Jochen wrote in and asked, what are the rules for living off of stocks before retirement?

I'll have a few years of no income because of grad school, but I have about 350K in a brokerage account. Do I sell slowly or all at once?

And what do you think about this idea? What are the rules about living off of stocks before

retirement? A few years of no income because of grad school, but have 350, a brokerage account,

do I sell slowly or all at once?

What are the rules about it?

Well, we know this.

If we've been saving into retirement accounts, if we've been saving into 401ks or Roth IRAs

or accounts like that, we can't use them until a certain time.

We can't actually get to those assets until 59.

Or if it's a 401k,

if we're, we retire in the year we turn 55, we can do that. But these are like retirement assets.

And so I think the question Joachan's asking is, okay, before I get there, before I get to 59.5,

how should I think about creating an income stream? And if I have a portfolio, he said right now I've got $350,000, how do I think about that?

And we have a lot of folks who do enter into early retirement and they're part of the fire

movement or fine movement.

And there are some things that you can think about when it comes to early retirement.

Like one of the ones I think about that I know we do for a lot of clients is, you know,

if you're able to manipulate your income to the extent that you can keep it super low,

you might qualify for zero percent capital gains.

So even as you have these stocks and you begin to liquidate them as needed,

you can pay zero percent capital gains if you stay below certain income thresholds.

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