One of the biggest risks of an early retirement is the “sequence of returns” risk. If investments perform poorly in the first five to ten years of retirement, you could be selling low in order to cover your expenses, taking a larger percentage of your savings than you originally intended.
Working enough to cover expenses during those initial five to ten years of early retirement could pretty well negate the risk of a market dive in that first decade.
You could continue to work until the market rebounds and avoid touching your nest egg throughout a potential bear market.
Committing to work a week a month, or even a few weeks every few months makes it difficult to spend a year with my family learning Spanish in a place like Spain or Costa Rica.
Behind Door Two is the alternative. Rather than slowing way down to a subsistence earning level for ten years, keep the pedal to the metal to match what you might have earned in those ten years over a much shorter period of time.
I don’t expect to do anything that pays as well as my current day /night job. I do expect to keep writing, because I enjoy it, and, as my e-mail subscribers know, I do earn a bit of money doing so.