Millionaire Interview 447

Here’s our latest interview with a millionaire as we seek to learn from those who have grown their wealth to high heights.

If you’d like to be considered for an interview, drop me a note and we can chat about specifics.

This interview took place in May.

My questions are in bold italics and their responses follow in black.

Let’s get started…

OVERVIEW

How old are you (and spouse if applicable, plus how long you’ve been married)?

We both turn 53 this year and have been married for 27 years.

Do you have kids/family (if so, how old are they)?

We have three boys ranging in age from 19 to 26. One is away at college but still in our state, one is in college and living at home and one has flown the coop and living independently about 4.5 hours from us.

It is an amazing feeling knowing that we have been able to raise kids who are capable of being independent, but it comes with a sense of loss when you realize they don’t need you as much anymore.

What area of the country do you live in (and urban or rural)?

We live in the Northeast in a rural/suburban area.

While I don’t consider us to be in a high-cost-of-living area, property taxes are brutal and impact the overall cost of living here.

What is your current net worth?

$7.34M as of May 2, 2025.

What are the main assets that make up your net worth (stocks, real estate, business, home, retirement accounts, etc.) and any debt that offsets part of these?

• Traditional 401Ks and IRAs: $3.51M
• Net Real Estate Equity: $1.00M
• After-tax brokerage accounts: $0.88M
• Cash Balance Pension: $0.71M
• Deferred Compensation: $0.49M
• Roth 401Ks and IRAs: $0.32M
• Cash: $0.25M
• 529 Plan: $0.18M

A few notes: Real estate includes a primary residence, a secondary home and 6 long-term rental properties.

The after-tax brokerage accounts include one online account that with a dividend portfolio and an advised account that is diversly invested for growth.

Cash balance pension plan is fully vested. Deferred comp will be paid out evenly over 5 years after we retire. We expect to fully exhaust the 529 plan by the time our youngest completes college.

EARN

What is your job?

We are both in Director level Project/Program management at a Fortune 500 company.

We have been fortunate to work together for the same company and to do so for all but the first year or two of our careers.

What is your annual income?

29 and 30 years into our post-college careers our total combined annual base salary is $563,400 with a target variable compensation of 25% (can range from 0% to $40% based on individual and corporate targets). We also receive an annual retention bonus of 15% independent of the variable compensation.

Our earnings still amaze us and we are incredibly grateful for the opportunities we have been given.

Tell us about your income performance over time. What was the starting salary of your first job, how did it grow from there (and what you did to make it grow), and where are you now?

Our first jobs out of college with engineering degrees paid salaries of $37,000 and 39,000. We changed companies one time resulting in a 10% pay increase for one of us and a 0% increase for the other (I made the mistake of noting on the application that my desired salary was the same as my current salary – they were happy to meet my expectations!).

We weren’t making the change to get more money, we were making the change to get to the same location. We were engaged to be married and living 6 hours apart.

Our degrees were fairly specialized and difficult to find two jobs in the same geographical areas with 2 different companies. We went and interviewed at a company as a package deal – being up front that we were engaged and we both needed offers to make it work.

They accepted this and in hindsight, it was the best thing we could have done for our careers and for our future family.

Our first child had some health issues at birth and our company was extremely flexible with us. Allowing us to work remotely when needed (over dial up internet!) and letting one of us work part-time and outside of typical business hours.

With some of those simple but powerful accommodations, our company made us feel like they were committed to us and it drove our commitment to them and our focus has always been to work hard and do great work.

Throughout our careers, we rarely asked for raises. We regularly asked for opportunities.

Sometimes these opportunities would be positions that we knew were going to be vacant soon. Sometimes there were holes within our teams that we knew needed to be filled.

Sometimes they would come with raises and new titles but often we viewed them as planting seeds for the future. These seeds often grew into unexpected mid-cycle raises, expanded roles, and new roles.

While we don’t have good records of base salary through all our working years, we can say that since 2014, our total base salary has nearly doubled from $286,000.

What tips do you have for others who want to grow their career-related income?

I know that many see changing jobs as the path to high income, but as stated above we didn’t follow that same path. We have seen tremendous salary growth by going towards hard.

