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Thanks for the tax advice on REIT's and BDC's. But that doesn't apply to me because of the fact that all of my investments, except for a little bit of money market money if you call that "investing", is either in tax-deferred or Roth accounts. The money in tax-deferred accounts (traditional 401K and IRA) will be taxed as ordinary income when I withdraw it or convert it to Roth, regardless of the type of investment it's in (i.e. REIT, BDC, or municipal bond).

Also, the money in Roth accounts won't be taxed at all regardless of the type of investment (assuming I adhere to the 5 year start rule, the 5 year per rollover rule, and the 59.5 age rule). So I do a little in a REIT fund and a little in a municipal bond fund, but I do them solely for diversification in investments and with no regard to tax treatment of the funds.

The idea behind the broad diversification is it allows me to be 75% in growth instead of 50% or 60%. If we have a large downturn like 2020, 2008, 2000, or 1987 then a withdrawal rate of 4% per year will last me 6 years even if I pull from just the 25% in safe funds. And that's assuming the safe funds don't rise during the stock downturn (my LT treasury fund always rises during major downturns). If they do I have more than 6 years to last me until my stock funds recover.

Having my 75% of equities spread out across 30+ asset classes gives me comfort that even during a broad stock market downturn, at least a few of those classes will be up (i.e. last year tech and health skyrocketed while much everything else collapsed, even though most of everything else was down fairly briefly). So that gives me even more years of ability to handle a major stock downturn.

With all of that, it might be safe to say I can handle 8 or more years of a stock downturn without resorting to withdrawing from a fund that's gone down some (selling low) to live off of. That's plenty. Any more of a safeguard beyond that might be overkill and remove my ability to keep up with inflation.