Is Going Off Grid The Answer?

Dividend Hero Tweeted the following:

This resonates on some level. We live in the forest on a mountain, we are not off the grid but we mostly could be other than needing propane delivered. Mark Baker coined the phrase living off the grid in the grid which is more of an attitude about life than actually being off the grid in the mountains or a cave somewhere. 

In that light, both sentiments tie into self sufficiency or as I like to phrase it, preventing/solving your own problems. I don't like the idea of counting on others to solve my problems, in that instance you're just a statistic or if you prefer, you cannot expect someone else to care more about your outcome more than you. 

An investing form of the grid, the status quo, is the 4% rule. I believe it is a crucial building block of understanding and it is a great starting point but very few retired clients adhere to it. Some have some combination of account balances larger than their needs and other sources of income and some have been at more like 6-7% having been helped by the equity market's tail wind of the last 12 years.

Maybe I am stretching here but if you want to go off grid in life I'd guess your benchmark is the typical on grid lifestyle and then figuring out how to access modern conveniences like electricity, water, heat, the internet and whatever else you need as opposed to going full 19th century prairie living.

To the 4% rule, here is an example from Morningstar of total on grid, heavy arithmetic, complexity. I didn't count the number but it must be at least 2000 words which I could replace with "whatever you got, no more than 4% per year." That's it, done. Not that there wouldn't be drawbacks to that idea but there are drawbacks to the complexity laid out in the article too. Where possible, simple is better.

My ideas of off grid in this context for when I am older, I don't even want to say retirement because I will view whatever comes next, whenever it comes as being my next chapter, is years working on cultivating other sources of income should I need them (fire related, maybe I can derive an income writing again), staying fit enough to have optionality to do something I really wouldn't want to do like work in a warehouse or store and very crucially, not painting myself into a corner that relies on one outcome going my way. 

It would be stressful to need $6000/mo, having $3500/mo coming in from Social Security, needing $2500/mo ($30,000/yr) from the portfolio to get to $6000 and having exactly $750,000 in the bank--$30k is 4% of $750k. There's no margin for error in terms of a protracted bear market or a large one-off expense. We all know people in some version of this scenario and they make it work because they have to but it would be better to prevent this scenario or if you can't prevent it, then to solve it when it happens. 

That resiliency, self-sufficiency, ingenuity, optionality is how you get off grid and in my estimation make things better.