While I am sure the safest course is to keep ones mouth shut about money. I don't always do safe things.
My mom knows if for no other reason than to keep her from worrying about me and both sisters have a reasonable god idea, and I know there is a a bit of envy. Most of my closest friends know I'm worth "millions", I think I disappointed one of my friends when he found out that no I didn't have a 8 figure net worth not even 1/2..
The one benefit of being somewhat open about money is to tend to get question about money and retirement from friends and even those who aren't really close. I kinda of think we have a moral obligation to spread the wisdom of the board, LYBM, low investment expenses, diversification, 4% rule, and even the holy trinity of the ER board, Vanguard, Costco and PenFed
.
Seriously, I'd much rather a person get money advice from virtually any forum regular than their local Amerprise adviser.
A couple of week I got a call from one of my closest friends new wife about retirement. They both had attended retirement seminar put on by their respective employers about pensions. She had questions for me about how do I know when I had enough. It was great opportunity to talk not only about the 4% rule, but also talk about when they should take SS. At almost 60 he is 5 years old and has had much higher income. But even more important was it gave me an opportunity to stress that income is not even 1/2 the equation for successful retirement, knowing your expense is even more important.
We talked about Mint and Quicken, and how important it is to enter retirement debt free (other than a mortgage). Now I don't honestly expect her to start using Mint this year. But she has a real spending problem, and if she can grasp that she can't really retire until she know how much she spends, may eventually motivate her to face realities.
The fact that I accumulated enough assets to retire early and many people know it, I think gives me credibility to speak with some authority.