[tejohnso]

So the standard point of view is that you can't stop worrying about money until you have passive income of roughly USD $300,000 per year? Why would you need five times the average annual gross household income to be comfortable? That sound like the symptom of a serious problem.

Why not take your current annual spend, multiply it by 1.2 for a nice cushion, and then figure out what you need at 3% to gain that annual return? This should come out to be roughly an order of magnitude less than $10M.

[ThrowawayR2]

That passive income does have to carry you through bad economic times as well. What if the rate of return is only 1% or the value of your portfolio drops drastically because of a full-blown economic depression?

[tejohnso]

The 3% is an average. Some years it'll be higher, and that extra income goes into your savings and offsets the bad years. Plus there's the cushion mentioned and that should also be accumulating a larger and larger safety net.