I just believe one has to consider the opportunity cost of insurance.

What is logical for the wealthy tech prepper to hedge against (remote events), isn't for the average Poor.

This is as good a point in the thread as any to chime in an "Amen" to this idea.

A lot of Mungofitch's calculations seem quite appropriate to the 1% or maybe even the 0.1%, but it seems to me the insight that this is an unaffordable over-caution for the bottom 99% is right.

Your optimum "withdrawal rate" MUST depend on whether your savings consist of 0.5X your annual spending or 500X your annual spending. Everybody I know who has purchased "long term care insurance" has FAR MORE money than everybody I know who has not purchased this insurance. The reason is NOT that "rich people are smarter about how they spend their money", or at least not solely due to that, as the existence of $1million dollar cars and gold-plated toilet bowls will show.

Even with a millionaire in the US has a finite chance of running out of money while they are alive. My parents, or certainly were most of the way to having a million in net worth when they were 75 or so, spent the final years of their lives in assisted living which, while their money lasted, cost about $8,000/month EACH. $16,000/month went through their retirement savings in a few years, they were still alive. We did what I suspect many "middle class" people do when they last a long time: we got them qualified for "Medi-Cal" which is California's name for Medicaid which is the US gov'ts program to subsidize medical care for people who can't afford their medical care. Medi-Cal supported my father in a nursing home for the last year of his life and my mother in assisted living for the last 2 or 3 years of her life. To be clear, they had ~ $5,000 a month income from soc sec, pension, etc., which Medi-Cal took all of (well, they allowed $35/month to each of my parents for other expenses, and Medi-cal paid the, one guesses, $10,000/month shortfall (we do not know exactly what deal Medi-Cal struck with the homes my parents were in.)

So in my own planning, I have been flummoxed. DO I plan to leave my kids a bunch, assuming the Tesla Robot will usher in an era of astounding corporate earnings and I will not need $10,000 a month care for a bunch of years? Or do I plan a future where Russia nukes Kyiv, China nukes Taiwan, and Elon Musk turns out to have been lying about the rockets actually making it to orbit and the cars actually having been sold at positive margins, and I run out of money long before I run out of breath?

Does Medi-Cal survive a nuclear war any longer than my portfolio does?

I think I plan my portfolio as if the nuke's stay in their suitcases and the earth does turn out to be round, the rockets and the cars are real, and a few million Optimus robots are adding to our GDP by my 80th birthday (2037 fyi). And my "insurance" in case I am wrong is two layered:

1) Medi-cal qualification and big bottle of benzodiazapene's for when the life style Medi-Cal affords me is no longer to my liking

2) The ability to go noisily insane if the world somehow lays waste to the US economy while I am lying in a bed unable to get myself out of it without assistance.

Wow. That turned dark...

R:)