Asking for challenging tasks or roles, volunteering to step in when there is a gap without asking to give up other things on our plate, being willing to do the hard things that others won’t step up and do if they don’t think they will get paid more. And after we were given those extra tasks – we delivered!

There are some key traits that can be found in employees who excel in their career:

• Identifying problems and driving solutions. Only identifying a problem brings more work to your manager or another team member. Being the person willing to solve the problem is extremely valuable.
• Asking for specific roles or tasks. We never said “hey, I think I am a top performer can you give me a raise?”. Instead, we said “I see this gap and I can take it on”, and this typically turned into a future raise without having to ask for it.
• Doing the hard work. Challenging assignments will always bring more opportunity for rewards than repetitive tasks, no matter how important those repetitive tasks are.
• Being versatile. Being willing and able to change direction quickly or work in a new space when the need arises makes you more likely to be sought out for new roles.
• Having a sense of urgency. Most companies will reward those who move fast. Being able to move forward without 100% certainty is an enabler to future success. Failing fast is equally as important as having a successful outcome. Of course, poor decision-making or making moves that would be considered high risk without the appropriate level of contingency planning can be detrimental. It is a fine line and those who can walk it will find success.
• Being likable. Those who can build relationships with others create a network of people who can pull for them in the future.

What’s your work-life balance look like?

Right now, it is pretty good. We have a fair amount of autonomy in planning our days.

Typically, we both enjoy working in the office vs. working from home but when we need to work remotely we can. Past roles have required significant global travel and/or a lot of time on conference calls at night.

While this still happens occasionally, it is not something that is an issue for us.

Do you have any sources of income besides your career? If so, can you list them, give us a feel for how much you earn with each, and offer some insight into how you developed them?

In 2024 we earned $33,000 in dividends from our after-tax accounts. These were all reinvested.

We have a long-term rental portfolio that cash flowed $23,000 last year after expenses and reserves for future capital expenses. Our portfolio has 3 single-family homes and 3 duplexes.

The cash flow right now is used to build reserves for future repairs but we are near a comfortable level so we will likely use the cash flow to pay down some of the mortgages. We started building this portfolio in 2019 to begin to build another stream of income for the future.

At that time, we felt like we had done well with stocks but that at some point the market was going to drop. Investment properties were a hedge towards that drop.

We did not cut back on investing in our stock portfolio but utilized some idle cash to move into real estate. Our local market is not an appreciation market but we got lucky and purchased at the right time and caught an appreciation wave driven by the broader real estate market and inflation so we got more than expected on top of the cash flow.

That portfolio is 58% leveraged and all but one have rates ranging from 2 3/8% to 5%.

Clearly the stock market has continued to make great gains so we are happy that we continued to invest and the real estate portfolio will provide a nice travel budget when we retire.

SAVE

What is your annual spending?

This is an area that we are very poor in tracking. We used to be pretty good at tracking spending but as our income grew and we were meeting our savings goals, that tracking became less meaningful.

When I look at 2024 total after-tax income and remove after tax investments, by default we spent $250,000 last year. For sure as our income has grown we have allowed our spending to grow.

We believe there needs to be a healthy balance in enjoying today while keeping an eye on the future with savings.

We did try to look at our spending in 2023 and that is what we used to categorize our main spending below. This is something that we need to get a better handle on as we are on the verge of retirement.

What are the main categories (expenses) this spending breaks into?

Below are our top 10 spending categories based on 2023 analysis which represents about 2/3 of our total spend that year (excludes rental properties).

• Home maintenance and upgrades (11%)
• Travel (11%)
• Mortgage (10%)
• Food/eating out (8%)
• General merchandise (7%)
• Medical Insurance and payments (6%)
• Property Taxes (5%)
• Utilities/garbage/TV/Cellular/internet (5%)
• Second home carrying costs (3%)
• Donations (2%)

Do you have a budget? If so, how do you implement it?

No budget – as indicated above, we save hard and then we enjoy the leftovers. We are not shoppers.

We try to keep our cars for 10 years. We value experiences and things that bring our family together which is more important (and more challenging) as they are developing their own lives.

