Wanna make 1mil go the distance

Glad you know what you want. Have you worked out how much capital you'll need? Some quick lazy-ass armchair calculations: (I'm a moron, not a financial advisor, so take this with a bucket of salt)

If you want to live off investment returns indefinitely such that your income is 20k in today's money (I'm ignoring tax, pension contributions, etc. for this) and your real rate of return is 5% (a thumbsuck from historical returns minus inflation), then you'd need 4.8m to sustain your lifestyle (drawing 5% per year as your income). Add to that the price of a house and Lexus, and you've got yourself a target, which I'm guessing is going to be over 7m. Let's round up to 8m to make the maths easy.

Now, you say you'll have 1.2m in 3 years, which is roughly 1m in today's money. However, you say you're worried you might stop saving then, so the question becomes: how long until you reach your target with 1m (effectively) invested today at ~5% real returns (a reasonable enough estimate, unless you're dumping in crypto and praying to the Bitcoin gods for a miracle). Well, your 1m has to double (in real terms) 3 times. A rule of 72 estimate says a single doubling will take 14.4 years, so you'll reach your 8m (in today's money, in future money it'll be much much more but with the same purchasing power) in about 44 years.

So you're gonna need to save a helluva lot more if you want to realistically reach your target capital and retire anytime soon.

/r/PersonalFinanceZA Thread Parent