Emotionally understand exponential growth

This post is part of the Financial Freedom Guide series

If you want to achieve Financial Freedom, you need to emotionally understand exponential growth

And value your savings and investments accordingly. That means you need to start today. Not tomorrow. Today. Here is why:

Suppose Alice is in her early 20ties and decides to live on a shoestring budget to save everything she can from her first job (like we did). By age 25 she has already saved $100,000 - well done! Alice invests this money in a diversified stock market portfolio.

“Over the roughly 200 years of its existence, the US stock market has generated an average ~10% nominal and 7-8% real (after inflation) total return (stock price appreciation + dividends). At 7.2% return your investment doubles roughly every 10 years.”

See this Visual Capitalist chart for a sense of total US stock market returns over time.

This means Alice's $100,000 should on average grow to $200,000 by age 35, $400,000 by age 45, $800,000 by age 55, and $1.6 million by age 65!

Alice's net worth (USD k)

After making just a single $100k investment in her twenties, Alice has secured her retirement and is likely on track for Financial Freedom sometime in her 50ties.

All of this in real, inflation-adjusted, today's dollars. And as we shall see and you can probably already guess, $1.6M is a very nice retirement. In other words, Alice is done saving for traditional retirement and likely on track for Financial Freedom in her early 50ties. The rest of her life - for the next 40 years and beyond - she could blow every penny she earns on fun and never have to worry about taking care of herself in old age ever again.

Compare that to Fiona. Fiona decides she wants to have some fun first and spends all of her first paychecks. She’s still young and can always save for retirement later. Fiona is no sloth either and ends up saving her first $100k by age 35. The problem is, that same $100k will now only grow to $800k by age 65 - half of Alice's result. So Fiona keeps saving for retirement: By age 45 she's saved another $100k, then by age 55 another $100k, and by age 65 she's still slaving away to be able to afford the retirement she wants and saves another $100k. Her net result? $1.5M.

Fiona's net worth (USD k)

Yes, Fiona ends up with less than Alice despite putting in 4 times as much effort and slaving away for 4 decades while Alice enjoys herself!

Another way to think of above example is that every dollar you save for retirement in your 20ties will be worth $16 in your 60ties. Just 10 years later, those same dollars will only be worth $8, so you're going to have to save a lot more of them to make up for the shortfall. Of course the same is true for dollars saved in your 30ties vs your 40ties and all is not lost if you start then - you’ll just have to work that much harder. The earlier you save and invest, the more time and compound interest can do the work for you.

Do yourself a favor and start today!

Wealth snowballs

When we delay saving and investing, we think we are just starting a bit later on the left - but we are actually stealing from ourselves on the right, where exponential growth shoots up the "hockey stick".

Do you have any thoughts or questions? Leave them in the comments below!

Next up: What's your number?

Go back: How do I plan my Financial Freedom?

BONUS

Here's a calculator you can use to play around with Alice and Fiona's numbers:

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