MMM Reader Case Study: The Man who didn’t Realize he was already Rich
This week, Mr. Money Mustache was honored to answer more calls for help from his readers. There was one in particular who had an interesting situation, and was generous enough to let me share it with you (anonymously of course) after we were finished the email discussion. We’ll call the reader SAM – short for Surprisingly Advanced Mustache.
Check this out and see if any of it sounds similar your own situation:
Age: 41.
Family: 2 parents and one young kid.
Desire: To enjoy some form of Mustachian early retirement.
Fear: He did not feel he would be able to accomplish this until at least age 65 based on his current situation.
Current Spending Situation:
Salary: $70,000 annual (one worker, one stay-at-home parent)
Living Expenses: $2351 including mortgage at $1250
Remaining Mortgage Amount: 140,000
Current Saving Situation:
Retirement Account Balance (401k/IRA): $300,000
Emergency Fund or Rainy Day savings: $80,000
Annual Savings Rate: About $28,000 including 401k, IRA, and additions to the Rainy Day Fund
What do you think? Is Sam almost ready to for Early Retirement, or still 25 years away as he fears? Let’s find out right now!
What I am quickly realizing is that MMM readers are all in rather different situations.
For people with high incomes and low savings, the solution is getting people motivated to find interesting ways to streamline their lifestyle.
But many of the self-selected crowd who read an Early Retirement blog like this are already quite frugal. The situation above, for example, describes someone spending even less than we do in the MMM household, for a family of the same size. For these people, the solution might be a bit of financial wizardry. It is at this point that Mr. Money Mustache fires up the Turntable on the right – the one with Ulysses S. Grant from the $50 bill instead of just the $1 Washington platter.
1: Let’s look at Sam’s retirement balance*. It’s $300,000 right now, which is actually a fairly sizable ‘Stash. But lest the younger folks get discouraged, this is the amount you end up with if you just let your 401K run with auto-deductions of $1000/month from age 25 to 40 and it compounds at 7%**.
If Sam stops contributing right now, this balance will automatically grow to about a Million Bucks by the time he is 60, even after adjusting for inflation. So it is already on-track to be much more than he needs to live on from age 60, for an unlimited time, living only off of the passive income it gains. And not even counting some eventual Social Security income! ***
2: We’ve established that Sam is DONE saving for old-age retirement. Now he just has to get enough money to get from his current age until age 60 when the Million Dollar Retirement kicks in. How much does he need to do this?
His family is living on $2351 per month right now – $28,000 per year. To generate that much income with no work, he would need another $403,000 working at 7%. With $80k in the bank right now and a $28k annual savings rate, he is already less than eight years away from a full retirement if he continually invests the early retirement money as he goes along.
It’s actually even better than this – because the assumption above assumes that he uses none of the $403,000 principal to live on, only the investment gains it and dividends it generates. And it assumes he never makes another cent after he retires – I believe most people who retire well under 60 will find they WANT to do some paid work occasionally to keep their minds sharp and to have challenging interactions with other adults.
So here was the final MMM prescription for Sam:
1 – Immediately put your $80,000 rainy day fund into a mixed 60% stock/40% bond fund (adding the bond component makes the return far less volatile – this is important since you will be starting to use this money in less than 10 years and need lower risk). If you simply buy the Vanguard balanced fund (VBINX), this whole step is done with just a few clicks.
You can set up a line of credit on your house, which you won’t actually use, for small rainy days, and of course you can always sell shares of VBINX whenever you want if there is more rain.
** Since the past 15 years happened to span both a crazy boom and a crazy bust which we’re just coming out of, how are the 40-year-olds of today doing? Well, as of May 2011, a $1000/month investor would have STILL averaged just about 7% compounded including the dividends, which have have averaged 1.84% per year. That is the magic of Dollar Cost Averaging to help smooth out price fluctuations in the long term. But but this is an unusual result so hang in there. The stock market has already recovered most of the losses it made during the Great Recession.
*** Social Security: contrary to popular belief among grumpy people with limited training in macroeconomics, the Social Security fund is absolutely NOT going bankrupt, it will simply adjust to a modestly lower level of payouts than currently scheduled. More on that in a future article.
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Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to write this blog to educate the world on how it is done.
I am very envious of this person! I wish I I was in this situation.
Here are some steps I’ve been taking to prepare for my early retirement.
1. Emptied my money market that was paying .05%
2. Emptied my savings account paying .025%
3. Purchased iBond at TreasuriesDirect and requested paperwork to be able to buy another via post. This will allow me to double dip and bypass the 5K limit and obtain a 4.6% rate on rainy day funds.
4. Opened a brokerage account and purchased IWB. I chose IWB because it offers a comparable fee to Vanguard and I can turn it into cash immediately with no problems and no roundtrip bs to deal with. I will be dollar cost averaging into IWB this summer to even out any market fluctuations and keep my wife from freaking out if the market caves next week.
5. Keeping an extra month expenses in checking for bills and summer vacation
6. Printed a spreadsheet for my predicted goals so I can keep motivated and compare to actual progress.
So the family profiled is spending approx. $1100/month, not including their mortgage expense? I don’t want to sound like a hater, but holy cow! How are they pulling that off???
I’d like to think we’re conscious about our spending, but were are twice that amount each month with no mortgage/rent payment of any type.
Tell me how it’s done! Inquiring minds want to know!
$1100/month for a family of 3 – where do they live?!
