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How To Retire At 40: Radical Saving, $5 Wine And Brown Bananas

How To Retire At 40: Radical Saving, $5 Wine And Brown Bananas

Is it possible to really retire by 40? A 38-year-old Seattle lawyer named Sylvia Hall has a plan she says is going to work. And it centers around radical savings, $5 wine, and brown bananas.

She lives on an extremely strict budget in order to reach her goal of reaching $2 million in assets by 2020. In order to amass this amount, she must save about 70% of her after-tax income and this means some severe cutbacks in her lifestyle.


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“She looks for brown bananas and other soon-to-be discarded items from fruit and vegetable stands to help keep her grocery bills around $75 a month. She walks to work so she doesn’t have to spend money on gas. She borrows Netflix passwords from friends so she doesn’t have to spend much on entertainment,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

“The idea of not having to wait to 65 to start living on my own terms appealed to me,” she said.

Hall isn’t the only millennial who wants to retire early. And those who do have adopted FIRE — Financial Independence/Retire Early.

This may be the solution for many millennials, who are behind the economic track when comparing them to other generations.

“Even though they are better educated than their parents and grandparents, people between 25 and 35 have less wealth than prior recent generations, and “are behind in almost every economic dimension,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Boston College Center for Retirement Research, including earnings and debt,” WSJ reported.

One drawback to FIRE and retiring early is how do you know exactly how much money you will need to live on in the future. Your projections of inflation could be way off.

And the extremely frugal lifestyle can be very stressful. Ask Brandon Ganch, 36. He retired from his job as a software engineer in 2016, but “his frugality became an obsession and he stressed over small purchases by his wife.”

“It wasn’t healthy,” said Ganch.

FIRE really isn’t new. It’s nearly the same philosophy espoused by Ben Franklin in “The Way to Wealth” (1756), in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” as well as Henry David Thoreau’s book “Walden,” published in 1854 book.

And in 1992 Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez wrote about financial independence in “Your Money or Your Life.”

“Millennials understand the rules have changed,” said Robin, now 73. “They understand that the system their parents built is coming apart.”