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Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

The rule of thumb is that you can safely withdraw about 3% of you saving annually (same say 4%, some say 2.5%, depends on how risky you want to be).

So estimate what you can save over 10 years and determine if you're willing (or capable) of living on 3% of that.

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This is pretty much it. Let’s say at 50 you’re comfortable living off of 4% of your assets, which should have a reasonably high chance of providing income throughout your retirement without depleting your principal. This 4% is assuming 7% market returns before 3% inflation.

How much are you willing to live off as income? If you need $40,000/yr (before taxes) you’ll require $1m in savings. $60,000 requires $1.5m. Tax-advantaged savings like a Roth IRA improve things here a bit but we can ignore it for a general ballpark idea.

Let’s say you’re frugal and only need $40,000. You’ll have to save up $1,000,000 in invested assets over a decade. Given expected 4% inflation-adjusted returns, this works out to around $85,000 in savings each year (adjusted upward 3% each year for inflation).

In order to afford those savings, after tax and $40,000 in annual expenses, I’d guesstimate you’ll likely need somewhere in the ballpark of $150,000/yr of income. Again, adjusted upward 3% every year for inflation.

By the same math, if you want to live off $80,000 a year, you’ll probably need to earn $350,000 or more annually over that decade. The number more than doubles because of the increased taxes at those kinds of incomes.

This is easy. Just find a job that pays you $350,000 a year.

Just get a job as a SDE in Netflix or Renaissance Technologies. /s

LOL. Not a problem. If only you could’ve predicted the future, 20 years ago, that Netflix would’ve paid their software engineers $350,000 a year.

Back then, Netflix was just some silly DVD rental business.

Then, you could’ve studied and did whatever you could to land such a job with them.

That's is easy (just spend 4 months memorizing algorithms and hack the tech interview). The problem is to keep working on that kind of job for 10 years (after a few months they would realise that the only reason you passed the tech interview is because you memorized algorithms... then you would get FIREd).

How many golf balls can you fit into a Boeing 747?

And somehow, this question is related to engineering world class software systems. I’m still trying to figure out how.

I mean, the goal is to retire in ten years starting from scratch. And that number is assuming you want to have a reliable $80k/yr income without ever depleting your principal.

If it only took the median income, everyone you know would be retired at 35.

The guy asked a question and it was answered. Retiring from nothing in ten years is hard. Retiring from nothing in ten years with an above-median retirement income is even harder. Is that supposed to be surprising?

I’m all ears for your better plan.

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