What percentage of your gross income do you save and how has that changed over time?

We save 25% of our pre-tax base salary. This goes to 401k until it is maxed out and then then for the rest of the year 25% goes to deferred compensation.

Our company provides a 4% match that is applied to both the 401k contributions and the deferred comp. This year we will max out the 401ks by June.

We also save 20% of our variable compensation to deferred comp and get a 4% match on that. We save 22% of after tax pay to our brokerage accounts.

All told in 2024, this amounted to 27% savings of our total gross income (not including company match).

Not included above is real estate investment and some additional cash savings. Using cash to buy properties and refinancing later (sometimes the following year) makes this hard to track but we are trying to beef up our cash position ahead of retirement so we direct a small amount each month to high yield savings.

Another savings mechanism that is not our direct savings – our company makes a monthly contribution to our cash balance pension plan. The amount is based on a combination of age and years of service and we are currently getting 8% of eligible compensation (base + variable).

Interest is also accrued monthly in this account.

What’s your best tip for saving (accumulating) money?

Start today! We both started saving to our 401k with our first jobs.

We would increase our contributions with salary raises and eventually, we found that we were maxing out earlier and earlier. This almost felt effortless because we kept some of each raise for our own enjoyment.

We did have years where we didn’t increase – sometimes due to salary freezes by the company, sometimes because of other priorities in life but we made sure to never go backwards. Maxing out allowed us to switch to after-tax contributions to keep getting our match and save a little extra.

When we earned enough salary to qualify for deferred compensation we immediately participated knowing it would help with taxes today and be a source of income in the first 5 years of retirement. All these options became available to us because we started early.

Automatic deductions/investments are a must. If you don’t see it, there is no temptation to spend it.

Set goals for savings and make commitments to yourself to increase your savings rate over time.

Educate yourself on investing using multiple sources. Use that education to establish a personal investment strategy/policy that guides your savings rate and where you direct your savings.

Be intentional about making changes to this plan. There is a lot of content out there which hype the latest investment trend and can be a distraction.

If you stick to your strategy you will be less likely to chase these trends without doing your own education on the topic.

In full disclosure – we did not/do not have a written policy. We also did not have Instagram, Tic-Toc, social media influencers, or an endless stream of people telling us we should have/hit a FIRE number.

We did, though, have regular discussions about our savings (where and how much) and were deliberate about major changes such as adding an advisor, contributing to deferred comp, and investing in real estate. A written policy gives an extra layer of protection against sudden changes – especially for newer savers/investors.

What’s your best tip for spending less money?

Compared to most other interviews on ESI, we are not the poster children for low spending. However, as I mentioned earlier we are not shoppers.

We spend on the things that make us happy – our family, our home, our hobbies, and experiences. Our advice would be to spend on the things that make you happy.

Spend less time looking at what others have and thinking you need it too. Spend more time collecting memories.

What is your favorite thing to spend money on/your secret splurge?

Travel – with ourselves, with family and with friends. We tend to take about two larger trips per year and since the kids have gotten older we have increased the number of long weekend trips we take.

We are big fans of National Parks and plan to visit them all in the years to come.

Skiing – our most expensive hobby. Season passes, our second home, gear and trips to other mountains all add up.

Home improvements in both our primary and second home, especially our outdoor space at home.

Baseball park collecting – we try to see a game whenever we are in a city that has a team. It has been fun to do this with our kids.

Music – we usually see a few concerts and attend a music festival every year.

INVEST

What is your investment philosophy/plan?

For a long time, our plan was set it and forget it. There would be 2 changes per year – once to switch our 401k contribution after maxing out and once to reset it in the beginning of the year.

We are still pretty much in the set it and forget it mode but a bit more active as our income grew and our investments diversified. I manage our dividend portfolio and real estate portfolio.

The dividend portfolio makes investments 2 times per month. An advisor manages about 20% of our investable assets and we make monthly investments there.

We meet with her 2 times per year – sometimes making changes and sometimes leaving it alone. Our 401ks are in target date funds.

As we approach retirement we will need to consider how to handle these and if changes are required to simplify.

What has been your best investment?

Our marriage. We have made sure to make time just for us, even when the kids were small.

