The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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I hate to break it to you, but you probably won't be satisfied with 2 million or even 5, 10, 20, or 100 unless you are very good at not playing status games.
Once you get to 2 million, the amount you think you need will be 2x your current wealth or the wealth of your richest friend, whichever is greater.
I guess I object to the whole idea. It might work for some, but working a FANG job for 15 years and then quitting probably isn't going to fulfill you unless you have something much better you'd rather be doing.
It's not about possessions. It's trivial enough to live well on 100k a year. It's about status and a sense of purpose.
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I mean, three million dollars is a lot of money. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, it's perfectly reasonable for a single person to live on 24 k$/a, which (using the four-percent rule) amounts to the returns on an investment of just 600 k$, or one-fifth of your target. I personally can't imagine working longer than my BLS-based calculations say I need to, just so that I can retire to a big house in California rather than to a small one in Indiana.
In the "cross-tabulated" section, under the "size of consumer unit before taxes" heading, the "consumer units of one person by income before taxes" table shows that the average one-person household that has gross income of less than 15 k$/a has average expenses of 23653 $/a. Those expenses include 3542 $/a on "food" and 6678 $/a on "shelter" (comprising mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance/repairs/insurance, and rent). Such a household's average pre-tax income consists of only 7617 $/a, including 4092 $/a from "Social Security, private and government retirement" and 1002 $/a from "Public Assistance, Supplemental Security Income, SNAP".
Additionally, on the Census Bureau's website, you can get information on median household income on a state-by-state and county-by-county basis, by looking at dataset S1901 (2021 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates). Compare California's (84 k$/a) and New Jersey's (90 k$/a) median income with Nevada's (66 k$/a) and Indiana's (62 k$/a). From this comparison one can surmise that the cost of living is significantly lower in Nevada and Indiana than in California and New Jersey. Those numbers are slightly misleading, since within-state variation can be pretty big (e. g., 126 k$/a for San Francisco County vs. 76 k$/a for Los Angeles County vs. 51 k$/a for Modoc County), but you can cross-check county median income against the Census Bureau's map of metropolitan areas to ignore rural counties that have nothing but a Dollar General to shop at, and compare apples with apples.
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