It appears this raging stock market has been blasting people right past a lot of milestones lately, and I'm happily caught in that wave too.
My net worth passed one million (in USD) today. $1,002,466.86 to be exact, according to Quicken. Yeah.
Of course, it's actually not anywhere as exact as the precision on that number implies. That number includes the value of my home, which I entered at its purchase price in 2002, and have never adjusted since then. Currently the house is worth something less than that purchase price, so that would drop me under a million. On the other hand, I was also recently offered (but did not take) a lump-sum payout from a small pension I have, and that number might put me back over a million. So it all sort of evens out, and when I add in the fact that I have $760k in assets whose measurable value fluctuates daily by thousands of dollars, it's kind of silly to demarcate the not-millionaire/millionaire boundary with anything more precise than a giant fuzzy cloud.
But things like this must be marked, dammit! So this is my semi-arbitrary way of collapsing that giant fuzzy cloud into a sharp line. And hey, it's fun to see that Quicken doesn't have a bug that prevents it from handling 7-digit numbers!
For reference, I'm 36 years old, unmarried, no kids, and have been working as a semiconductor engineer for the past 15 years. All of my wealth-building has come from saved wages and stock/bond return, the vast majority via index funds. So no crazy real-estate deals, inheritances, or selling my hot sexy body; I guess that makes me your classic Millionaire Next Door, and also a decent MMM clone.
I started tracking my expenses and thinking about early retirement around 9 years ago. My net worth then was around $180k, and while I could see a clear path to $1 million, it sure seemed a long way out there. But then you go and live a great fucking life, checking in from time to time, and suddenly 9 years have passed like nothing, and holy shit, I'm a millionaire! So to anyone out there whose FI-point seems impossibly distant, don't be discouraged; time really does end up flying (especially when seen in the rearview mirror), so if you've got that savings rate locked in, just sit back and let time do its magical thing to your money.
An important warning for you market-timers though. The last milestone like this that I noticed was $500k. The day was October 12, 2007. The next day, the S&P 500 dropped from its all-time high, bringing me back under $500k, and the index would not revisit that pinnacle at any time over the next 5 years. Since I was lucky enough to still be receiving income, my net worth didn't suffer for quite as long, but I still had to wait more than two years for my second day as a half-millionaire!
So I almost certainly just called the top of this thing. Fuck. Sorry! :-)
(of course the positive takeaway is that after that second day as a half-millionaire, it took me less than 4 years to double it. Whoa.)