This is a really fantastic, simple way of looking at it.
There are of course many other factors that go into it. One that may very well work in your favor is saving while living in a big city, then moving some place small later on. This could cut your living expenses by a percentage big enough to make a very significant difference in the number of years you have to work.
Of course, once you involve kids, the whole thing becomes a lot less predictable.
> There are of course many other factors that go into it. One that may very well work in your favor is saving while living in a big city, then moving some place small later on.
That's how I've been doing the math (over, and over, and over) ever since I found this article last night - calculate savings based on my tech job in sf, and then calculate expected expenses based on what it'll be like to live basically anywhere else and maintain the same cost of living (sf is 72% more expensive than portland[0] and a whole lot more expensive than living comfortably off of $10k a year in thailand).
Christ, many of us on this site could likely get away with retiring now & moving to Thailand, if you really can assume 5-7% long(long!)-term returns on the stock market.
Just be careful that by retirement he doesn't mean "stop the work and do nothing". In the author's view retirement means financial independence - the point in life where you don't need to work anymore but you work for your own pleasure (or you work on what you really like to do).
Because I share the sentiment- I don't want to have to sacrifice a lot of time with my children for my "career" (the one that makes most of my money) at all. Even though I have little interest in retiring early, the same strategies can be used to save up to be able to work part time from home on less lucrative (but still skill-building/maintaining) projects when I have children. Maybe work for a non-profit like I started out at.
yep, if I'm not mistaken he has an article named "first retire.. then get rich" where he mentions learning carpentry or something like that and making even more money, even tho he wouldn't need it
He has another article where he mentions that since he refused to remove the word "badassity" from his blog, the credit card companies revoked his affiliate agreement, costing him something like 800 dollars a month in blog revenues. But apparently this wasn't a big deal.
There are of course many other factors that go into it. One that may very well work in your favor is saving while living in a big city, then moving some place small later on. This could cut your living expenses by a percentage big enough to make a very significant difference in the number of years you have to work.
Of course, once you involve kids, the whole thing becomes a lot less predictable.