even sven?
And if you had a dick that long, you could easily get rich as a porn star. Hell, dick doesn’t even hang off the edge of the bed, let alone make it to the door and branch out into several directions from there.
Hell, not even that. My folks are factory workers from Poland and they’re just about knocking on the door of that amount. Some people just know how to save.
Half a million dollars in savings or other assets is not “rich” these days. It’s aint poor, but I’d consider it firmly in the middle class. Half a million bucks may seem a lot when you’re a twenty something out of college–it sure as hell did to me–but now in my early 30s I realize when you start thinking about paying for your kids education, retirement, and that sort of stuff, it’s really not a hell of a whole lot. Like I said, it’s not something to complain about, but it certainly isn’t even close to my definition of “rich.”
How naive can the OP be? More math for ya…
I put together a rough excel calculation showing the purchasing power of $500,000 after twenty years with 3% inflation if you chose to not invest at all:
Yr: Purchase power: Inflation taken:
0 $500,000.00 $15,000.00
1 $485,000.00 $14,550.00
2 $470,450.00 $14,113.50
3 $456,336.50 $13,690.10
4 $442,646.41 $13,279.39
5 $429,367.01 $12,881.01
6 $416,486.00 $12,494.58
7 $403,991.42 $12,119.74
8 $391,871.68 $11,756.15
9 $380,115.53 $11,403.47
10 $368,712.06 $11,061.36
11 $357,650.70 $10,729.52
12 $346,921.18 $10,407.64
13 $336,513.55 $10,095.41
14 $326,418.14 $9,792.54
15 $316,625.59 $9,498.77
16 $307,126.83 $9,213.80
17 $297,913.02 $8,937.39
18 $288,975.63 $8,669.27
19 $280,306.36 $8,409.19
20 $271,897.17 $8,156.92
$270,000 if you choose to retire will not afford you much after twenty years, and will require you to work until you die, assuming you’re even healthy at that point.
Say you live today with your budget for housing and living costs being 25k per year, with inflation averaging 3% per year, your cost of living also goes up.
Yr: Cost of living: Added cost of inflation:
0 $25,000.00 $750.00
1 $25,750.00 $772.50
2 $26,522.50 $795.68
3 $27,318.18 $819.55
4 $28,137.72 $844.13
...
18 $42,560.83 $1,276.82
19 $43,837.65 $1,315.13
20 $45,152.78 $1,354.58
So if you have $500,000 in todays dollars in 20 years (really $270,000 purchasing power) and do nothing and want to retire, you’ll be lucky to afford 6 years of non-working time because you’ll need to spend $45,000 to survive per year.
Same amount if you averaged 7% after investing:
Yr: Balance: Earnings:
0 $500,000.00 $35,000.00
1 $535,000.00 $37,450.00
2 $572,450.00 $40,071.50
3 $612,521.50 $42,876.51
4 $655,398.01 $45,877.86
5 $701,275.87 $49,089.31
6 $750,365.18 $52,525.56
7 $802,890.74 $56,202.35
8 $859,093.09 $60,136.52
9 $919,229.61 $64,346.07
10 $983,575.68 $68,850.30
11 $1,052,425.98 $73,669.82
12 $1,126,095.79 $78,826.71
13 $1,204,922.50 $84,344.58
14 $1,289,267.08 $90,248.70
15 $1,379,515.77 $96,566.10
16 $1,476,081.87 $103,325.73
17 $1,579,407.61 $110,558.53
18 $1,689,966.14 $118,297.63
19 $1,808,263.77 $126,578.46
20 $1,934,842.23 $135,438.96
So if you invested and things worked out good, you could have a safe withdraw rate of 4%, you’ll get $76,000 per year (beating inflation with some left over). Likely less if you pay taxes, but you can afford to not work for 40+ years in this scenario.
Let’s look at 1975 and having $500,000…
The thing is, is that the OP is the type of person that will be bitching how broke he is when he’s 70 years old, and voting to enact a tax on everyones Roth IRA so he can eat :dubious:
No, actually, if you are still listening to Talk Radio, you will be be-headed.
Use the brain you came with. If you have to listen to Talk Radio to get your ideas, well … you are in a lot worse position then those-who-don’t-have-money-in-the-bank.
