Nice, congrats!
You basically have a person working a full-time job at $14.08 an hour just contributing to your stash! =)
302000 dollars / 2080 hours * 9.7% = 14.08
This is an interesting perspective. Never considered it that way (assuming 9.7% is your long run rate of return!)
Yeah! Just for fun of course. That's about the nominal return for US stocks historically, and I think nominal is right given that salary is nominal =).
To say this another way, which is really crazy...
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. In 133 working days (approx. 188 days calendar days), OP's money makes as much as a minimum wage worker earns in a year(!).
133 = (2080 / (302000 / (7.25 / 9.7%))) * 260, where 260 is working days to get 2080 hours and you can replace with 265 to get calendar days.
302k produces income at the US federal poverty level for 2 people ($17,420) at a 5.8% safe withdrawal rate. Said another way, OP could easily ensure to most likely never be in poverty for the rest of their lives, even if they completely retired right now to live off the stache. I think that's worth a round of applause in and of itself.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelinesEven more, if they didn't save another dime and never saw social security / pensions they'd be about 27 years away from making more than the something like 60% of Americans under 400% of the FPL, using a 4% withdrawal rate.
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/population-up-to-400-fpl/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7DOr if OP were feeling super generous, they could go down to the local orphanage and give $15,000 each to 20 newborns (plus 2k for OP's per diem =) ). Why 15k? Because in 65 years, that should be enough for each of those kids to be worth 1 million 2021 dollars at 6.7% returns!
(300,000 / 20) * 1.067 ^ 65 = $1,015,730