Barista FIRE

The name comes from Starbucks, one of the few US employers extending health coverage to part-time staff. That detail is the whole point of the variant, since health insurance between early retirement and Medicare eligibility at 65 is one of the largest and least predictable costs in any early retirement plan.

The arithmetic effect is substantial. A household spending $50,000 with $20,000 covered by part-time work needs to fund only $30,000 from the portfolio, which at 25 times expenses is a $750,000 target instead of $1.25M. Modest earned income removes a large amount of required capital.

It also shortens the exposure to sequence risk. Earned income during the early retirement years reduces how much has to be withdrawn while a poor market sequence is unfolding, which is exactly the window where withdrawals do the most damage.