To apply MMM's ideas, on a 50K salary assuming monthly expenses of 1,250 (that's the hard part), if you put away 50% every year you can retire on a 375K nest egg (4% safe annual draw) after 15 years, or age 37. Roughly.
Plans like this just seem downright dangerous to me.
The reality is that as you get deeper into that 43 year period without pursuing your career, your marketable skills will diminish as well. Many careers don't "scale down" either. A person who was once making $50k may not be able to make $25k with half the hours. The choice in many careers is 100% or 0%. Programming is in many cases a wonderful exception, so that might be biasing folks here.
You may very well end up just getting a part-time retail or fast food job. In any area of the country where this plan is viable, the minimum wage is going to be quite low, possibly as low as $7.25/hour. You're going to find yourself working quite a few hours just for a "little bit" of supplemental income. Indeed, if you needed to cover all your expenses (but nothing more), that'd be a full-time year-round job at the minimum wage (and in fact you might have to work overtime).
If you continually only withdraw 4% of your nest egg (reducing your absolute withdrawal during market drops), then make up the difference if you need to in order to cover current expenses, then you'd be just fine.
Per cFIREsim, with "success" defined as having more than 0 dollars at the end of the time period
375k -> 84.62% success 425k -> 96.15% success 450k -> 99.04% success
Additionally, the median portfolio value at the end went from 650k to 1.1M to 1.4M.
375k is definitely cutting things close. But at the same time...
* you're always going to have unpredictable market conditions
* you're likely to get at least some level of social security (which is unaccounted for in the above numbers)
* pulling back the expenses even a couple percent in the particularly bad years has a huge effect on success. This is admittedly difficult at 15k/year expenses, but padding the 375k by 5-10% would do a lot to mitigate that risk as well.
* If things start going downhill in terms of market returns, you retired young enough that you can reasonably go back to work for a short period of time. Even working at McDonald's at 7.25/hour would be approximately sufficient to cover the annual expenses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/comments/6vaz...
Ever heard of diseases (not to mention just plain old aging)? Tai chi/joga is not a ticket to immortality.
>you have the means to end your life internally by simply controlling your energy, sending it up your spine into your brain
Many people (myself included) practice yoga and other internal martial arts for at least 1-2 hours a day while also having a full-time job and family.
Retirement doesn't mean one sleeps 15 hours a day. It generally means one doesn't care much about the day to day financial demands of life and does what he/she always wanted to do.
If you give these $50K/yr people $400K at the age of 37, these people will very likely go on to a lot of other important things which can help them make more money.
May or may not be relevant in the context of this discussion.
FWIW you can buy a lot more than you'd expect for a small amount in very rural areas. Homes and acreage for well under $100k, which gives you a pretty small mortgage. Much, much smaller than $750.