How long did it take for you to earn your first million?

[panda]

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[use2betrix]

I was around 29ish when I had earned a total of 1MM. I’m not quite sure how to answer the question, are the numbers supposed to be “age”? It might be better to ask, “how old were you, when you had earned a total of 1 million dollars” or similar.

[ender]

I was around 29ish when I had earned a total of 1MM. I’m not quite sure how to answer the question, are the numbers supposed to be “age”? It might be better to ask, “how old were you, when you had earned a total of 1 million dollars” or similar.

+1

Especially for some careers like medicine, you could get to $1M very quickly... after your residency finishes ;-)

Another interesting poll would be how old you were when your net worth passed your lifetime earnings.

[NotJen]

It happened sometime during my 18th working year when I was 35.

[use2betrix]

I was around 29ish when I had earned a total of 1MM. I’m not quite sure how to answer the question, are the numbers supposed to be “age”? It might be better to ask, “how old were you, when you had earned a total of 1 million dollars” or similar.

+1

Especially for some careers like medicine, you could get to $1M very quickly... after your residency finishes ;-)

Another interesting poll would be how old you were when your net worth passed your lifetime earnings.

Yeah and now the poll results are all skewed. If you view the poll, like 90% of forum members earned their first million before they turned 20 lol.

[NotJen]

How are they skewed?  It looks like everyone so far answered based on working years, and not age.

(Currently 9 people before 20 years, and 9 people not there yet.)

[MishMash]

Yup working years is what I put, took just about 10 for the first 4 for the second.

[TheAnonOne]

The "Start" year is ambiguous here, at least to me.

I am around 800k @ 29, so sometime when I am 30-31 I should be there. That is 10-12ish years in my professional career. Though the 18-22 jobs paid WAY less and were less focused.

I had a job at 14 serving soda/pop at a local fair. So I guess I could put that as my start :)

[austin944]

You can go to ssa.gov/myaccount to get your yearly earnings history.

My total adult lifetime earnings (not saved earnings) is a little less than my current NW.  I wonder how the two numbers might line up on average (if at all).

[MissNancyPryor]

26 working years, starting at age 16 in the hamburger stand.  For the first 15 of those years I netted only about $200K doing crappy customer service work and then $800K in the later 11 years as an engineer and finally as an executive leader.  The reason is that I waited 10 years after high school to go to college for my degree but after that things took off in a damn hurry.

There was a fun thread going in 2018 that asked how your lifetime earnings compared to your current NW:

https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/share-your-badassity/what-is-your-net-worth-to-lifetime-earnings

I am hovering at 100% which is kind of surreal-  imagine being told as a 16YO that at age 50 you will be able to say you essentially will "still have everything you made" if you save and invest and are not an idiot with your money?  I wouldn't have believed it. 

[Bloop Bloop]

There's some ambiguity around when your working years start - do I start from age 14, when I got a $9 cheque for a whole day's worth of mail delivery? Or age 16, when I got a steady after-school job paying $27 per week for 4 hours' work? Or from when I graduated and got my first proper full-time job at age 24?

[RWD]

I voted even though I'm not quite there yet. At 12 years now since college graduation and should hit $1 million gross earned income in another 2 to 2.5 years.

[2sk22]

I have put down 11 to 20 years but that is really not the correct answer for old-timers like me. I will have to work out the inflation factor and convert to 2020 dollars. I'll have to spend some time with my spreadsheet later today to figure that out.  I started working in 1991 and according to the BLS CPI inflation calculator, those dollars are worth almost double 2020 dollars.

[norajean]

Probably 7 years after graduation but hard to know as employer was giving non-wage benefits which added up.  Didn't reach $1MM net worth until 10 years after graduation. Doubled again in five years, then three, etc.

[Brother Esau]

26 working years, starting at age 16 in the hamburger stand.  For the first 15 of those years I netted only about $200K doing crappy customer service work and then $800K in the later 11 years as an engineer and finally as an executive leader.  The reason is that I waited 10 years after high school to go to college for my degree but after that things took off in a damn hurry.

