If you had the money to retire at 30, your savings would be invested and on an average year your earnings would cover your expenses. You would have health insurance, so no worries there. The only catch is that you would have to keep your expenses at 65% of what you spend right now. Would you take it, or would you rather work a few more years for a better lifestyle and financial security?
I don’t think I could keep my expenses at 65% of what I spend now because I already spend as little as I can since I’m trying to save up for an early retirement. I’d love to retire as early as possible.
Healthcare costs grow rapidly as you age, and have been outpacing inflation in the US. If your remaining money is only keeping up with inflation over time, you are very likely to fall behind later in life, when job opportunities are more scarce, and less lucrative.
If you can make changes to live more frugally now, and work a year or two more while your money is growing in the background, you will be much better off long term.
I have numerous family members that have lived a long time, and eventually faced severe health issues, so I expect that in my future. I will work until my retirement savings are more than I need for my current lifestyle, and then cut back on certain things to do my best to prepare for that eventuality.
100% I would do that but that’s a bit unfair because:
- I make enough money to splurge more than I need to, namely eating out, and I would happily never eat at a restaurant again if it meant I got 40 hours of my week back for the rest of my life.
- I would spend the next 60 years of my life doing all the hobbies I want to do. I have stories I want to write, video games I want to make, furniture I want to craft, themed parties I want to throw, a TTRPG I’m working on, a card game (gods to make a card game before I croak!). Even if I did what I plan to do which is sell all of that at the lowest price I could (including giving as much of it away for free as possible) inevitably some of those things will make me a bit of money. Enough I’d hope to splurge into an international trip every now and then or keep my PC rig rather new.
I just don’t expect to stop working in retirement, I just plan to work doing stuff I love instead of stuff that pays well.
So if anyone in the comments is a wealthy person or dying with no heirs feel free to send me enough money to retire. I would love to create things for people for the rest of my life and not worry about anything but if I could afford a thing I don’t need and if my hobbies are worthy of other people’s time/attention.
It is almost as if all of humanity could survive and provide for each other without psycho billionaires owning the means of production and housing!
Ah, to own a house… Wouldn’t that be neat? And imagine if it wasn’t a piece of shit produced at the lowest cost possible by overworked and underpaid builders. Hell, imagine a custom house for my particular tastes!
What a world we could live in if we just taxed the rich out of existence and owned a portion of our work place.
I wasn’t even out of school yet.
I’ve heard of people being kept back a year but damn my dude
Did a PhD. Those take time.
Yeah i figured as much but I like my jokes
If I could retire now I would. But living in the US is expensive and gets more expensive every year. From real estate taxes or rent, from insurance, from cost of food, from basic utilities like electric, heat, gas… Neverind if you want a hobby, or a vacation, or Any leisure activities…
Every time I leave my house it costs me $100 no matter what I am doing.
There’s no way I would have enough money to retire comfortably.
You don’t need to buy new shoes every time you go for a walk, you know?
Funny enough, the money never seems to be spent on stuff for me.
We couldn’t. More than 65% of what we make goes just to cover the bills, so it wouldn’t be a possibility. Even if we didn’t eat or have a car.
Would be underwater and back at work within a couple of months.
If you mean some version of 65% of our current lifestyle like magically the house shrinks and costs 65% of what it currently does, then maybe? We don’t eat out much, don’t vacation much, don’t go out much already though.
If you mean health costs all covered, and no more retirement contributions and 65% of GROSS earnings, that would actually give me almost the exact same net pay, and wouldn’t be a different lifestyle. Those things cost 32% of my earnings and taxes 15%.
So I’m not sure exactly how to think about this but in short - I am more willing to work to have a reasonably good life, than to not work and not have a good life, but have a lot of free time. I do know how to have fun for cheap, have been poor before, but I like life now better than then.
I actually have enough money to retire right now and live frugally for the rest of my life at the age of 51… But to be honest it sounds super boring and depressing.
I know this will go against the grain here, but I enjoy what I do. I’m an engineering manager and I work on cool and interesting projects. I enjoy what the extra money gets me, whether it’s vacations or a better place to live or whatever. I enjoy working with other intelligent engineers trying to solve challenging problems. If I was retired I wouldn’t have that same engagement. I don’t know what I’d do with my time and I’m afraid I would not spend it in a healthy way.
So the reality is I’ve thought about it, but I’m not really that interested in retiring, even though I could.
Invested in what ? What’s the magic trick that won’t leave you with nothing in the next 10 years.
It’s…a hypothetical? A fabricated reason why you aren’t given a massive lump sum of money, and instead have to live off dividends? The “what” doesn’t matter.