I dunno, that doesn’t seem too difficult… I did grad school in an expensive city (Ottawa), and we brought up two young kids on less than that. About $400 a month for food, $75 for transit, $120 for diapers and kid clothes, $150 for grownup clothes and beauty and stuff, $100 for phone/internet, $50 for incidentals, $120 for heat and electric. Of course, our entertainment budget was near nil.
“You could drop down to about quarter-time employment, just enough for free health insurance and a thousand or two dollars of easy income per month.”
-Seriously? I’d love to see a list of companies that provide free health insurance to quarter-(or even half-) time employees. Inquiring savers want to know.
Hi Diane – excellent point that I’m sure other readers have wondered too. We’ll definitely explore that more in upcoming articles and hear from others who are actually doing it (including my wife).
Part of the magic of becoming more financially independent over time is that you realize it is YOU that gets to set the rules of how life works, not a particular employing company. To an employer, health insurance is just a monthly bill, just like your paycheck and your payroll taxes. When you negotiate a part-time position for yourself, everything is up in the air and negotiable. What work you will do, your hours and work location, your benefits, and your pay.
Early retirees tend to be a pretty confident bunch with some very useful self-management skills. Exactly the type of people who can get real work done, and thus the type of people many company owners would like to hire as contractors. So there are a surprising amount of work opportunities that pop up. I think many of these people also have some entrepreneurial spirit and tend to start their own small businesses, so negotiating for “free” health insurance might be as simple as asking themselves for it over a few beers ;-)
How do you figure that a 7% withdrawal rate is “safe”? Most literature suggests no more than 3.5% for early retirees; are you forgetting inflation?
I am curious as well about your 7% withdrawal rate. Will this persons expenses ever rise with inflation? Seems to me that utilities and food expenses go up every year a little bit therefore they will need more income each year which if they pull out of savings will draw down thier nest egg.
Also, what about market volatility? What happens if the year he retires we see a market correction of 10%? His 403K goes down to 362,700 minus the 28k he needs to withdrawal for living expenses so all the way down to 334,700 after only one year of early retirement. Couple bad years early on could wipe out his dreams of early retirement.
You Doubters have inspired me to do some more articles on the Safe Withdrawal rate and the various probabilities of success.
But for now, think about this quick answer: I told the reader he needed the four hundred thousand JUST TO GET FROM AGE 45 OR SO TO AGE 60. So that chunk of cash only has to last 15 years. After that, he switches to using the million-dollar 401K fund.
For a 15 year withdrawal period, the historically safe withdrawal rate is actually more like 8-9%, rather than the 7% suggested. So I was being CONSERVATIVE rather than optimistic.
Mr. Money Mustache is always Optimistic about the awesome power of people to work hard and spend less money, and Conservative about his assumptions about passive investment gains.
You can start your reading here while I write more of the fancy article: http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_Withdrawal_Rates
Is it wise to put VBINX in a taxable account while still working as the bond yields are taxed as ordinary income? Depending on his effective tax rate, wouldn’t he be better off with the tax-managed balanced fund (VTMFX) or buying a combo of Total stock market (VTSMX) and something like the intermidiate term tax exempt fund (VWITX)?
Wonder is there are UK comparisons for US savings accounts.
I currently have
ISAs (cash or equity – max c£11k a year)after tax savings but income is tax free.
SIPP (pension – cash goes in gross – max £50K)
Company pension (cash goes in gross – shares same £50K 6% from me gets 12% free from my employer but everyones situation is different)
Interesting example you used – very similar to my own situation
Just found a UK tilted spreadsheet elsewhere on your website that suggests I am able to retires at 51 – I am 44 just now.
Alas in the UK I cant touch my pension pot until I am 55.
MMM — I realize this post is quite old, but I just discovered your site and I love it! I am trying to understand one small point in the article. You state:
Your VBINX fund will have compounded to about 100k by this point. You can safely withdraw $10,000 per year from that and it will only run out right as your million-dollar 401k fund kicks in.
If only five years have passed, he’s still only 46, right? And if his million-dollar 401k fund won’t be ready until he’s 60, doesn’t he have four more years to cover in between?
Thanks so much!
Remember that the $100k will still take ten years to deplete as you use it up, and the remaining balance will still be in there working for you. So after a year, you’ll still have 90k in there at work, and so on.
Thanks for the follow-up!
Or, you could retire in about 6 months.
$380,000 – $140,000 mortgage = $240,000
Monthly expenses = $2351 – $1250(mortgage pmt) = $1101
To retire with the same lifestyle in perpetuity, one needs $1101 x 12 (months) x 20 (inverse of 5% annual passive earning on investments) = $264,240.
So Sam, pay the mortgage today.
Invest your time at the margin in learning to manage money instead of engineering or leisure – because your return on a $240k portfolio for skilled money management vs the foolproof idiot way of index funds will far surpass $70k / yr you get as an engineer. Pretty much everyone in an engineering / architecture / doctor / scientist / construction / contractor / entrepreneur role should get >$100k by the time they’re 40. Unless the job is the best possible way you can imagine spending your time, they’re paying you peanuts. Kill the mortgage RIGHT NOW, put in 6 more months at the job, hit your target portfolio size, and do whatever you want for the rest of your life.
If you insist on remaining financially retarded, then go with the ultra-bulletproof Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme number of 4% annual perpetual savings interest, and your target = $330,300. Still, kill the mortgage RIGHT NOW (why are you paying a bank to borrow money that YOU HAVE), work 12-24 months as an engineer (you’re saving $56,788 per year now that you have no mortgage), and pull the trigger on retirement when you reach a slightly higher target.