In a very long period of my life I thought that in order to become rich you need to earn a lot of money. When I started to study have the financial independent I found that this wasn’t the whole truth. The most important part to become financial independent is to spend less.
If we have two people. One is earning 500.000 $/year, the other make 50.000 $/year. If they both save 10 % each month they will have the same retirement date.
Because their 10 % is going to fund 90 % of expenses. It doesn’t matter what the amount is. The percentage is what we are looking for.
If we instead could live on 50 % of the income our situation will look like this:
Which is WAY BETTER!
“What about the rate of return then? That must be an important factor.”
Not really. That chart below is from the book Early Retirement Extreme.
It clearly shows us that when we can save +60% of our income, the rate of return is less important.
And if you have read my other article on How I’m Retiring in 5 Years or Less you can tell that I sometimes recommend people to leverage their investing. If we save and invest +60% of our salary, and we borrow the same amount to invest for. This means we hit our retirement number in half the time. And do some time diversification. If we have more money in the market early, they will make dividends, and they will have more time in the market to prove their performance.
The average savings rate here in europe is around 5 %*. And if we look at the chart above we will never be able to fund. Even if we have the same rate of return as some of the best investors in the world like Warren Buffet. He has averaged around 20 %/year. If we earn 50.000 $/year and we are saving the 5 % of our income and get a ROI on 20 %/year we will be able to retire in 25 years. While this seems like a relative short time period. We need to get the same ROI as the best investor in the world.
Yes you can be the next Warren Buffett. But I think you will have a higher chance of winning the lottery. If we instead save a large amount of money. And maybe leverage. We now have the odds with us.
* https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-savings.htm