Dividends from what ? Tell me company that can’t collapse in the next 10 years, you have insides from billionaires who can shit fuck your investments in couple of seconds ?
Buddy, you seem to have a problem around investments because again that’s not how this works. You shouldn’t be investing in individual stocks unless you like gambling or have insider information (which is supposed illegal but the US is really showing that it’s not as of late). You should be invested in broad index funds, like ETFs, which track the entire market (to simplify they own a fraction of every company on the market). The market, over the long run, always goes up so you always win (although again, with the US in very interested in understanding what happens when a country collapsed, from what I read about Germany it was actually surprisingly fine if I’m not mistaken).
You seem to be looking at investing as a way to get rich quickly, a gamble that may pay off. But good investing is slow, consistent growth that guarantees a safe retirement (but also unfortunately does not give us an escape from this capitalist hell hole of permanent work).
Every investment is a gamble is you read terms of service, it’s hidden behind this fancy word called speculation. Bank guarantee nothing to return. You recommended some financial products that you have no idea how they work. ETFs are just money machines for bankers to get double commission from selling stocks of companies you can’t afford to hedge with real stocks and get your dividend and votes. Sometimes even to fuck you up if that’s their business strategy. You buy index so you buy nothing of value, moreover you give a knife to banker so he can stab you whenever he wants. That’s even more stupid than buying company stocks. Read more kid, I know exactly how this shit works.
Investing in an index fund can net you an income of between 3-10% per year on average. I think most people estimate between 4 and 6 % when talking about retirement. This post ignores providing any monetary values but your question makes it seem like investing is magical and arcane and will inevitably go to zero but that’s simply not the case.
If you had 100 dollars in investments every year, on average, you could spend 4 dollars and that 100 bucks would never disappear. You’d have a 4 dollar income for as long as you live; let’s call that your permanent income. If you had 1 million in investments you’d have a permanent income of 40k. At some point, you have enough money in investments that you could quit your job and live within your means for forever.
At some point you have so much money you could never spend your entire permanent income even if you live an extravagant lifestyle and you have to reinvest the returns by buying more assets (which then further increases your permanent income).
We should tax that second group of people more. I’d argue out of existence as there should be a cap in the amount of wealth a person should be allowed to have.
I tell you something about investing. If enough people invest there is thing called TV that they can make announcement and push indexes down by 50% in an hour and let them go back in 10 years so from your 100 bucks you will have 50 bucks and from your 4 dollars you will have 2 dollars per year. That saying you saved your 500 thousands in let’s say 10 years now work 5 more years to go back to 500 thousand because you just lost 250k in an hour. You stand no chance when they want slaves. Million is for pussies they fuck everyday.
It seems you’ve been scorned from treating investing as gambling and I’m sorry to hear that but that’s not how this works. Yes, markets can go down and you can lose money but:
- this is a hypothetical which doesn’t care about real market considerations
- you can and should average your retirement investing against a conservative figure so in boom years you’re underspending and in bust years you’re still covered
This is all calculatable. The problem is we’re all paying for some jackass’s yacht when we should be paying for community rail and affordable housing.
You’re dreaming or selling ? Retirement investment is Ponzi scheme. If you think there will be more and more people every year in your country look up birth rates. You know what is Kondratiev wave ? There is no real market right now, go make something and see how much it’s worth and for how much billionaire owned companies are selling it and why they don’t pay taxes.
Yes.
65% of what I spend right now. So basically 35% below paycheck to paycheck? Seems like a bad idea to me.
No, because I’m close to 30, literally had a more favorable version of this option (enough money, relocate to a low cost-of-living country and doesn’t even have to be frugal) presented to me, and I chose not to. And I already live frugal enough that 65% would be really rough… I’m okay with a lite version though: only take fun and engaging part-time/flexi jobs, and dedicate my full time to a rewarding but not necessarily well-paid (or paid at all) career, while cutting down a bit on spending
I just felt that with all the education & things I have going for me I’d rather do something productive that contributes to society. If I literally couldn’t find a job that’s not a metaphorical meat grinder then it’s another story, but I’m not at that stage yet
I think this question varies greatly depending on your current salary, if you have dependents, and what your cost of living looks like.
You never know what the future holds. Much better to work now while you are in a good position to do so, than to be forced to work later on, when you have been out of the workforce for years.
When I was approaching 30 I was looking forward to kids, and that wouldn’t be sufficient to raise them.
In a couple years though …… once they are through college so I’m done with those payments and child support, living on 65% of my income would be easy.
My initial response was Hell yeah! But, then I remembered my job will pay for the kids college, so I’d be crazy to make that trade.
