![]() How can you say it will cut the time in half if you don’t know what the stock market is going to do? Or how do you know this will be enough money to get you through retirement? These projections are assuming 1) a 5% return from investments (after inflation) and 2) a 4% safe withdrawal rate. The Limitation of the Shockingly Simple MathĪs you read this you might start to think that all of these projections depend on a lot of what-ifs. 50% savings rate) can just about cut your expected time to retirement to about 17 years. For example, getting your expenses to match your savings (i.e. By increasing your savings rate, you can vastly shorten your time til retirement. Or the best option, you could try for both. This would also increase your savings rate if you contributed that extra money to your savings. Honestly, these look pretty low to me already but if you were looking to lower your expenses, these items probably have the most opportunity.Īlternatively, you could look into getting a new job or a higher income. The three expense items I’d look at are groceries, phone/internet/utilities, and monthly incidentals. First, you can look into decreasing your expenses. If you’d like to expedite your route to retirement, there’s two options here. ![]() Still, with allowing for some error in the estimates, we’re likely still going to retire to in a common amount of time for retirement (perhaps a little early in our 50s). This person is contributing to their retirement account, investing in a brokerage, paying off our mortgage, saving for their kid’s college, living on roughly half of their take-home. Savings / (Savings + Expenses) * 100 = 850 / (850 + 2100) * 100 = 28.81%.Īs I will show later, using an expected 5% return on investments, this would put you on track to retire in about 25-28 years. Let’s say, after taxes this hypothetical person takes home $5,000/month – here is a breakdown of how they might categorize their budget.Īdding all of this up we get the following values for each category: To share my thinking, I’ve put together a mock scenario below on a completely made up budget definitely not representing my own. There are many more grey areas in a monthly budget and ultimately you’ll have to come up with what makes the most sense for you. The same goes for my daughter’s college fund, it’s money that I contribute each month but is a gift I plan to give at a later date – this money will have no direct impact on my living in retirement. I plan to be mortgage free before retirement.). As such, I treat my mortgage payment as neither an expense or money saved – it’s in it’s own bucket (“neither”) as it’s not going towards money I can use in retirement and it’s not a recurring expense I expect to have in retirement (i.e. Your home is an investment but it’s also something you need to live in you can’t use the equity for retirement but not having a mortgage payment in retirement will lower your monthly bills. ![]() If the line item is not something that will directly impact your finances in retirement, then I would categorize it as “neither”. For each of these, my answer is “neither”. You may start to wonder things like “Does my mortgage count for savings or expenses?” Or “What about a college fund for my kids?”. When looking at your take-home pay, at first glance it can be pretty straight forward to divide things up to Savings or Expenses. Sounds easy enough but this is probably where the simplicity ends. To expand on this, your savings rate is simply the amount of money you save each month divided by the amount of money you save month plus the amount of money you spend. Your savings rate, as a percentage of your take-home pay. Your time to reach retirement depends on only one factor: In this article, he details how the most important number in your financial independence journey is: your savings rate. ![]() This idea purely comes from MMM blog on this same topic. The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement This leads me to the topic of this article. For example, there’s the detailed analysis on killing your $1,000 grocery bill or how investing about half your take-home pay will allow you to retire in about 17 years. One thing that MMM does great is, with a few assumptions, he reduces complex investing strategies into simple rules of thumb. He wasn’t my introduction to personal finance but his content fundamentally changed my approach to personal finance and, more than anything, made me less afraid of digging deeper (as opposed to just accepting some very rough cookie cutter solution – cough Dave Ramsey cough). Money Mustache (referred to as MMM hereafter). It may come as no surprise but I am a fan of Mr. ![]()
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