal" retirement as well. If a 70 year old retiree does some maintenance on his rental property we don't accuse him of lying about being retired.

Your point about medical bills doesn't really hold water. I'm sure plenty of unlucky people who retired at a more conventional age end up having to come out of retirement because of an unforeseen tragedy.

Unless you want to change the definition of "retired" to: "having sufficient investment income to cover any possible expense that you or your family could possibly incur from now until your death, without ever doing a single hour of paid work"

I don't agree with MMM all the time but accusing him of not being retired does seem like a pointless exercise in semantics.

MMM gave a talk last year[0] where one of his key points was "Work is better when you don't need the money."

That's what he's doing when he says he is "retired" and yet works odd jobs to make money, or his wife sells things on Etsy for fun. I do think there's something behind the idea that it's more fun to do money-generating activities when you don't need the money they generate.

Also, his talk is pretty funny (and a good intro to his way of thinking for those who haven't read any of his stuff). Worth a watch.

[0]: https://vimeo.com/183016901

It's not dishonest, you're missing the point of that sentence.

The Etsy shop could fund the family's lifestyle. The family is already funded by investment returns. They could shut the shop down and continue living just as they do. MMM is just using "fund our family's lifestyle" to give an idea of how much the shop is pulling in (about $30k/year).

All of these concerns are real. You'll be reassured to learn that health costs are probably the fourth-most discussed topic in the MMM community, after safe withdrawal rates, asset allocation, and game plans during the next big market crash.

MMM's blog posts are very basic - you won't safely retire early if all you do is read them. Fortunately, people are responsible and put slightly more effort into planning their entire lives than uncritically following some blog post on the internet. For example, many people are planning on using a 3.25% withdrawal rate rather than 4%, and have much more in bonds than the 100%-equities-or-bust message on the blog.

One of the key insights about his situation, I think, is that you can live on his under-30K budget and not feel super poor, if you don't have regular 9-5 job with a fixed location, if you don't need to worry much about good schools (can homeschool—these two things combine to mean you can choose inexpensive housing with fewer other trade-offs, which makes it easier to have a paid-off house), and if you already have a lot of money and in-demand skills so you can reasonably have much lower insurance spending generally, and especially health insurance. The overwhelming bulk of his budget savings comes from already having lots of money and from having plenty of time to DIY stuff others might pay for. The rest is useful but relatively marginal.

His blog's good for reinforcing that you can spend less money when you already have money, so it's heartening in that it tells you your target income for retirement can be much lower than the income you need pre-retirement. It's not especially helpful for getting there.

His community takes the cue and runs with, too. Any hint of, "wait... this post is useful for saving only if I already have a ton of money and/or already don't have a job and therefore have little to no time pressure in my life. Rich people pay less for stuff, retired people have lots of free time, that's well known and not insightful. Some of the cutting-spending stuff here is good, but this particular thing is incredibly unhelpful." is dealt with harshly, no matter how justified.

This would be a meaningful comment if your critique weren't appallingly mundane.