throwaway18678

I think this feeling never goes away. Even people with hundreds of millions of dollars probably look at billionaires with envy from time to time.

The important thing is to spend some time coming up with reasonable goals for savings and retirement that will meet your needs, and get to work on those. If you’re like most of us, you won’t get rich overnight but rather over decades.

It’s going to vary a lot depending on where you live and other lifestyle factors. The rule of thumb I have heard is take your yearly expenses and multiply by 25. That should yield enough income from investments to last more or less indefinitely.

I have about $1.5m in my investment account heading into my late 30s. I would say about half of it came from regularly investing leftover income in index funds, 25% from a condo that I bought and sold in the bay area, and 25% from my parents. Despite spending the majority of my career working as a developer at startups, very little of it came from equity.

I think if I had worked a little harder, I probably could have made a lot more money by just chasing after higher paying gigs. But on the other hand, I don’t cope well with stress and I don’t regret sticking to lower paid (but still pretty good in the grand scheme) and more relaxed jobs. I even took a fairly large pay cut once to get out of a stressful job.

$1.5m certainly does not feel like a lot of money, especially with a single income family and kids. I drive a used car, fly economy, etc., so I definitely wouldn’t say I’ve made it big. Maybe if I had $10m... but even then there are going to be a lot of things you still can’t afford.