Suze Orman - You need 20M to retire early

When I first cracked the $2M barrier back in early 2020, I briefly flirted with the idea of retiring. And if I was still around that threshold by my 50th birthday, which was April that year, I have a feeling I would have done it. Or, at least posted my financial situation on here and have you guys give me a reality check one way or another.

I had (and still have) a mortgage, and the payment was around $2800-2900/mo, but it didn't seem like that big of a deal. I had just taken out a $472K refinance, at 3.875%, the year before, so I would've been stuck with it for awhile.

Well, suddenly Covid hit, and my portfolio was down by about 35% in roughly one month. By the time my birthday rolled around, I was "only" down about 25%

Adjusting for inflation though, that $2M would be close to $2.4M today. But I swear things are a lot more expensive these days than those official inflation numbers suggest. I refinanced again in the summer of 2020, to 2.875%, and that cut the mortgage to around $2460/mo. But with the way property tax/insurance went up, the payment is now around $2760.

I have a feeling I probably could have retired back then, and I'd be okay now. But, I'm kinda glad I didn't. I had a 36x60 pole barn garage with a loft built, and then just last year bought a 2023 Charger R/T, and didn't sweat either one too much. If I had been retired, I still would have done the garage. But I dunno about the Charger. I have a feeling I might still be nursing my old 2003 Regal along and praying that I can get it to fake out the emissions test one last time.
 
Maybe Ms. Orman has been perusing this forum reading the posts from new members asking if they can retire with their 8-digit (or near 8-digit) net worth. Looks like the near 8-digit people are hosed! :rolleyes:
 
MC Rider said:
If we needed $20M to retire we would be looking at bridges.
Because tarps are not that great. :LOL:
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You'll have to make due with tarps here. The bridges are all taken. I'm serious.:(
 
pacergal said:
Agree.
It would be interesting to know the early retirement ages for the folks on this forum. I know there are a few who retired in their 30's, but I think the majority were a bit older.
Anything younger than 65 is ER to me!!
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IIRC, the last time this site did a survey, the average retirement age was somewhere in the 56 year range.
 
njhowie said:
Well, apparently inflation raised her number from "$5 million or $6 million, maybe $10 million" to $20 million in under a year.
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I estimated our family's number to retire in our then-current house in the DC suburbs at age 50 in around 2010, as approaching $5 million. That did not consider a pension or any adjustments in spending.
 
If she believes $20million is required for FIRE, I wonder what she believes is the appropriate amount to have if you retire at normal retirement age? $10million?
 
I don’t click on anything Suze, but evidently millions of people still do? They must be pretty wealthy if they believe you need $20M to retire early.
 
I think that Suze Orman might be a perfect example of hedonic adaptation. As she grew in popularity and made more and more money, it takes more and more money to give her the same baseline level of happiness. To the point where she now could not conceive of retiring with less than $20 million. In that same vein, I saw a recent statement by Grant Cardone that he would feel a failure as a man if he earned only $400,000 per year. Once people like this have adapted themselves to a more luxurious lifestyle, they simply cannot imagine living without it.

They are just extreme examples, as hedonic adaptation happens to all of us. The young wife and I now spend an amount that we both probably would have considered offensive when we got married 40 years ago. Yes, there has been inflation over those years, but I could not have conceived back then that I would ever spend $4000 a year just to have someone clean my house. (Historically, my family members were always the ones cleaning house for other people). I would be unhappy if I had to stop.

So, while I have not been as financially successful as Suze, in my own way, I now require more money to keep me happy. Consequently, my idea of what portfolio size I would need in order to retire grew over the years too.
 
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I think she is just throwing a super huge number out there as a way to urge people to NOT retire early. She has always been a big proponent of working as long as possible and not taking SS unless/until you absolutely have to.
 
I can barely sit through 20 minutes of Suze in one of those PBS specials (before they spend 20 minutes fund-raising).

I'm glad I didn't take her advice when putting together my ER plan ~20 years ago, needing only about $800k to ER at age 45 (with about $600k in taxable accounts) in late 2008.

But I had lost a lot of respect for her when I heard her bashing bond funds on her weekly CNBC shows. A bond fund's monthly dividend income is what has been paying my bills for the last 15 years, like a monthly "paycheck" except that I don't have to do any work for it (see my tagline).

Splitting my ER plan into 2 parts, the first part getting from my ER age of 45 to age ~60 using only taxable account money is the important part. I just turned 60 last year, and am very much intact (with a much higher taxable balance than I had in late 2008 when the markets were crashing). Going forward, with my other 2 reinforcements waiting for me (frozen company pension and SS), my financial picture only gets better. BTD, anyone?
 
scrabbler1 said:
I can barely sit through 20 minutes of Suze in one of those PBS specials (before they spend 20 minutes fund-raising).

I'm glad I didn't take her advice when putting together my ER plan ~20 years ago, needing only about $800k to ER at age 45 (with about $600k in taxable accounts) in late 2008.

But I had lost a lot of respect for her when I heard her bashing bond funds on her weekly CNBC shows. A bond fund's monthly dividend income is what has been paying my bills for the last 15 years, like a monthly "paycheck" except that I don't have to do any work for it (see my tagline).

