I retired into a falling market

I stopped working in April 2022, flew to Lisbon, and the market spent most of the rest of the year falling. On paper, the worst possible start to an early retirement. Here's the honest report from inside it: I barely noticed.

The last working day wasn't dramatic. I spent most of it packing for the move, finishing things off, closing boxes. At some point that evening I looked at the total on the screen, the whole pot, and smiled. Done. Out. Free.

Then I did the thing that turned out to matter: I mostly stopped looking. Not discipline; I just had better things to do. I'd measured that number against the plan for months, and it had cleared the bar. The total had done its job, so I let it retire too.

The fall came anyway. My portfolio, which is more or less the whole market, dropped about eighteen percent from its top to its bottom that year, counted in euros. Laid over my exit date, that chart should have been terrifying.

What I actually felt was closer to mild annoyance. It had years to do this. It picked now.

The reason annoyance never became fear is boring, and it was settled long before Lisbon: I'd kept about two years of life in cash, uninvested, for exactly this kind of year. The plan never needed me to sell a single share in 2022. The market could do what it liked; the groceries were never part of the conversation.

My mother took the year harder than I did. Every crisis since, the same call: stocks are down, she's heard about it somewhere, am I going to be OK? By 2022's standards she was the better-informed of us — I wasn't watching.

Because here's what the retirement blogs hadn't prepared me for: the market wasn't the problem that year. The supermarket was. Prices climbed like they hadn't in decades, and the life I'd carefully priced was suddenly being sold at new prices.

The car made it personal. I'd just moved to Portugal and needed one, so I did the sensible thing and looked at nearly-new second-hand cars, ten or twenty thousand kilometres on the clock. They were selling for pretty much the price of new ones! There were simply no cars to be had that year, and the used market knew it. So I bought new. When the discount is zero, the discount hunt is over.

Did I cut back? No, and not out of bravado. The drop simply never reached the depth where the plan starts asking for cuts. I kept living the life I'd priced, at its new prices, and the maths kept clearing.

I want to be careful not to sell this as nerve. The days were genuinely calm, but the calm was engineered, not summoned. A low withdrawal rate and a fat cash buffer don't make you brave — they make brave unnecessary.

The old high took the better part of two years to come back around in euros. Somewhere in there, watching the total push past its old mark, the year quietly reclassified itself: from test to anecdote. Saying the plan survived 2022 gives 2022 too much credit.

I'm on the record with the stance that makes people nervous: all stocks, no bonds, for an exit that could run fifty years or more, with cash beside it so a crash can never force a sale. 2022 was that stance's first exam, straight out of the gate. The maths was never the hard part. The hard part is whether you can watch it fall and do nothing, and doing nothing is easy when nothing is exactly what the plan expects of you.

If your own exit is close and the screens are red, the playbook I actually ran is written down in the manual, step by step, and The Three Endings will show you honestly what a bad start does to the odds. The longer story of how I got to that April is its own page.

Four years on, I'm glad the fall came early. It answered the only question the spreadsheet couldn't, in the first year, at a discount. So, one for you: when your first red year arrives, and one will, what exactly is your plan for doing nothing?