For those who have managed to retire early, I am wondering what was the hardest part, and is there a point when saving for retirement gets easier?
Your post made me wonder how you might measure the difficulty. I use the software program, Money, to keep track of my finances so I plotted out my net worth as a function of time and built the table below. I retired last year and have normalized my net worth over time to the value at retirement. So column 1 is this normalized final nest egg value. Then I took that value (in increments of 0.005 of the final value) and divided it by the number of days of my life it took to achieve that value.
As an example, if the final net worth at retirement were $2M, then 0.005 of that is $10,000. The first row of the table indicates that it took 11,445 days of my life (I started from birth) to achieve that net worth. The next row shows that I accumulated the next $10,000 at a rate of $10,000 every 5982 days. Note that the second column is not incremental. I achieved the 0.010 final nest egg net worth 518 days after the first 0.005 mark. But the column is calculated by dividing the net worth by my total life time in days at that point.
Net Worth . . . . . . .
as Percent . . . . . . .Days to
of Value at . . . . . . .Earn 0.005
Retirement . . . . . . .of final nest egg
0.005.......................11,445
0.010.........................5,982
0.025.........................2,539
0.050.........................1,342
0.10..............................708
0.25..............................306
0.50..............................163
1.00................................91
Another way to look at this is incrementally. That is shown below.
So in this table, the first row shows that it took 518 days for me to double my net worth from 0.005 of the final value to 0.010 of the final value. The second row shows that it took 487 days to get from 0.010 to 0.020 of the final value.
Net Worth . . . . Days
as Percent . . . . to
of Value at . . . . Double
Retirement . . . . Net Worth
======== ========
0.010..................518.00
0.020..................487.00
0.040..................609.00
0.080..................730.00
0.160................1096.00
0.320..................701.00
0.640................1095.00
My timeline starts in March 1954, but I really didn't get out of grad school and start earning money till July 1984. So the tables above represent my net worth growth through the lated 80's, the 1990's, up till March 2003. It represents moving and buying 3 houses while selling 2, changing jobs and locations twice plus all the career nonsense of raises/promotions etc. I have not included pension values or social security in the net worth calculations.