I haven't got to 10m yet, but I saved 70-80% of my take home pay since ~2008 and I have enough to quit at any time and live the rest of my life without working. That is just by investing in the 3-fund portfolio and without the crazy SF salaries.

No one knows you here. Give some real numbers. How much are you paying for housing? What’s your gross pay?

Numbers don't matter. If you can save 80% of your paycheck for 15-20 years and you invest it wisely, you are FI on the 4% rule.

So exactly how do you save 80% off of $175K and live off of $30K a year? Especially considering everything above your 401K max is post tax?

That’s only twice the minimum wage and even in Atlanta they are offering cashiers at McDonalds more than that.

Before Covid, I lived on about 25K a year since I had a paid off condo then. Now, I am renting and live on around 36K a year. I realize my situation doesn't work for everyone. Some people cannot fathom not buying a new phone and computer every year and a new car every 3 years.

Also, now, I am fully working from home so that helps with saving on gas and not eating out as much. I make my coffee every morning instead of Starbucks on the way to work and I make my own lunch and dinner 95% of the time.

We aren’t talking about buying a new phone. We are talking about buying a place to live and food to eat.

What is the average rent where you live for a one bedroom? What is the tech hiring seen like?

Do you have kids?

No kids, rent is $1800 a month for a 1 bedroom. I could rent the same for cheaper but I like this place. I'm in Washington State, Software Devs make decent money where I am but not SF wages. I make good money but nowhere near the top. I have an easy job, WFH and rarely work over 40 a week.

You do not understand compounding growth.

You could have looked up the numbers for indices yourself, but here you go -

S&P500 -> ~4 million

NDXT (top 100 tech) -> ~14 million.

> just save 100k out of your 170k comp

Yes, that was my starting salary, and that's almost exactly what I saved.

This calculation assumes your salary is somewhat constant and maxed out as the person I was responding to claimed, but in my experience you can expect your tech salary to double every ~5-6 years.

Your math seems way off?

NDXT went from ~2300 in 2015 to ~12500 in 2025. That's ~5.5x return. So even if you had your whole 1M saving in 2015, you'd only have 5.5M now. No idea how you get nearly 3x that?

And it's way worse if you take the actual scenario which is 100k added every year instead of starting with the 1M.

S&P500 is worse yet, at about 3.5x total return if you had the whole million at the start.

Really appreciate your comment, literally the only comment in this long sub-thread that picked up on the nonsensical numbers fooker put out.

Realistically fooker's investment strategy into NDXT of 100k over 10 years would have produced around $2.5M depending on exact timing in the year and partitioning of that 100k. Way less than $15M nonsense. Also would have required extreme conviction alike the crypto types and completely counter how typically multi-million portfolios are managed (diversified).

Also, who needs 15M, at 5M net wealth there honestly is no reason to be working at a $200k/year job. You'll make way more after-tax income even assuming lousy 5% yearly return thru capital gains. Same story for 2.5M @ 10%.

Counting on 10% returns long term is way to aggressive especially when you have to consider sequence of returns risks during withdrawals. Even 5% is not conservative enough while you are in the withdrawal phase.

If I had $5 million of investments outside of my home, would I work? Maybe? My job is far from stressful, I work from home, I “retired” my wife over 5 years ago when she was 44 eight years into our marriage so she could pursue her passions and we could travel a lot.

All of my friends still work so what could I possibly do with my free time that I don’t do now? The only restrictions that not working would lift is that we could more easily spend an extended amount of time outside of US time zones.

> Counting on 10% returns long term is way to aggressive especially when you have to consider sequence of returns risks during withdrawals

Yes though the propose is not to retire. There's better things to do with your life (IMO) than work a standard 9-5 job for some corporation once you've accumulated sufficient wealth to have financial independence.

> Even 5% is not conservative enough while you are in the withdrawal phase.

Assuming you spend 5% per year. 5M@5% is 250k, 200k+ after tax for CG + eligible divs. That's a lot of money to spend every year, more than most families get to earn thru their labor yearly. Can be secured against downturns with higher 4%+ bond allocations too. 5M is financial independence for vast majority of households. 2.5M can be as well for many if their baseline spend remains at 100k.

> All of my friends still work so what could I possibly do with my free time that I don’t do now?

Financial independence provides vast opportunities for those with ideas but lacking time. There's a reason most businesses are pursued by those who have financial wealth on their side.

I calculated saving $100K out of $170K gross some pre tax and most post tax is living off of around $1800 a month.

And again, expecting your salary to double every six or seven years is not realistic for most developers.

Most developers making around $120K in 2013, aren’t making $480K now.

$170K as a starting salary, scratch that, as any salary, is already way beyond the average SWE salary.

That’s true. I said “top out at”. When I left AWS working in the ProServe (cloud consulting division) in 2023, I was seeing “architect” positions in Atlanta - I didn’t live there any more, but most of my network was still there - topping out at $175k. But for “senior” developers it was even less.

I obviously decided to stay in consulting and work full time for a third party consulting company.

Shit, dump that $100k into bitcoin at the low point of 2015, and you'd have $37 million today. Easy!