There was a fun thread going in 2018 that asked how your lifetime earnings compared to your current NW:

https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/share-your-badassity/what-is-your-net-worth-to-lifetime-earnings

I am hovering at 100% which is kind of surreal- imagine being told as a 16YO that at age 50 you will be able to say you essentially will "still have everything you made" if you save and invest and are not an idiot with your money?  I wouldn't have believed it.

Wow, that is a bit of a mind bender but yet, totally understandable.

[coynemoney]

You can go to ssa.gov/myaccount to get your yearly earnings history.

My total adult lifetime earnings (not saved earnings) is a little less than my current NW.  I wonder how the two numbers might line up on average (if at all).

This site is pretty cool - thanks for letting us know it exists.

I'm on track to reach $1 million in about a year and a half which would be put me at about 16 years of working to reach. Net worth is around $350k for what it's worth. Should be at least $500k in 2 years. I've had a"grown up" job and salary for about 10 years which is the vast majority of those numbers.

[MissNancyPryor]

You can go to ssa.gov/myaccount to get your yearly earnings history.

My total adult lifetime earnings (not saved earnings) is a little less than my current NW.  I wonder how the two numbers might line up on average (if at all).

This site is pretty cool - thanks for letting us know it exists.

I'm on track to reach $1 million in about a year and a half which would be put me at about 16 years of working to reach. Net worth is around $350k for what it's worth. Should be at least $500k in 2 years. I've had a"grown up" job and salary for about 10 years which is the vast majority of those numbers.

This site is very important for planning.  Importantly, don't use the estimated benefit number they use -  the government is using a model that says you are going to work right up till your eligible retirement age and they are guessing at your income.  For those of us who reject working life far before SS eligibility you may want to do your own calculation. 

Form EN-05-10070 explains how to calculate your SS payments using your own information.  This was exceedingly helpful for me in the run up to FIRE because the difference between working through age 62 and stopping early at age 50 amounted to only $72 per month difference.  Working longer just to get that itty bitty SS payment difference is not worth it.  It demonstrates that the "penalty" for FIRE really doesn't exist.

As a cynical Gen X-er I never trusted that SS will be there for me anyway.  I am taking it at 62 because I don't trust the government to keep the rules the same and I am certain I can do better things with that excess than have it sit there and wait for me.         

[SimpleCycle]

I am 39 and have 21 working years under my belt and am nowhere close to $1M in earned income.  Just over half that, actually.  If my income stays the same, I'll hit $1M in six years, so 27 working years.

[honeybbq]

10 years. After a loooooong time in school.

[Loren Ver]

There's some ambiguity around when your working years start - do I start from age 14, when I got a $9 cheque for a whole day's worth of mail delivery? Or age 16, when I got a steady after-school job paying $27 per week for 4 hours' work? Or from when I graduated and got my first proper full-time job at age 24?

I don't see what's ambiguous about when other people started paying you money for work you did. I started working and paying taxes on my income when I was 15 and that's when the government started being informed of my earnings.

Zero. Some of us will never earn a million dollars, nor plan to work long enough to reach that. We have a lower FIRE number. Perhaps it is better to ask how many years have/will you work to reach your FI number. That's approx. 20 for me starting at 18 and not including my teenage jobs.

Talk about FIRE numbers is kind of a dead horse around here. Plus, I'm very skeptical that even someone with a low FIRE number would never crack $1M in their life time. Some back of the envelop math shows that you almost have to avoid getting paid by others to not clear $1M at some point in your life. Sure we could quibble about passive versus active income (I'd argue that with passive income it's likely impossible to FIRE and not exceed $1M in total income), but something like 90% people born in the US are projected to near or exceed $1M in lifetime earnings even at very low income levels.

Maybe but I took your post to mean "earned income" not investment earnings, or passive income or NW increases like equity on your house. So just using straight SS earnings data I didn't come any where near a million bucks by a huge amount but then I never earned much at my jobs. By the time I reach 65 I will have close to 25 or 30 years of zero earnings on my SS statement. I haven't earned any income since FIREing either. But I get that most people here are higher income earners and can easily crack the million dollar mark for gross income earned fairly quickly. I imagine it could be pretty disheartening to see you earned a million fast but between taxes and spending much of it wasn't saved.

