I wrote a response to Rocco's article, and its is also based on the assumption that you will not do anything economic after you retire. If you choose this you probably die soon afterwards.

My parents both retired early, in their 50's without substantial savings. My mom had a fully indexed pension though. After she retired from Teaching she worked in child care for another 10+ years. My dad was a small farmer, and sold his farm for a decent amount of money, but you can't take the farmer off of the farm. My dad worked Planting and Harvest for 20 years, and did other odd jobs to keep himself busy. Their $250K aprox. lasted almost 40 years, my mom just passed away last year(90 yo) and still had money in her retirement fund. In fact my mom was on her teachers pension for more years that she taught, and was making more in annual pension that she ever made as a teacher at the end. However there are no more pensions like this anymore.