Someone give the baby (boomers) a bottle

I'd sooner have sympathy for Timothy McVeigh before this 'Skip and Muffy Yuppie' couple:

Ellen Minter and her husband, Jeff Bartman, spent 30 years in demanding, mid-six-figure jobs in the tech industry, most recently at SAP AG, the German software company. Both in their mid 50s, they began laying the groundwork for early retirement last year. They moved from near San Francisco to Healdsburg, in wine country. They devoured books about retirement. They calculated future cash-flow needs with great precision — even considering how often they would want to eat out.

With several millions set aside, they assumed they'd need a minimum annual return on their assets of 3 percent annually to retire a few years early. "I have spread sheets up the yin yang," says Ms. Minter. "We ran every kind of number through every kind of model. I figured, 'OK, we've got it all together.'"

Ms. Minter retired from SAP in October. She sold her workaday Chanel suits on eBay, traded her Lexus convertible for a freewheeling Volkswagen Beetle and started painting watercolors. On Jan. 1, Mr. Bartman, 57, also retired from the company. That night, they opened a bottle of 1996 Cabernet they'd bought in France years back and toasted their future.

After their stocks began heading south, the glow dimmed fast — especially for her husband. "Every morning over coffee, he'd just sit there and say, 'Do you know how much the market has fallen? Do you know how much the market has fallen?'" Ms. Minter says.