I Retired At 40: Here’s What My Salary Was

28/06/2024

Middle age beautiful couple sitting on terrace speaking and smiling

Early retirement is a dream that most people don’t even allow themselves to consider, because it requires an incredible amount of planning and savings to make happen.

Yet others, like those who practice the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, make it their sole focus. Either way, for the average person an early retirement is a rare event.

However, in the case of Malisha, who retired from her family business in the manufacturing industry in 2016 at age 40, and Amber Rose, an engineer who retired from tech in 2023 a month shy of her 40th birthday, it’s been a remarkable reality.

Salary Is Typically Not Enough To Retire Early

Both Rose and Malisha were earning decent salaries in the final few years of their careers. Malisha was earning around $100,000, with approximately $50,000 annual bonuses tied to the performance of her company. Amber Rose was earning around $300,000 (though in the early days of her career she wasn’t even breaking six figures).

Though Rose acknowledged that her salary was decent, it would not have been enough to retire on.

“I was getting bonuses in stock. I got a signing bonus to join the company and then I also was getting performance bonuses in stock and that stock was worth absolutely nothing while I was getting it,” Rose said.

Rose remembered when, after just two years working at her company, her net worth was only about $14,000 and it wasn’t enough to cover a major surgery she needed.

She hoped that her company stock would one day be worth something, but she had no idea that it would eventually become her path to early retirement.

“I worked my ass off at that company and there’s a lot of people that do that and it doesn’t become anything. I was fortunate enough that it did and I’d held onto that stock that was worth nothing and it ended up being worth millions of dollars over time,” Rose said.

Malisha acknowledged that she benefited from “generational wealth” because not only was she employed by her family company, her parents set her up for a future retirement in a number of ways from the time she was young through retirement accounts and good financial literacy. She worked for the family company from the age of 15, when she earned minimum wage, to her retirement age of 40, when she was making over six figures.

What enabled Malisha to retire without getting another job was taking over the management of a series of rental properties on an estate her family owns, bringing in around $11,000 per month in income. While she does put in around 20 hours a month in managing these properties, it’s nowhere near working full time, and nothing she has to do on a set schedule.

Making the Call

For Malisha, the decision to retire was made for her when her parents chose to sell the family company–she was not quite ready to stop working. Since then, she’s thrown herself into volunteer activities, like directing and producing local theater, sitting on a local planning commission and other activities that give her purpose.

For Rose, who had spent her career working 60 hours a week on average, and at some times working 80 hours and even overnight shifts at her demanding company, the decision came down to quality of life. With two young children, she was keenly aware of how quickly life passes by. When the value of the stock she was sitting on first hit $1 million, she began to seriously consider a change. By the time she was worth around $3 million, given her and her spouse’s small footprint and modest lifestyle, with the advice of a financial planner, she determined she could do it.

“My number one priority was spending more time with family and just getting to do more adventures and the things that I want to do, taking care of myself, like going for a run every day. The kinds of things, especially when you have young children and a taxing job, that get put on the back burner,” Rose said.

Rose’s spouse still works, mainly for the healthcare benefits the job provides, but there may be a time in the not-too-distant future when they can both be retired.

The Takeaway

While both Malisha and Amber Rose’s situations are atypical, there are some lessons that others can take from their experiences.

For Malisha, whose parents immigrated to the US from Fiji, she said her family was “in the right place at the right time and were able to take advantage of opportunities.” She added, “I think a lot of people, they miss those opportunities that sometimes they get presented to them and they’re not able to see that future into the future. If you try and think about where you’re going to be in 20 years, that opportunity might be the thing that you need.”

She urged people to be very cognizant of what you’re spending, where you’re spending it and how you’re spending it. And more importantly, not to live it up too much when you’re young and forget about the future.

Rose approached her job with an attitude of hard work, tucking away the stocks that she earned through that work, with no guarantee of a payout. She advocates for a frugal lifestyle for people who want to retire early.

“A lot of people would say what we have in the bank is not enough money to retire, but because of the life that we live, we can. Retirement in many ways is just the choice of priorities and where to spend that money,” she said.

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