Less than two years away from early retirement, we wonder how much cash (if any?) we’d like to hold in a money market account. As many of you might have heard, we currently run a very tight ship with our cash management. We have no emergency fund – our entire portfolio is our emergency fund! But that’s easy to do while the paychecks are still rolling in and we maintain a 60% savings rate. Early retirement will be very different. How would we handle the cash withdrawals in retirement? How do we react to market fluctuations?
In the FIRE community, I often read that the solution (maybe even the panacea) for an equity bear market is to keep a certain percentage of the portfolio in cash (money market account) to sustain cash flows through a bear market. And we should point out that we are not the only ones thinking about this, as evidenced by recent popular posts on the PIE blog and on Retirement Manifesto (also check out the really cool infographic) dealing with this subject. Two to three years worth of expenses (presumably 5-10% of the portfolio) seem to be the numbers floating around (examples: 5% cash allocation for the PIE blog, The Retirement Manifesto recommends 2-3 years, ThinkSaveRetire uses 3 years), obviously calibrated to roughly correspond to the length of the average bear market.