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If we multiply that by 25, we’ll need to hit $800,000 in order to live in perpetuity at that level. We’ve estimated that we will need $32,000 per year to live on for the long haul. That’s what you’re going to live on.Ĥ% times 25 is 100% – in other words, the amount you need.Īgain, let’s look at our example. That leaves a 4% gap between those two numbers which represents the “real” growth of your money. Warren Buffett estimates that, over the long term in the future, the stock market will return 7%, and that inflation will sit around 3%. Where do I get that number from? I’m assuming that you’ve invested that money for the long term in a broad-based index fund with very low expenses. That gives you a very good estimate of what you’ll need to save for to retire in perpetuity. Now, multiply that final spending number by twenty five. It’s completely reasonable to assume that those add up to 20% of our income, cutting our spending down to $32,000 per year in retirement. We’d probably switch to having just one car.
#Simple math of early retirement professional
There’s no need for professional wardrobes. There are no daily commuting costs for Sarah. If Sarah stops working and I stop working, that means that quite a few costs go away. So, let’s say that my family spends $40,000 each year. The exact estimate of those expenses is hard to specify, but I usually encourage people to figure that all work expenses add up to 20% of one’s annual spending, so just multiply that total spending by 0.8 to obtain a number equal to how much you spend each year in the absence of work.
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You won’t have commuting costs for work, for example, nor will you have professional wardrobe costs. Now, there are some expenses that you have now that you won’t have in retirement. What you will need to include is how much you spent on health insurance, which, if it’s provided by your employer, will be stated on your tax documents. Naturally, this doesn’t include things like pre-tax retirement contributions, but you won’t need to be making those in retirement. What was your balance at the start of 2014? Take that, add all of the deposits during 2014 to that number, then subtract the final balance. The easiest way to figure that out is to start digging through your checking account. So, how much money is that? Before you know that, there’s one key question you have to answer. That way, you’re covered no matter how long you live and no matter how many medical discoveries occur in the next fifty years. In fact, I think it’s best to have enough money to live forever on your investments if you’re going to retire early. If you retire at age 60, for instance, you’ll want to be in a position where you can live for at least 40 years off of your savings. In an environment with incredibly long average lifespans, where people have better than a 50% chance of living into their eighties and a pretty significant chance of living until they’re over 100, you’re going to need some serious resources in the bank to retire before age 65. That’s true for almost everyone that dreams of retiring significantly earlier than typical retirement age. The truth is that if we want to retire early, we need to save at an incredible rate. Why would we choose to not enjoy life with the income that we have? Why are you choosing to just walk away from all of the good things that you could have? The biggest reason is that Sarah and I have made the conscious decision that financial independence is the one thing that we most want. The question that most people ask is why. If I had told myself in 2005 that Sarah and I would be putting literally half of our income in the bank, I simply would not have believed it.
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That is an incredibly tall order for a lot of people.
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I like to think of it as if we’re saving 50% of our income. We’ve been investing every dime of my income (minus taxes and specific professional expenses) since late 2011 and living purely off of Sarah’s income. Over the last couple of years, Sarah and I have essentially been living on one salary.
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