Livin’ the dream
For anyone working these days, retirement can seem like a far off island, accessible only by a boat crafted from your hard-earned savings, but also a boat that you may be too old and tired to row once you get the chance to.
Sometimes it is hard to think of retirement when you are just going through the motions day in and day out. Luckily for all of us stuck in our routine, Four Pillars Freedom has created an “Early Retirement Grid” to estimate how long it will take you to reach financial independence based on annual income and spending.
A closer look at the grid
The grid was made to be simple. Therefore, a few things such as savings and debt are not accounted for. In addition, the grid assumes an annual withdrawal rate of 4% and investment return of 5%. Lastly, your annual income is after taxes.
So, let’s take a look.
Let’s say in this dream world you made an annual after-tax income of $80,000 – go you! However, you like the finer things in life so you end up spending $60,000 a year. The grid estimates it will take you a little over 31 years to reach retirement island. However, if you rake in your spending to $40,000 annually, perhaps pass on updating all of your Apple products the moment they are released, then you could reach financial independence in less than 17 years!
What’s the key?
According to the grid, the key to early retirement is to spend less money each year, or as they put it “widen the gap between income and spending as much as possible.”
What counts year after year is how much you are able to save and profit from investments.
No matter your annual income, if you aim to spend only half of it, then you could retire in an equal amount of time as everyone else doing the same, about 16.6 years. Of course, this will vary with your choices and things that come up along the way, (i.e. paying for college tuition, having children, finding that you went a little overboard on Treat Yo’self Day), but your income could increase as well.
Overall, this grid shows that the path to financial independence is not unattainable, and that retirement island could be closer than you think.
