thesimpledollar.com — Right now, I’m twenty years old. I am willing to take a large percentage off the top of my salary for the rest of my working life in order to be able to retire very young and live off of the proceeds of my investments and do volunteer work. How many years would I have to work if I saved 20% of my income?
May 27, 2007 View in Crawl 4
drecollMay 28, 2007
There are plenty of articles that come from much more reputable sources than this that show you how to accurately invest your money, I'm sure that all digg users know how to google, well thats where you can find an article from someone who knows more about it than a 20 year old blogger.
Closed AccountMay 29, 2007
"I know several students who right out of college got job offers ranging from 50k-70k a year. Of course, the fact I am at Cornell and in Engineering probably biases that, and most of them have absurd amounts of student loans. Still, with a high paying bachelors degree, or 1 year masters degree you can do quite well..."- Well my cousin just graduated from UConn (a top 100 school, but not exactly Cornell), and his starting salary falls between that range. I went to a s**ttier (party) school in a city... I'd have probably dropped out of Uconn given how serious I treated schoolwork, but I'm not doing too bad myself a couple years out of school. I think what a lot of people say about this is true. The piece of paper gets you a better job right away, but 10 years down the road it matters more who you are then where you went to school.
serpentmageMay 29, 2007
>>12% going forward is a long term (read LONG term) calculation. Post WWII, the stock market has had a 12% average cumulative return with 15% standard deviation. (Yes, that does mean crazy boom and bust years.)I did the numbers for the S&P 500 since 1950 and the return is 8.5%. What people confuse with the stock market is that they look at the numbers since the late 80's and think, wow this is going on and on. If you look at the period from 1970 to the late 1980's the stock market sucked dinosaur eggs in a major way.What you need to realize is that if we have for the past 15 years been getting 15% returns, what do you think will be returns in the next 15 years so that the S&P averages out to 8.5%? Not 15, nor 12, how about 3-4!
ziggy1959Aug 18, 2007
A couple of comments after reading all of these. First, despite what the right wing extremist free marketeers want you to believe, there simply is no social security crisis -- simply raising the cap on the ss contribution (or any of a half-dozen other, more complex, fixes will keep ss as a viable SUPPLEMENT to retirement. I'm planning to retire at 50 with about 400k, and my ss is my hedge against inflation (after 15 years, I get a raise). I will be taking 6% per year as income -- to the extnt I can earn more than 6, it goes back in to up the principal. 24k may not sound like enough, butI plan to retire to Ecuador, where I can live very comfortably on that amount. A great deal of the question "when can I retire" is about the level of consumption you need to feel comfortable. The real problem is the cost of health care -- unlike every other industrialized nation, we continue to ration health care access on the basis of ability to pay and insurance for a couple in their early fifties can run as high as 7,000 usd/year. I am opting to buy health care coverage in Ecuador until I am 65, and hope that I don't need extensive high tech care till then!
Closed AccountFeb 8, 2008
on word- awesome. If you're intelligent enough it definitely is possible to be making $60,000 a year at 20 yrs old.... impractical maybe, but possible for sure
fr3nchfriarApr 24, 2009
You CAN touch RothIRA before your 59 1/2.Because Roth IRA contributions are after-tax, you can withdrawal all contributions anytime without penalties. The rest can be withdrawn in "substantially equal periodic payments" over your estimated lifetime. There is no minimum age for these periodic payments.Google "substantially equal periodic payments"
fr3nchfriarApr 24, 2009
Did you include reinvestment of dividends?