Very small networth when ER ?

[Enuff2Eat]

It seems like lots of folks here retire early with a massive of net worth. I like to see if anyone actually pull the trigger with a small networth.

would you share your networth (asset) and age when you pull the trigger?

less than or equal to $100k
less than or equal to $250k

less than or equal to $1/2 million
less than or equal to $600k
less than or equal to $750k
less than or equal to $800k
less than or equal to $1 million
less than or equal to $1.5 million
less than or equal to $2 million

more than $2million

----------------
If your number is big enough... why are you still working? health care? boredom? 1 more year syndrome? fear out live your saving?..or Where would you want your number to be when you retire?

We are in the "less than or equal to $1.5 million" but too scare and too young to pull the trigger.

enuff

 

[Meadbh]

The answer to this question means nothing when pensions are not taken into account.

 

[2017ish]

Much depends upon whether one has a pension and healthcare until 65 from employment. If in that position, you clearly don't need as big of additional liquid net worth. [Meadbh beat me to it!]

Much also depends upon your spending plans.

We have no pension/insurance, and plan to spend more discretionary in retirement than we did for ourselves when working. Retiring at 57/56 with a good deal "more."

 

[Major Tom]

A poll would be good in this thread, even if, as already stated, lack of information on other income sources such as pensions, renders the results fairly meaningless. I suppose you could multiply the payout from a pension by a set factor (somewhere in the range of 25 - 50) to come up with an equivalent NW. In fact, the only way to make the results abundantly enlightening would be to include as much information as possible on all income sources, spending levels, general lifestyle, health insurance, housing etc etc. Luckily, spending lots of time reading these forums in detail will yield that kind of information if you have the time and the inclination.

Questions and polls like this are good for prurient interest though, if nothing else. Kind of like the financial equivalent of looking at pictures of (insert name of favorite movie or reality TV star here).

If it helps, Enuff2Eat, I retired with not very much at all (a little over a third of what you have now), about 6 years ago. I would quite like a bit more money in order to travel but to be perfectly honest, my worst enemy in the quest for a happy and contented retirement is my natural tendency to live reclusively. I really do need a certain amount of social interaction in order to keep a certain level of "joie de vivre", but am blithely unaware of that fact most of the time. Anyway, that's a topic for an entirely different thread

 

[braumeister]

would you share your networth (asset) and age when you pull the trigger?

Net worth, as others pointed out, is only one factor out of many. So it's like having a coloring book with only one crayon.

OP, you've been a member here for over ten years, but the low post count indicates (to me, anyway) that you probably don't visit very often. I think if you got more into the habit of reading threads here about early retirement, nearly all your questions would be answered before long. Just a suggestion.

 

[REWahoo]

would you share your networth (asset) and age when you pull the trigger?

Sure - it was enuff. See age below.

 

[NW-Bound]

We are in the "less than or equal to $1.5 million" but too scare and too young to pull the trigger.

You are young, but how young? 40 young or 50 young? Or 60 young like myself? Children still in middle school, or out of college and earning a living?

Your $1.5M can provide a quite comfortable retirement if you do not have a mortgage, are an empty nester, and close to drawing a pension or SS. This is assuming you do not have a luxurious lifestyle in mind, with his and her German autos replaced every 4 years, vacation in the French Riviera, etc...

Run FIRECalc with SS, and see what you can spend, compared to what you are spending now.

Don't know what you are spending now? Nobody can help you then.

 

[Just_Steve]

The answer to this question means nothing when pensions are not taken into account.

Much depends upon whether one has a pension and healthcare until 65 from employment. If in that position, you clearly don't need as big of additional liquid net worth. [Meadbh beat me to it!]

Two very important points which allowed me to bail out @ 55.
Pretty small combined 457b & 401k less than $150k which are just being used as bridges to SS.
I honestly think I had about $900 between my checking and savings account but now after being retired for 1 year and 11 days my emergency fund is up to about a half years living expenses and growing.
Pension and no cost medical........God bless America and the tax payers of New York.

 

[pmac]

Net worth and retirement savings are two different things. For purposes of retiring, I think you should only be counting savings, (and factor in pensions, if any, and SS, depending on your age) not total net worth. I'm retiring in 2 weeks at 62. DW has been retired for 4 years and is 66, with a good state pension. We have total retirement savings of around $2M, about 900K taxable and 1.1M deferred. No debt with a paid for house in a LCOL area. The plan is for her to take SS next year with me taking at 70. Firecalc and i-orp look good.

But you never know until you jump in the pool. If you and your spouse are in good health, retiring under 60 with much less than $2M and a significant pension would scare the bejesus out of me, but I'm not much a risk taker on the "do you have enough" question. You may be different.

 

[calmloki]

67 now and rarely paid much into social security. No pensions. Upshot is what we make or have is what we live on. Good side is we have plenty of net worth to provide for our lifestyle, but we stay in the game with 37 mostly one bedroom rentals and loaning money out on property - which means NW continues to grow. I think about the fact that every birthday passed means I need maybe 5% less NW to get to the end. Nonetheless, color me chicken, but it is HARD to make the leap of faith living on NW takes.

 

[Bir48die]

Net worth is such an overused term. Should be investible assets plus some factor equated to you pension. Housing should be excluded unless you tapped it as a source of income. Instead of net worth it always comes back to income needed to cover said expenses and the various means to derive that income.

 

[Big_Hitter]

is this a pole?

 

[REWahoo]

No, it's a fence post.

