As the most afraid-to-retire-when-I-probably-should person here, even I had a hearty LOL at this one.
My wife and I make a combined $500-700k a year. We also are in our early 30s and have a sub $500k net worth because of MBA student loans and paying for a 175 person wedding out of pocket.
It’s weird when you get to this point where mentally you should feel secure, but the more you accrue the more you’d feel like an idiot if you were to retire/scale back career wise and blow your financial future. So that sticks in peoples’ minds and forces them to keep working long after they have to. Also, people find ways to fit their budget and lifestyle to their income to keep themselves on the stupid treadmill (lol private school K-12 mostly)
That said, I’m retiring as soon as is feasibly possible and playing a ton of golf while my body will still allow me to have fun doing it. I have no intention of working past 50 unless something massively changes between now and then.
1 Like
This is the exact same number I came up with. I am in my 30s and if you gave me 500k cash tomorrow, I’d probably never have to work another day for someone else. $1M cash would be a slam dunk.
1 Like
Holy shit. Fuck those people.
“We’re in out thirties and already have more money than almost anybody else will make in their entire lives. Plus, if we really fuck it all up, both of our parents are super wealthy and will bail us out. My wife wants me to take her to McDonalds this weekend for dinner, can we afford it?”
Fuck you. That’s your answer.
3 Likes
Additionally, if you have this much fucking money, and your family has this much money, WTF are you doing asking bogleheads for advice. Just go to an estate planner and an accountant, you fucks. I assume the post was just a humblebrag?
1 Like
I want to challenge you, @ElSapo, and @CanadaMatt3004 to look at your monthly expenses, do some math on this $500k figure, and see how it looks for you.
The retire early crowd touts The 4% Rule which has some conditions, but basically if your $500k is invested in a broad market index fund and based on the historical growth averages, you can pull 4% from it yearly nearly in perpetuity. Risk of ruin grows and shrinks as you pull out more or less respectively from the fund yearly. So that math says you could take $20k out per year, and depending on your current and expected expenses in “retirement”, you may have to work quite a bit on these side jobs to make up the difference.
That yearly expenses number really varies for a lot of people too. Like if you have a paid off house with lowish property taxes and have cheap forms of transportation, $20k + $10k in side work yearly still gives you a ton of room to live a great life.
I didn’t always think this, but I definitely need some kind of job, at least for the foreseeable future. I’ve seen the movie a million times before with mid 50s guy who retires with a bunch of money, slowly starts drinking too much and eating too poorly, then suddenly is either in poor health or dead by 70.
I’m all about autonomy - the ability to say “no,” combined with a very flexible schedule, but I just don’t think I have the discipline to stop working, even if I don’t have a financial need to do so.
Separately, you’ll find a ton of people who think the 4% rule is outdated in an era of low rates. I don’t agree, especially if you can dial back spending quickly and relatively painlessly, but it isn’t a settled argument. The 4% rule gives you something like a 90% - 95% chance of success, while a 3% withdrawal rate is 99% or so. To me, in the real world, if your portfolio drops 40%, you’re going to spend less money, it is just human nature.
1 Like
I can totally see that happening to me where I reach an amount I’m comfortable retiring with, but choose to work anyways. The mental freedom you must gain from going to work every day because you want to and not because you have to must be fantastic.
1 Like
I’m actually not worried about any of those things. However, I do still plan to work a little. When I say retire, what I mean is “Work about one or two days a week only doing shit I really like doing”. Retire is just shorthand for that. I suspect it’s like that for a lot of people.
I’m about 95% sure I could retire tomorrow and never have the urge to work again and I’m in my mid 30s. I genuinely feel for people who need work in their life to feel complete (my wife is one of them), I don’t think we were meant to live that way.
1 Like
I don’t know about it making my life “complete”. That’s not quite it for me. I just really like certain aspects of it.
I’m rich but I don’t like spending money. Help!
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=356941&newpost=6208339
This person seems fine. They should just give away all the money they clearly don’t need.
Giving away the money will also throw up some psychological barriers. It’s really hard for people that have established a years-to-decades-long habit of saving and cutting costs to change gears. Entrenched behavior patterns (maybe just a fancy way of saying “habits”) have a lot of momentum. A really common problem that small business owners have when they retire is they simply can’t spend money. They spent decades building a successful enterprise by being constantly vigilant about opportunities to maximize revenue and minimize expenses. When you are used to relentlessly focusing on optimizing net income you can’t just stop.
How do these people have a 2.375% rate on their mortgage? I know rates were very low recently, but it doesn’t seem like they refinanced since they say they have 25 years left on their term.
If I ever got true fuck you money I definitely would not buy a big house, that seems like a huge hassle and tons of pain, even if you contract everything out. I also would not build a social life around being the rich guy, I’ve seen that turn out very badly.
I would just travel constantly. I would go to major sporting events and splurge on good tickets. Maybe that would get old but it would take several years. I would pay for vacations with my close friends and family. I would dig into investing as a hobby. And I would make damn sure I exercised and ate well, probably hire a chef and a trainer. Why not.
6 Likes
This is really the way to go.
As I get closer to attaining sustainable financial freedom, I find myself thinking more and more about how I can use my upcoming free time to help people. Other than, you know, spending two hours a day posting here which we all know adds a ton of value to society.
I have already started spending more time mentoring younger professionals. This year I have reviewed a lot of resumes for people that I know are good people and that I want to see succeed. It’s amazing how many people are good people that would help lots of organizations but they don’t know how to write resumes or prep for interviews. As we’ve discussed on the forum many times, the corporate job market is laughably inefficient.
I also think it really, really helps to do some volunteer work. Some of my best experiences have been things like working at the local food bank or the mission that gives homeless people free food. Many people are really focused on consumer experiences in retirement, because they’ve been conditioned to think that the golden ticket to fulfillment is the consumer experience that is just out of reach. And I like that stuff of course but we all know that it only goes so far. If you chase consumer fulfillment in retirement it’s going to go badly.
6 Likes
Yeah. My grandma basically had a third career after she retired running a local charity for 15 years. Pretty sure she was more fulfilled than most people.
So what Riverman is saying is that Marlins Man is the one who has achieved true enlightenment
4 Likes