How do you know when to retire?

Hi everyone,

I hope everyone's doing well.

I'm looking to learn a bit about, as the title suggests, retiring.

Specificially, I want to know typical ages of retirement of those in industries like IB/PE/CO/HF/VC etc. (overall industries who typically hold the top percentiles of earners), strategies they utilise to build personal wealth, & other relevant information to ultimately plan out for myself & what I can do now to get there.

I want to understand the following:

1. How to assume what I might spend/figure out my habits later on in the future.

As a prospect who is 18 and no actual experience in learning how I will spend as I grow, I find it hard to extrapolate my habits now to later. For example, I love to travel, I love cars - but how frequently will I travel/buy a car - what is the average expectation I will go on holiday, or buy a car once retired?

2. Real people in industry's approach (What assumptions people tend to make on the above).

This would be great for context. i.e. perhaps people with more experience in life who understands themselves better - their typical spending, what their lifestyle is (frugal/enjoyable/excessive spender etc.) could shed some light on what portion of their portion of their income gets invested ASAP, when they would like to retire, what they want to do in their retirement, and how they have planned to incorporate this.

3. Typical Investing Strategies - & their internal polar opposites.

To build on this further, I read on the "Financial Independence, Retire Early" (FIRE) approach which you can click here. I want to know what the FAT/Lean/Barista FIRE models are like in practice (their definitions are below).

"Fat FIRE—This is for the individual with a traditional lifestyle who aims to save substantially more than the average worker but doesn’t want to reduce their current standard of living. It generally takes a high salary and aggressive savings and investment strategies for it to work.

Lean FIRE—This requires stringent adherence to minimalist living and extreme savings, necessitating a far more restricted lifestyle. Many Lean FIRE adherents live on $25,000 or less per year.

Barista FIRE—This is for people who want to exist between the two choices above. They quit their traditional 9-to-5 jobs but use a combination of part-time work and savings to live a less-than-minimalist lifestyle. The former lets them obtain health coverage, while the latter prevents them from dipping into their retirement funds."

Take the example of the Lean model. It gives us a figure of USD25,000 a year - but no additional measures to achieve this & what it actually looks like in reality. I wonder how people cut down their expenditure to follow a stricter regime like this, what does their typical lifestyle look like etc. - not just for this strategy, but for all.

I'd love to learn about other strategies & what the typical approaches within them look like on an actual day-to-day basis in their lives

4. Locations, Tax, & Career Development - Is moving abroad feasible to reduce tax, but without detriment to career?

In an industry like IB, where NYC/London are known as the financial hubs of the world & accommodate the best talents, the best firms, work on the best deals and so on - how much does it affect your career to seek opportunities abroad to reduce your tax & try increase the size of your investing (amidst a likely larger cost of living)?

Do you suffer from a lack of development as opposed to your London counterparts?  I have heard this is the case when moving to newer regions like MENA (Dubai being a great example) where the pay may be attractive given their tax policies compared to London, but work is much less frequent (heard almost like a 9-5), and as colleagues try to move back to London, their experiences in MENA are discredited/set them back a year.

(Again this is from what I have heard , so take it with a pinch of salt. I may be wrong).

Are there genuine opportunities for people to jump ship (perhaps to Zurich from London), for favourable taxation without fear of hindering your development in your career?

Or is it most appropriate to try work your way up to a position of authority and from there move around, given you have already established your position within a great location (i.e. VP/MD in London) & can now benefit from better taxation rates abroad with little need to cater to career development as such.

Further to my knowledge, PE/CO seem to be good industries should someone wish to move around especially - with PE likely being favourable given it's larger pay over Consulting. But can people talk to this with their personal experience?

5. What can I do to incorporate my average expenditure & create a tangible retirement figure?

Final one, slightly odd one. But how can I create a rough figure to achieve successful retirement that would incorporate inputs like: inflation, my average spending habits, what age I seek to retire - inputs which I can freely alter as I learn more.

I've seen people experiment with rough calculations in Excel - but have no idea at the moment what would be best to use. Can someone suggest anything to perhaps map this out?

thanks in advance & thanks for reading - look foward to some insight being shed on this topic & learning from your guys' experience.