How much to retire and live a nice luxury life?

How much $ would you want saved up to quit your high paid job and retire early with the following criteria:

  • retire young (21-25 years old) so the retirement money will need to be enough to last you 50+ years
  • be enough $ to make up for leaving a high paid job such as IBD earning $250k+ a year and also the opportunity cost to know if you stay in banking for another couple years you will be on $500k+ as a VP
  • be enough to live a nice life (i.e. not having to live cheap and not having to move to a cheap location) examples include: having a nice house in a nice major city, enjoying frequent fancy holidays, able to regularly go for fancy dinners and night outs with friends, enough to look after a future family with kids, enough to cover any future emergency expenses such as medical.

In my head I feel the minimum to meet the above criteria would be $10m but perhaps it's possible with less? What's everyone's thoughts and rationale?

5 Comments
 

More than $10m. Probably closer to $15m. The "3% rule" (or 2%, or 4%, depending on whom you ask) includes an implicit assumption that the person retiring and drawing down 3% of his assets every year is doing so starting at or around age 60, and will live to be 90-100. So if you're thinking about retiring in your twenties, you should assume that a safe withdraw rate is 2% at most.

So at $10m that's $200k / year. Not *that* nice a life in an expensive metro area. $15m in principal yields you $300k, etc. 

And take the stress of work out of your life, combined with ever improving medical innovations, and you may well live to be 100. Bottom line, keep saving and re: making money, plan for more of a marathon and less of a sprint. 

 

Y'all crazy. Grew up in the NYC area and my family has $10 mil net worth and my parents have lived this type of lifestyle for a fraction of what is being claimed by others. My parents haven't been working "as hard" as they used to when they were 50. Wouldn't call them retired but more "chill/relaxed."

Very few people can retire at 21-25. One of my relatives retired at 38 after selling a tech startup pre-dot com bubble burst (circa 1999/2000 ish) and has a net worth of $30+ million. He still consults on the side for companies because he thinks retirement is boring.

 

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