How do I become wealthy enough to retire in 10-15 years?

Congrats on breaking into IB! That’s a great first step. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) is what you seem to be looking for.

Essentially, a regular retirement age is mid-60s, and the idea is to lower the retirement age by increasing your investment/ savings rate. You are essentially buying back your time.

First, you need to determine how much you expect to spend annually during retirement. Let’s say 80k in this case. Then, you multiply this figure by 25x. Now, your Financial Independence (FI) number is 2m. Essentially, the idea is that a Safe Withdrawal Rate (SWR) is 4% (Most commonly cited figure based on the Trinity Study - you can Google it). It’s not perfect, since your retirement length matters, but it’s a great heuristic.

Next, you need to figure out your monthly/ annual contribution amount. Here is where the online calculator on Investor dot gov comes in handy. Here you can input your initial investment amount, guess your annual contribution amount, length of time investing, and expected interest rate to see what your final retirement balance is planned to be. To actually achieve about 7% real returns, you can do a mix of about 80% VTI and 20% VXUS index funds. As you grow much older, then you can add in bonds for security.

Also, make sure you look at FireCalc and play around with estimates there. While retiring in a decade seems tough, it’s doable if you have your FI number in mind and can contribute enough funds into your investments. Of course, this is a simplification and pretty dependent on market conditions especially since ten years is not a very, very long time in the market at all.

Finally, I would like to point out an observation. Most people in finance shy away from FIRE, since hours and especially control of your time generally gets better as you progress and pay increases exponentially. It’s very tough to walk away when you are doing well in your late 30s/40s and it feels much more sustainable than the analyst stint you vaguely remember completing a couple decades ago. Usually, tech individuals are more drawn to it because of the general income ceiling that software engineers experience. However, FI should be applicable for everyone. If you invest at an early age and invest a solid amount, then compound interest works for you. It’s essentially the antithesis of the Golden Handcuffs that you see IB VPs experiencing and especially important in this recessionary environment. I’m not sure if the RE part is applicable to me yet, but I’m a strong advocate of FI.

Wishing you the very best!

Note: I would suggest exploring the FI/FIRE/ FATFIRE sub-Reddits as well.