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I can only give this advice, and this is buried deep enough, and so few people will see it, I'm going to drag out some real-ish numbers.
Last year I paid over $36,000 in taxes. I saved less than $8000 post taxes, and the government shutdown drove the company I worked for out of business. I have an offer on the table already, and maybe a better one coming soon, fingers crossed. So you know, I'll be alright. Just sayin' though.
Over the course of my life, because I've kept meticulous notes, I've saved about $165,000. That's about 20 years of post-tax savings. Some years were better, some years were terrible. My best year I saved about $32,000 (that was a mad dash year). My worst year I only saved about $2,500.
The year I bought my house, I put down nearly everything I had that wasn't in my 401k, brokerage or crypto. I think it was nearly half of everything I had liquid. It was probably the single scariest financial decision I ever made in my life.
That was almost 5 years ago now. I'm in my 40's now. My wife just turned 40. My accounts have done tremendously well. The balance barely reflects the amounts I mentioned up above. It's borderline "Fuck you" money. It also bares little resemblance to my income which continues to just barely cover my essentials, plus one emergency per year, plus a little net savings. I consider myself profoundly lucky I found not just one but two 10x or more investments. In another life I'd have 1/10th of what I actually do.
But we still lost out on our youth. We're having one last kid. That makes a grand total of two, and this last one is a squeaker. For years my heart broke that I aged out of having as many kids as I wanted, while I was struggling to achieve the material necessities I felt I needed to do right by them. I still don't have as many kids as I wanted, but I suppose two will have to suffice.
Reminder: A not-insignificant number of people browse this website with the "firehose" all-comments view, so security by obscurity is far from assured.
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