7 ms·

Restated: “would you accept an offer to shorten the time before you can retire by 20%?” It would take a lot of free coffee and fooseball at your current gig to

Restated: “would you accept an offer to shorten the time before you can retire by 20%?” It would take a lot of free coffee and fooseball at your current gig to make that be worth turning down,

phamilton 8y ago
It's probably more drastic than that. Simple math: if you have a savings rate of 20% right now, you would double your savings rate with a 20% bump. This would halve your time to retirement. Taxes/differences in savings rate/etc change the math, but the principle is the same: an increase in salary is a disproportionate increase in disposable income.
ghgr 8y ago
Restated once more: "Would you trade free time in your youth for the same amount of free time at retirement age?"
- jake-low 8y ago
  While both your question and the GP's are worth pondering, I'm not sure either is identical to the original question. The new job doesn't necessarily come with less free time (or less free coffee and foosball).
- jasonkester 8y ago
  As noted elsewhere, that's not the trade-off being made (as we're assuming like-for-like work conditions, thus equal free time in both cases). But it's a fun exercise in compound interest, so I'd recommend doing the math to discover how many years of extra retirement you get from working, say, a full year of 80 hour weeks, billed hourly at your current salary, at age 30. Once you've gotten past the steep part of the salary curve, that starts to look like a really good tradeoff. Put an extra, un-looked-for, quarter million into the market early in life, and you can essentially not worry any further about saving for retirement. That is, you can move forward spending every cent you earn (or only working as many months per year as necessary to cover expenses) and still retire as per usual at age 60.
scarface74 8y ago
I want the optionality to retire, but I really don’t care about full not working retirement. I’m perfectly okay with working part of the year doing contracts/consulting until my health declines so much I couldn’t do it. My wife has guaranteed health coverage for the rest of our lives through her government job after 10 years.

Restated: “would you accept an offer to shorten the time before you can retire by 20%?” It would take a lot of free coffee and fooseball at your current gig to make that be worth turning down,

phamilton 8y ago

It's probably more drastic than that. Simple math: if you have a savings rate of 20% right now, you would double your savings rate with a 20% bump. This would halve your time to retirement. Taxes/differences in savings rate/etc change the math, but the principle is the same: an increase in salary is a disproportionate increase in disposable income.

ghgr 8y ago

Restated once more: "Would you trade free time in your youth for the same amount of free time at retirement age?"

jake-low 8y ago
While both your question and the GP's are worth pondering, I'm not sure either is identical to the original question. The new job doesn't necessarily come with less free time (or less free coffee and foosball).
jasonkester 8y ago
As noted elsewhere, that's not the trade-off being made (as we're assuming like-for-like work conditions, thus equal free time in both cases). But it's a fun exercise in compound interest, so I'd recommend doing the math to discover how many years of extra retirement you get from working, say, a full year of 80 hour weeks, billed hourly at your current salary, at age 30. Once you've gotten past the steep part of the salary curve, that starts to look like a really good tradeoff. Put an extra, un-looked-for, quarter million into the market early in life, and you can essentially not worry any further about saving for retirement. That is, you can move forward spending every cent you earn (or only working as many months per year as necessary to cover expenses) and still retire as per usual at age 60.

scarface74 8y ago

I want the optionality to retire, but I really don’t care about full not working retirement. I’m perfectly okay with working part of the year doing contracts/consulting until my health declines so much I couldn’t do it. My wife has guaranteed health coverage for the rest of our lives through her government job after 10 years.