Mahanu

draft project

Managing the FIRE Money

the corpus has one job — outlast us

Manage the money behind financial independence deliberately — asset allocation, a safe withdrawal plan, the cash buffer, and the discipline to leave it alone — so that early retirement stays retired through good markets and bad.

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A copy carries over only the public parts you see here — the owners' private files never leave their own vaults.

🚧 Draft — not final. A generic, shareable version of this project's approach, published because it may help others. Give it a human edit before relying on it — and see the note at the bottom.

The FIRE-money playbook

Reaching financial independence is a savings problem; keeping it is a behaviour problem. A corpus meant to last thirty or forty years faces three enemies — bad markets early on, inflation over time, and the owner's own itch to tinker. This is a plain framework for defending against all three. (The family's actual numbers stay private; this is only the method.)

1. A written asset allocation

Decide the equity / debt / cash split on paper, matched to how many years the money must last and how much volatility the household can stomach. Writing it down is what lets you hold the line when markets fall — the plan, not the mood, decides.

2. A withdrawal rule set before it's needed

  • How much comes out each year (the classic starting point is a conservative withdrawal rate, adjusted for a long horizon and local realities — treat any single "4% rule" figure as a debated starting point, not gospel).
  • From where — which bucket you draw in a good year vs. a bad one.
  • Deciding this before a downturn is the whole point; deciding it during one is how portfolios get wrecked.

3. Sequence-of-returns risk (the quiet killer)

A crash in the early years of drawdown does far more damage than the same crash later, because you're selling units while they're cheap. The defence is the cash buffer:

4. A cash / short-debt buffer

Hold enough safe, liquid money to fund a couple of lean years without selling equities at the bottom. This is what turns a market crash from a catastrophe into a bad headline you can wait out.

5. The discipline (the actual hard part)

  • Rebalance on a schedule, not on a hunch.
  • Don't time the market — the buffer exists precisely so you never have to.
  • An annual review: re-check the allocation, the withdrawal rate, and the buffer size. Change things deliberately, rarely.

Not financial advice. This is a general framework, not a recommendation. Withdrawal rates, tax, and asset choices depend on your situation and jurisdiction — consult a qualified, preferably fee-only, financial planner before acting.