ETA FWIW my current NW is much higher then my lifetime earned income thanks to investment growth and home equity increases.

This is kinda where I am.  I FIREd early in 2019.  I never W-2 earned my first million and probably never will as I don't plan on exchanging times for money any more.  As for the stash, it is also not at one million, though I expect it to get there eventually.  DH and my combined W-2 was a little over a million, but not by much.
If we take my W-2 income plus all the capital gains earned over the years, then we have the million earned, a few years ago. 

[clarkfan1979]

My wife and I went from zero to 730K in 8.5 years. I'm guessing we will hit one million in another 4-5 years, so probably 13 years. Average annual income to date is 85K/year. By the time we hit one million, the average annual income will probably be around 90K.

[clarkfan1979]

Probably 7 years after graduation but hard to know as employer was giving non-wage benefits which added up.  Didn't reach $1MM net worth until 10 years after graduation. Doubled again in five years, then three, etc.

Do you really mean "doubling" or just reaching another million?

So you went from zero to 1 million in 10 years, then 1 million to 2 million in 5 years and lastly 2 million to 4 million in 3 years. The last one seems a little difficult to believe.

[BTDretire]

I put 21 to 30, but now I find I misread the subject. I thought it was save not earn, and I went from when we started saving not started working.
 So it was 39 years, I started my first job in 1969 at 14, from there it took 39 years (2008) to earn 1M with both my wife's and my income. Didn't start saving until I was 26.
 I don't have an exact number, but we probably had over $700k saved by the time we earned the 1M.
Closest NW statement I have is the end of 2010 and that's $936K, That didn't include our paid for home.

SS is a bit misleading because we had some real estate profits that weren't SS taxed.

[Loren Ver]

There's some ambiguity around when your working years start - do I start from age 14, when I got a $9 cheque for a whole day's worth of mail delivery? Or age 16, when I got a steady after-school job paying $27 per week for 4 hours' work? Or from when I graduated and got my first proper full-time job at age 24?

I don't see what's ambiguous about when other people started paying you money for work you did. I started working and paying taxes on my income when I was 15 and that's when the government started being informed of my earnings.

Zero. Some of us will never earn a million dollars, nor plan to work long enough to reach that. We have a lower FIRE number. Perhaps it is better to ask how many years have/will you work to reach your FI number. That's approx. 20 for me starting at 18 and not including my teenage jobs.

Talk about FIRE numbers is kind of a dead horse around here. Plus, I'm very skeptical that even someone with a low FIRE number would never crack $1M in their life time. Some back of the envelop math shows that you almost have to avoid getting paid by others to not clear $1M at some point in your life. Sure we could quibble about passive versus active income (I'd argue that with passive income it's likely impossible to FIRE and not exceed $1M in total income), but something like 90% people born in the US are projected to near or exceed $1M in lifetime earnings even at very low income levels.

Maybe but I took your post to mean "earned income" not investment earnings, or passive income or NW increases like equity on your house. So just using straight SS earnings data I didn't come any where near a million bucks by a huge amount but then I never earned much at my jobs. By the time I reach 65 I will have close to 25 or 30 years of zero earnings on my SS statement. I haven't earned any income since FIREing either. But I get that most people here are higher income earners and can easily crack the million dollar mark for gross income earned fairly quickly. I imagine it could be pretty disheartening to see you earned a million fast but between taxes and spending much of it wasn't saved.

ETA FWIW my current NW is much higher then my lifetime earned income thanks to investment growth and home equity increases.

This is kinda where I am.  I FIREd early in 2019.  I never W-2 earned my first million and probably never will as I don't plan on exchanging times for money any more.  As for the stash, it is also not at one million, though I expect it to get there eventually.  DH and my combined W-2 was a little over a million, but not by much.
If we take my W-2 income plus all the capital gains earned over the years, then we have the million earned, a few years ago.

If I remember correctly this was Step 1 of YMOYL book. Add up all the income you earned and compare to to your NW. Was pretty eye opening from both the earning side and the spending side. For thoselike me it really showed the value of compounding and investing. For the big earners and spender it probably gave them.a heart attack ;-). "How could 'poor' Spartana who didn't make much have more money then big earner me after 10 years?" I think MMM has a old blog post on it. Yep: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/12/18/your-money-or-your-life/

Indeed!