Working class here.
No, because she listened and she learned and she changed. VCO3 is apparently incapable of any of that.
My wife, a Filipina by birth, is trying to convince me to retire to the Philippines. That would be a king’s ransom (as long as there is no hyper-inflation there in the next 25 years). And I have more than that in retirement savings.
If you don’t have a defined benefit pension, you’re going to need $500K in investments to retire on. If you do have a good pension plan, yes having $500K on top of it makes you pretty well off. It is by no means out of reach for the common guy, starting early in your 401k and going with aggressive mutual funds is going to get you there by retirement.
Depending on your area and style of living, 500K is not much to retire on and I am with the other posters that said they would be in a panic if that is all they had. I have only accumulated about half that and at 40(ish) that is extremely low since I do not have a pension. If I am fortunate enough to kick the bucket at 85, I will need at least 1.5 million to stop working at 65.
I guess if you are young like the OP, 500K does seem like a lot. In reality, it simply is not that much if that money is for retirement.
Not if VCO3 served it.
I gave Charles Squib half a million of my dollars and I haven’t heard from him since.
(Vitriolic, self-righteous post, deleted).
Summary: $500K may seem like a lot when you’re young, but at 45 years of age, it seems pretty small. One post-retirement hospital visit, and I’ll be living on government cheese.
The Great Proletarian will rise out of the People’s Collective Pumpkin Patch!!
Of course, we are talking about a guy who believes owning stock is unethical, who doesn’t believe in saving money (or at least, doesn’t believe in earning interest on it), and who only works 3.5 hours a day because he has better things to do.
My point being that I don’t think his head is wrapped around what he’s going to do about retirement.
To continue the pile on. My wife and I are public school teachers - working near state minimum salary - in the south. Yet we will have far more than $500k in our 457’s and IRA’s by the time we reach 65. Yet we drive 15 year old cars, we can’t afford vacations, I own one nice suit that I save for weddings and funerals. We are out of bread, eggs, milk, and peanut butter, but we can’t go grocery shopping until I get paid on the 25th. But we are rollin’ in the dough right?
I sure hope VC03 is fifteen years old. Tell me there aren’t adults that think this way.
I am reminded of the old Hembeck cartoon of the Invisible Woman on “The Newlywed Game”:
Q: What’s the last place you’ve made whoopee?
A: The kitchen and the bedroom.
Q: We need one answer.
A: That is one answer; I was in the kitchen, and Reed was in the bedroom…
Is the medicine made by Bristol-Myers Squibb? Cuz that would open a new line of crazy for VC03.
I think this rant is probably about as insane as every other VCO3 rant, but I can kind of see his perspective here in one small part. To all of you who make sane amounts of money, who don’t come from poor backgrounds, $500k for retirement might not sound like a lot. Apparently, the thought of only having $50k a year for one person to live off of in retirement is frightening to several of you.
Well, to some people, that sounds like an astounding and remarkable number. When I was a kid, my cousins and I considered “rich” to be somebody who owned his own trailer. We had really hit the big time when we no longer had to rent the apartment next to the illegal immigrant drug dealers. To this day, no one in my immediate family has ever owned a new vehicle. The most extravagant car purchase I can recall is my mother buying a Pontiac Grand Prix for $3000.
This was all when I was growing up in Vegas. We’ve since moved to rural Wisconsin, where my mother has been able to afford to buy up property and improve her situation a lot. She’s got real estate investments for her retirement, but even adding every building she owns together doesn’t equal $500k.
Now, I’ve gotten out in the world enough to recognize what other people consider “decent money.” I know that for many, many people $500k isn’t enough for retirement. I know how easily medical expenses can wipe out your savings; we actually experienced that one two years ago when my mother had to have a number of surgeries.
But, speaking as somebody who has survived on a four digit income, I have to admit to being just a little depressed reading what people have to say in this thread. Not because I’m angry or jealous, but because if people honestly think that $50k a year wouldn’t be enough to live off of, then I must truly be grotesquely substandard and nobody particularly likes feeling substandard.
Maybe they need the extra rooms in order for ritual sacrafices of Christian babies?