Why I am writing this down
I started this because I kept losing arguments with myself and having no record of who was right.
Money decisions arrive one at a time, years apart, and each one feels obvious in the moment. Then five years pass and you cannot reconstruct why you did it. Writing it down in public is a commitment device. If I claim something here and the numbers turn on me later, that is on the page and I have to say so.
I wanted to look at the numbers before deciding what I thought.
The two checkpoints
The next one is one million invested. Not net worth, which counts property and would let me feel finished sooner. Invested assets only.
After that the goal is Coast, which is the part most people have not heard of. Coast is the point where what you already hold, left alone to compound, gets you to your number by normal retirement age with no further contributions. You still work, you just stop saving. Regular financial independence means work becomes optional. Coast means saving becomes optional, and it arrives years earlier. It is a much less dramatic milestone and I suspect it is the one that actually changes how a person feels on a Tuesday morning.
What the outside data says, and where I had to be careful
At first glance these numbers look bad. They are not measuring the same thing.
Three current savings rates, each from the organisation that published it.
The national personal saving rate was 3.0 percent in July 2026, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. A large retirement recordkeeper's twenty-fifth annual study put the average participant rate at 12.1 percent, an all-time high. Another, reporting on more than 55 million accounts, recorded a 14.4 percent total 401(k) rate: 9.6 from the employee, 4.8 from the employer.
Different populations and different denominators. The first is everyone against all disposable income; the other two are people who already have a plan, against pay, counting the employer match.
I checked each one against the issuing organisation's own release rather than a news summary of it. They are still not directly comparable.
The 3.0 percent is everyone, measured against all disposable income, including the people with no retirement plan at all. The other two are people who already have a workplace plan, measured against their pay, counting the employer match. They cover different groups and measure income differently. Side by side, they give the wrong impression.
The number that actually stopped me came from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. Among families who have a retirement account, the median balance was 86,900 dollars, and the conditional mean was 334,000. When the mean runs near four times the median, most of the money sits with a few households and the typical family is nowhere near the average that gets quoted at them.
Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022, read from the Fed's own report. A mean near four times the median is the shape of a small number of large balances.
In the other direction, UBS reported this year that personal wealth rose more than 10 percent and the world added close to a million new dollar millionaires. Upwards of 2,600 a day. Both are true, somehow. That is the backdrop for all of this.
What I take from other people who did this
I have been reading through hundreds of millionaire profiles and pulling them into a spreadsheet, which is where most of the numbers on this site come from.
Two findings so far. The median age at the first million in that group is 40. And among the profiles that state net worth, income and savings rate together, 86 percent already have expected annual returns larger than what they add each year, assuming 7 percent real. At a more conservative 5 percent it is still 77 percent.
That is why one million matters to me as a milestone, not as a prize. Around that point, returns may matter more than new contributions. Bad decisions matter more too.
The books, briefly
Four that actually changed something, in a sentence each.
The Millionaire Next Door made the case that wealth is what you keep, not what you display, and that the two are often inversely related. The Simple Path to Wealth argues the winning move is boring: low-cost index funds, held, with the complexity removed on purpose. Your Money or Your Life reframes spending as trading away hours of your life, which is unpleasant and useful. And Die With Zero is the counterweight to the other three. Maximising the final balance is not the same as maximising the life. A plan built only from accumulation optimises toward the largest unspent pile.
I hold all four at once and they do not fully agree. That seems right.
The shape of my own money
I will not be posting balances. But the shape matters more than the size, and I will post that.
Roughly 46 percent sits in taxable brokerage accounts and 54 percent in tax-advantaged ones, across two 401(k)s, several IRAs and an HSA. So the larger half is money I cannot reach for years without a penalty.
For my plan, that split matters more than the total balance. It means a plan that treats the whole balance as available capital is wrong about my situation, and any Coast calculation has to respect that the accessible half is the smaller one. It is boring, but it changes what I can actually do with the money.