[use2betrix]

There's some ambiguity around when your working years start - do I start from age 14, when I got a $9 cheque for a whole day's worth of mail delivery? Or age 16, when I got a steady after-school job paying $27 per week for 4 hours' work? Or from when I graduated and got my first proper full-time job at age 24?

I don't see what's ambiguous about when other people started paying you money for work you did. I started working and paying taxes on my income when I was 15 and that's when the government started being informed of my earnings.

Zero. Some of us will never earn a million dollars, nor plan to work long enough to reach that. We have a lower FIRE number. Perhaps it is better to ask how many years have/will you work to reach your FI number. That's approx. 20 for me starting at 18 and not including my teenage jobs.

Talk about FIRE numbers is kind of a dead horse around here. Plus, I'm very skeptical that even someone with a low FIRE number would never crack $1M in their life time. Some back of the envelop math shows that you almost have to avoid getting paid by others to not clear $1M at some point in your life. Sure we could quibble about passive versus active income (I'd argue that with passive income it's likely impossible to FIRE and not exceed $1M in total income), but something like 90% people born in the US are projected to near or exceed $1M in lifetime earnings even at very low income levels.

Maybe but I took your post to mean "earned income" not investment earnings, or passive income or NW increases like equity on your house. So just using straight SS earnings data I didn't come any where near a million bucks by a huge amount but then I never earned much at my jobs. By the time I reach 65 I will have close to 25 or 30 years of zero earnings on my SS statement. I haven't earned any income since FIREing either. But I get that most people here are higher income earners and can easily crack the million dollar mark for gross income earned fairly quickly. I imagine it could be pretty disheartening to see you earned a million fast but between taxes and spending much of it wasn't saved.

ETA FWIW my current NW is much higher then my lifetime earned income thanks to investment growth and home equity increases.

This is kinda where I am.  I FIREd early in 2019.  I never W-2 earned my first million and probably never will as I don't plan on exchanging times for money any more.  As for the stash, it is also not at one million, though I expect it to get there eventually.  DH and my combined W-2 was a little over a million, but not by much.
If we take my W-2 income plus all the capital gains earned over the years, then we have the million earned, a few years ago.

If I remember correctly this was Step 1 of YMOYL book. Add up all the income you earned and compare to to your NW. Was pretty eye opening from both the earning side and the spending side. For thoselike me it really showed the value of compounding and investing. For the big earners and spender it probably gave them.a heart attack ;-). "How could 'poor' Spartana who didn't make much have more money then big earner me after 10 years?" I think MMM has a old blog post on it. Yep: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/12/18/your-money-or-your-life/

@spartana did you get any type of pension or military/government benefit for retirement?

FYI - I’m almost through YMOYL for the 2nd time. Great book.

[ender]

Probably 7 years after graduation but hard to know as employer was giving non-wage benefits which added up.  Didn't reach $1MM net worth until 10 years after graduation. Doubled again in five years, then three, etc.

Do you really mean "doubling" or just reaching another million?

So you went from zero to 1 million in 10 years, then 1 million to 2 million in 5 years and lastly 2 million to 4 million in 3 years. The last one seems a little difficult to believe.

SP500 dividend reinvested return from Jan 2016 to Dec 2019 was 80%. Not quite 100% and not quite 3 years but pretty close still.

[fattest_foot]

Haven't hit it and likely never will. I think I just recently crossed the $500k mark, and my remaining working years are low.

If you asked for household we'd get there, but then we'd probably run into the question of when do you start counting our earnings as combined (lifetime? only married?).

[use2betrix]

I haven't read YMOYL in ages but it was one of those old school books that started me out thinking about money and FIRE. Most of the investment stuff isn't useful but the rest is.

That’s a good point. I mostly skipped through many of the earlier steps as I’ve largely been through that before and already track all my earnings, spending, etc.The remainder which really focuses on the mindset and necessity of a lot of spending, it’s impact on your life and the environment, I found to be a great refresher.