Splitting my ER plan into 2 parts, the first part getting from my ER age of 45 to age ~60 using only taxable account money is the important part. I just turned 60 last year, and am very much intact (with a much higher taxable balance than I had in late 2008 when the markets were crashing). Going forward, with my other 2 reinforcements waiting for me (frozen company pension and SS), my financial picture only gets better. BTD, anyone?
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Nice Scrabbler1 and very well planned.
 
Gumby said:
I think that Suze Orman might be a perfect example of hedonic adaptation. As she grew in popularity and made more and more money, it takes more and more money to give her the same baseline level of happiness. To the point where she now could not conceive of retiring with less than $20 million. In that same vein, I saw a recent statement by Grant Cardone that he would feel a failure as a man if he earned only $400,000 per year. Once people like this have adapted themselves to a more luxurious lifestyle, they simply cannot imagine living without it.

They are just extreme examples, as hedonic adaptation happens to all of us. The young wife and I now spend an amount that we both probably would have considered offensive when we got married 40 years ago. Yes, there has been inflation over those years, but I could not have conceived back then that I would ever spend $4000 a year just to have someone clean my house. (Historically, my family members were always the ones cleaning house for other people). I would be unhappy if I had to stop.

So, while I have not been as financially successful as Suze, in my own way, I now require more money to keep me happy. Consequently, my idea of what portfolio size I would need in order to retire grew over the years too.
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You're being incredibly generous in your assessment of Suze and Grant. I think they are the equivalent of carnival barkers - they say what they gotta say to get your attention. Activity on this thread being a case in point.
 
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Wupot2020 said:
If she believes $20million is required for FIRE, I wonder what she believes is the appropriate amount to have if you retire at normal retirement age? $10million?
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Ok, I'll admit that yeah, $10M was my "number" for a quasi-normal retirement until I started listening to y'all, and then started doing the math and running calculators and rethinking exactly what I'd want ret to look like, and what I could live without, and how much cushion I'd really need, and rethinking whether I really cared about leaving a big pile of cash behind and learning all about SORR and 4% rules and VPW and all that. So thanks for all that education and keeping me out of Suze's clutches.

Best regards,
Not quite 8-digit FIRE guy
 
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I have a question for anyone that hears it...Why does anyone listen to her?

I'd trust a random group of 10 folks on this forum way more for financial advice than her.

I'm not saying she doesn't mean well. I rhink she is way, way over rated as an advisor in the financial field.

My old bus driver in the 1970's accumulated a multi-million dollar portfolio. When I was riding the bus my senior year I asked him "Wendell, how did you do it ?" He replied " Buy stock in good businesses, don't sell when they go down and have a cash cushion to last 3 years, don't buy things you don't need and help others".

Best sentence I heard in my life.
 
Stormy Kromer said:
I have a question for anyone that hears it...Why does anyone listen to her?

I'd trust a random group of 10 folks on this forum way more for financial advice than her.

I'm not saying she doesn't mean well. I rhink she is way, way over rated as an advisor in the financial field.

My old bus driver in the 1970's accumulated a multi-million dollar portfolio. When I was riding the bus my senior year I asked him "Wendell, how did you do it ?" He replied " Buy stock in good businesses, don't sell when they go down and have a cash cushion to last 3 years, don't buy things you don't need and help others".

Best sentence I heard in my life.
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Ok, yet another true confession: Suze's early books were a revelation for me. DW bought "Nine Steps to Financial Freedom" (1997) and "Courage To Be Rich" (1999) and insisted I read them.

Suze said stuff I had never heard before, woo woo stuff about our emotional relationship with money and spending. While the mumbo jumbo about manifesting abundance and all that sounds pretty cringy these days, her books taught me that I was indeed channeling a lot of money trauma from my childhood growing up in the shadows of poverty, and I was acting out by spending as much as I earned and then some. DW being from a fiscally frugal, prudent Millionaire Next Door kind of family was alarmed and having trouble getting thru to me. Suze got thru (or maybe it was DW smacking me in the head with those books).

Either way, I owe a small debt to Suze - in exchange for whatever her books cost back then, I started on an important life journey of wealth accumulation. I was already real good at making money - but lacking the discipline to save it. Where I came from nobody ever SAVED money, there was never enough of it to go around.

Now, it just so happens that this time period is about when we saved up enough down payment and stretched to buy our first home, and I started tracking my Assets/Liabilities/NW, so I can give you some stats. NW today by comparison 25 years later is more than 35x, a blistering CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 17%. Of course I moved on to other personal finance authors over time. I don't know what happened to Suze over the years - she's become a [frightening] caricature of her old self.
 
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fake teeth like Suze's aren't inexpensive so $20M might not be enough
 
njhowie said:
Well, apparently inflation raised her number from "$5 million or $6 million, maybe $10 million" to $20 million in under a year. She's laughable now more than ever. She must be upset that Dave is getting more headlines than she is with clickbait titles.

I know we discussed this here, as did most other FIRE boards when she said it last year.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/t-lost-compounding-suze-orman-120000501.html
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Well, then, it's official. Suze Orman says the gummint officials citing the recent inflation as less than 20% in 2 years were all wrong! Who you gonna believe? Suze Orman or your lyin' eyes? (Or the gummint?):cool:
 
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