re: What’s a great net worth by 45?

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I’m 42 and north of that and I’m terrible with money. Made a lot of mistakes over the years but doing fine at 42 and my goal is to be at 8 figures by 52-55.

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I have always thought that things like this would make a great tv show. Unless someone inherits money or owns a successful business how is it possible to work for someone else and accumulate 10 million dollars by 55? Not questioning just so interested to know how possible or what I am doing wrong. Household income > 500k year? Genuinely impressed and happy for people able to accomplish things like this.

Definitely possible, but takes some high paying careers (especially early!), hard work, clean living, and some fortunate timing. Save like hell and have tremendous capability for delayed gratification.

One example: Couple starts at $200k combined income at 23 years old, with $100k annual spend and saves the rest. Salary and spend both increase by 3% a year. Savings earns 4% a year. That gets you very close to $10M in about 33 years. Not saying it’s easy, but not impossible.

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Have to be self-employed or get really, really lucky in real estate. Or both.

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You can make it working for a large company with high salaries, stock and stock options.

But part of that is still getting lucky.

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but you have to know what to do early, be capable of doing it, and have the discipline to do it.

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They are all essential but I feel like the bold is the real key.

Even at a high salary, you don’t have a great shot if you spend your 20s and early 30s fricking around.

Saving and planning for retirement isn’t exactly a popular topic amongst those fresh out of school but you can get a HUGE jump on your peers (and people in general) if you commit to investing a significant portion of your income from day 1.

If you and your spouse both commit to aggressive saving from day 1 (and you have careers/jobs that pay you enough to save a bunch while still having a nice life) then it’s possible to get to that 10m mark even if you never work for yourself.

I could make it to 10M by 65 (in theory of course), but I think I'd be happier with 2-4M at 55 with some good years of family/travel. My old man worked until 70. He hit his target, but sadly he passed away not long after. Life is short. Everyone on this board is probably of the personality type where we get hung up on the numbers. I try to remind myself often, it's about LIFE. We aren't guaranteed a tomorrow.

I plan on working until 65 but mainly because I have a low stress job, get paid well, and have great benefits. My goal is to get my wife to retire much earlier than me. She had the more stressful job and commute.

Without getting into too many specifics, we started saving very early, both experienced rapid career and salary growth, bonuses that become material and the big kicker is the deferred compensation packages. Deferred comp can be like having a third working member of the family. When you live on one income and save 100% of the other and then add material deferred comp on top of it…early retirement becomes reasonable. It also takes a lot of introspection of what you value in life to walk away from big comp plans.

We’ve had some expense expansion over the years but income has far outpaced. The process I described earlier in this thread is automated so there isn’t anything we have to do to continue the snowball.

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Without getting into too many specifics, we started saving very early, both experienced rapid career and salary growth, bonuses that become material and the big kicker is the deferred compensation packages. Deferred comp can be like having a third working member of the family. When you live on one income and save 100% of the other and then add material deferred comp on top of it…early retirement becomes reasonable. It also takes a lot of introspection of what you value in life to walk away from big comp plans. We’ve had some expense expansion over the years but income has far outpaced. The process I described earlier in this thread is automated so there isn’t anything we have to do to continue the snowball.

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Wife and both worked for a company that the stock went from $30 to $500 over the last 12 years and we both received stock and stock options.

Now she’s working in Texas doing it again with a startup.

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Starting 401ks early really helps wit( this

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this is where I messed up. catching up now, but rough.

45 net worth....depends upon how you start. the big questions would be:

did work when you were a teenager, and did you drink it away or did you save some?
student loans?
did parents help with down payment for your first house?

A well-funded and well-managed pension is huge…just retired at 50 and calculated what I will pull in yearly with COLA till I leave this world for heaven would have required me to hypothetically have $2.5 million in the bank today to allow me to pull out 4% infinitum. Pretty good deal.

That’s not counting my version of a 401k which is high six figures and would have been more if I had just let it ride in index fund.

Pay GOD first - its His money and He allows us opportunity to good or bad with it.

Pay yourself second and like others said, max out 401k annual limits and after 50 catch up…you can’t afford not to.