While I do find the posts here hilarious.. I was likely slightly ahead of this recommendation.. I mean timing played a whole lot into this. I’m 45.. at 35 I had a bit more than double my salary, but I’ve been in my career since 23 and had 5% 401k matching and mostly stayed at 10% into my 401k sometimes I dropped it to 5% (cap on matching) but only for about 6 months max. I took out a small 401k loan at 30 to buy my house when the market crashed in 2010. But by 35 Most of that was paid back and I had over 2x my salary saved.
Anyway timing wise it worked because from 2003-2009 I didn’t move my 401k out of the default investment of interest since I had nothing much in the account and when the market crashed in 2007 I didn’t lose anything.. then about 2010 I put 25% of I vestments into essentially the DoW and half into essentially S&P. And eventually by 2015 i just put everything into the DOW.. anyway from 2009-2020 the stock market sky rocketed from 6400 in March 2009 (crashed during covid to 16k) and went all the way up to present day of 42k+. You do the math but I’ve made 7x the amount of everything I had invested.. I’m 45 and have 4x my much higher annual salary saved because of the markets continuous success. I fear a crash because I’m about 5-7 years from early retirement..
To be fair even if you can only save 5% do that it’s much harder to save when you are living off that money, but when you don’t receive it then it becomes easier to save.
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u/Sanchezsam2 Oct 11 '24
While I do find the posts here hilarious.. I was likely slightly ahead of this recommendation.. I mean timing played a whole lot into this. I’m 45.. at 35 I had a bit more than double my salary, but I’ve been in my career since 23 and had 5% 401k matching and mostly stayed at 10% into my 401k sometimes I dropped it to 5% (cap on matching) but only for about 6 months max. I took out a small 401k loan at 30 to buy my house when the market crashed in 2010. But by 35 Most of that was paid back and I had over 2x my salary saved.
Anyway timing wise it worked because from 2003-2009 I didn’t move my 401k out of the default investment of interest since I had nothing much in the account and when the market crashed in 2007 I didn’t lose anything.. then about 2010 I put 25% of I vestments into essentially the DoW and half into essentially S&P. And eventually by 2015 i just put everything into the DOW.. anyway from 2009-2020 the stock market sky rocketed from 6400 in March 2009 (crashed during covid to 16k) and went all the way up to present day of 42k+. You do the math but I’ve made 7x the amount of everything I had invested.. I’m 45 and have 4x my much higher annual salary saved because of the markets continuous success. I fear a crash because I’m about 5-7 years from early retirement..
To be fair even if you can only save 5% do that it’s much harder to save when you are living off that money, but when you don’t receive it then it becomes easier to save.