 

[ESRwannabe]

I'd ER off of taxable $400k and a paid off house. Note I'm 40 and can start collecting on a pension at 60. My savings just need to get me to 60. My guess is I will be able to ER within the next five years.

 

[marko]

Net worth, COL, debt, age, SS/Pensions, Life expectancy, dependent children, geographic area all play into the calculation; which is quite a calculation come to think of it!

A NW alone of $X in SFO/NYC means something entirely different than it might in Iowa (for example...not singling out Iowans!)

 

[DrRoy]

+2M for the comfort of DW. Going in 3 months at 57.

 

[FUEGO]

We retired right at the $1.5 million mark and it's since grown to roughly $1.7 million, though I also started a side hustle that pays most of our admittedly small expenses.

A huge help is having that low income and 3 kids so our health insurance is near-zero ($16/mo for a $100 deductible plan in 2017; kids likely on medicaid but it's pretty awesome here and covers even more than our $100 deductible plan).

We also own a 4 bedroom home paid off. That's part of the $1.7 million ($145,000 is what I'm carrying it at on my net worth statement).

We get by pretty well and spend $30-40k/yr. Without a mortgage and only a very modest tax bill, most of that spending goes toward food and vacations plus big ticket items (major home renovations, "new" used car, etc). Since retiring, we've gone on ~2 cruises per year plus a long international summer vacation of 3-7 weeks (it'll be 9 weeks in Europe in 2017). I can't complain about life at all!

 

[travelover]

The answer to this question means nothing when pensions are not taken into account.

+1 DW and I both have pensions and heavily subsidized health care, plus a paid off house. We have not taken SS or any portfolio withdrawals. Different circumstances would provide a much different answer re portfolio size.

 

[aaronc879]

We are in the "less than or equal to $1.5 million" but too scare and too young to pull the trigger.
enuff

No such thing as "too young" to retire. If you have enough money then you can retire. I would have retired at 18 if I could. I'd retire tomorrow at age 37 if I could afford it.

 

[CDRE]

No such thing as "too young" to retire. If you have enough money then you can retire. I would have retired at 18 if I could. I'd retire tomorrow at age 37 if I could afford it.

+1

 

[braumeister]

aaronc879 brings up the thought that I think the vast majority of us have:

I'd retire tomorrow ... if I could afford it.

Still, this is such a new thing. My grandparents were able to retire, but their parents, born in the mid 19th century, had no such concept. Now some of us get to do it earlier, some later. Some of us can do it in more comfort, some less. but the fact that we can do it at all is just so remarkable that I don't have a lot of patience with those who complain about various aspects of it.

I think Wikipedia puts it rather well:

In most countries, the idea of retirement is of recent origin, being introduced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Previously, low life expectancy and the absence of pension arrangements meant that most workers continued to work until death. Germany was the first country to introduce retirement, in 1889.[5]

Nowadays, most developed countries have systems to provide pensions on retirement in old age, which may be sponsored by employers and/or the state. In many poorer countries, support for the old is still mainly provided through the family. Today, retirement with a pension is considered a right of the worker in many societies, and hard ideological, social, cultural and political battles have been fought over whether this is a right. In many western countries this right is mentioned in national constitutions.

 

[AlbaCrush]

The answer to this question means nothing when pensions are not taken into account.

I just retired this year at age 50 with a Police Pension of $55,000 with COLA and a generous health and dental package. I have no debt. My house which is paid off is worth about $250,000. I have a modest 457 with $300K in it and another $60K in savings.

I'm not even close to having millions like others on here. Even though I don't have millions, I live comfortably and have taken several trips. The pension and health care package allows me to do this at an early age.

 

[Walt34]

Still, this is such a new thing. My grandparents were able to retire, but their parents, born in the mid 19th century, had no such concept. Now some of us get to do it earlier, some later. Some of us can do it in more comfort, some less. but the fact that we can do it at all is just so remarkable that I don't have a lot of patience with those who complain about various aspects of it.

I also wonder if the retirement as we know it now (at least in the U.S.) will become a historical anomaly born of the economic expansion of the early and mid-20th century. (1930's excepted, of course.)

I got lucky and picked parents and time and location to be born into, and picked an occupation and employer that had a very good (and funded) pension plan. Frankly, I didn't give retirement much thought at all until my mid 30's and could have pulled the plug - with a heavy hit - as early as age 46. Outside the military and public safety positions that require relatively young and fit people I don't see that happening much anywhere.

From what I've read of psychology, money, and behavior it is a rare person who has the discipline and foresight to begin saving for retirement in their early 20's, let alone teens. I think the whole 401(k) system is going to be generally a disaster, with millions of people quickly exhausting what they've saved (if anything) and then relying on whatever SS evolves into. Several of my nephews are going to be some of them.

Still, it can be done so there is hope: http://www.early-retirement.org/for...aiming-at-fire-in-a-few-more-years-72212.html

 

[travelover]

......... I think the whole 401(k) system is going to be generally a disaster, with millions of people quickly exhausting what they've saved (if anything) and then relying on whatever SS evolves into. ..........

I agree. The era of pensions will be a blip in history and it will go back to the way it was - multiple generations living in the same house or sharing with roommates.

 

[braumeister]

I also wonder if the retirement as we know it now (at least in the U.S.) will become a historical anomaly born of the economic expansion of the early and mid-20th century. (1930's excepted, of course.)

I think you may be right. You made a good (if risky) decision to go into law enforcement, just as I did in the military. Fortunately, we both avoided early death and were able to receive the promised retirement packages. But we're a tiny minority.

One thing is for sure: Fifty years from now things will be very different.