Do you dream of waking up in the morning and NOT hurriedly showering while drinking coffee and reading emails before commuting 47 minutes to a job you hate because your boss is Michael Scott’s evil twin? OMG same!

We have an escape route for you 

Today I’ll explain in three easy steps how my wife and I will retire at 49 and get out of the daily grind.

If you want to do this yourself, reply to this email and we’ll send you a free retirement template so you can calculate exactly how much you need to invest regularly to retire early!

Allow myself to introduce…myself

• 32 years old

• Stunningly handsome (not relevant, but painting a picture)

• Married (she’s prettier)

• Making $65,000 per year

• My wife (read in Borat voice) makes $75,000 per year

• One child, three years old, named Oprah

• Right now our core monthly expenses are:

• Our after-tax income is $9,000

• I do a killer Borat impression

Step one: What do I need?

To figure out how much money I’ll need in retirement, I looked at my current expenses. $6,200 today would be equal to about $10,250 when I want to retire, thanks to the devil that is 3% annual inflation. 

But usually, when people retire they only spend about 70-80% of their pre-retirement expenses. Let’s say 80% to be safe, so my monthly expenses would be about $8,200 in retirement.

Step two: What’s my target?

Now that I know my expenses at the start of retirement will be roughly $8,200, let’s run the numbers to see how much money I’ll need to cover this. 

We’ll make it easy by assuming a few things:

• I’ll live till 80 (I plan on going down heroically - think Tony Stark in Avengers (spoiler))

• I’ll leave a buffer of three years of expenses at that time, in case that Bryan Johnson guy (pictured below) finds the key to eternal youth

• I’ll keep my portfolio invested through retirement, and my investments will return 9% per year on average; long-term returns of the stock market have been higher than this anyway

I plug these numbers into my calculator and find out I need about $1.43 million at 49 years old to cover these expenses.

Step three: Okay COOL, now how in the H E double hockey sticks do I get there?

As you may expect, my wife is way smarter than me. She encouraged me to start investing early along with her. 

At 23, we had about $15,000 saved from earlier summer jobs and started investing $700 each month. Now we have $150,000. Score!

To get from $150,000 now to $1.43 million seems like a tall order in 17 years, doesn’t it? Wrong!

Plugging the $150,000 into that free retirement template I mentioned earlier (email me if you want it), I find that if we invest $1,550 each month, we’ll hit that goal.

Easy, peasy

See? Not that bad! Figuring out how much you need to retire is pretty straightforward. 

1. Start with what you know - your current expenses

2. Calculate how much you’ll need in retirement - use your current expenses as a starting place

3. Invest early and regularly - the sooner you start and the more consistent you stay, the better off you’ll be

So if you want to get out from Prison Mike’s watchful eye, run the numbers and get investing!