We have many similar interests which makes it easy to plan trips and our future. We play different roles with our finances, one focused on longer-term investment and one focusing on day-to-day money management, but we are on the same page with financial goals.

Our careers. We have worked hard and have been very dedicated to our company.

We are fortunate that we found a company that has been equally dedicated to us – allowing us both to grow. While this has come with some sacrifices over the years (working during vacation, missed birthdays or anniversary), we don’t look back with any regrets.

We never expected (or aspired) to make the kind of income we do today but feel the reward for our efforts has been worth it.

What has been your worst investment?

When I first started building a dividend portfolio I had a large percentage in GE, which became a painful learning opportunity about chasing high dividend yield!

In 1999 I had $1,000 to invest and I was choosing between Dell and Apple – I chose Dell! That taught me that “invest in what you know” is not really a solid strategy.

What’s been your overall return?

We have no good way to calculate this with account transfers and our company moving 401k managers several times during our career. Our brokerage accounts have earned 33% on our investments (but don’t give annual growth rate).

In 2019 I started an annual tracking of our investable assets. It includes all our retirement accounts, investment accounts, cash, cash balance pension plan, and deferred compensation.

The growth is shown below which includes new savings + earnings.

How often do you monitor/review your portfolio?

I look at market performance daily and look regularly at our Empower dashboard (formally Personal Capital). Since I am making investments in our dividend portfolio two times per month I look most closely at this to plan the next round of investments.

Once per year I update the investable asset tracking sheet mentioned above on January 1st. All the accounts are updated with year-end numbers and then I forecast our savings for future years and modest investment returns (5%) to get a future view of where we will be.

In 2019 I forecasted that we would have $4.15M at the end of 2024 so I think I was being too conservative but I was on the right side of being wrong. 😊

We meet two times per year with our advisor to review the portion of the portfolio she manages. She also helps us look at our total net worth and runs Monte Carlo simulations to help us understand our readiness for retirement.

NET WORTH

How did you accumulate your net worth?

Starting early, always staying in the market, prioritizing and increasing savings rate, and exceptional income growth have all played a role in our net worth growth. Our careers have spanned the burst of the internet bubble, the Great Recession and then Covid spurred market drop.

Through all those times, we were buyers and never sellers of the stock market. There is no doubt that the latest bull market run has been a big contributor to our current number, but only because we had decades of investments in the market to benefit from that run-up.

We avoided credit card debt. We did finance vehicles but tried to keep them at least 10 years.

We will still finance them today if there is a big enough spread between the financing interest rate and the rate we are getting in our high-yield savings account.

We had about $30,000 of student loans when we graduated college. We prioritized getting them paid off as soon as possible.

We both took advantage of tuition reimbursement from our company to work on our Masters degrees. We were able to defer some of our student loans during this time.

We continued to pay and since the loan was in deferment, 100% of the payment went to the principal saving us interest and getting the loan paid off faster. We are very fortunate to have way above average earnings that have enabled us to save a significant amount for many years which has propelled our net worth.

Our families made some contributions to our kid’s college funds. With their help, we are unlikely to need to spend beyond what we have saved for them.

While we are expecting some inheritances in the future, they will not have a substantial impact on our net worth and we hope that we don’t receive these for many, many years.

What would you say is your greatest strength in the ESI wealth-building model (Earn, Save or Invest) and why would you say it’s tops?

Saving is our greatest strength followed closely by earning. Being consistent, focusing on increasing our savings rate, and never pulling money out the market have been core components of our net worth growth.

While we didn’t focus directly on increasing earnings, our work ethic and commitment to our jobs put earnings growth on autopilot.

There is nothing magical about our investing strategy – some would likely say it is a bit haphazard. As our financial position grew we made sure to be educated about our investments – not so we could find big wins, but so we could avoid poor decisions leading to big losses.

What road bumps did you face along the way to becoming a millionaire and how did you handle them?

We have been lucky to have few if any road bumps. We have done many things that most would assume delayed our wealth building but we see it differently. Things such as:

• Buying into a time share – this is a drain on wealth building but it has allowed us to take many trips with friends and family all around the country without anyone having to think about having to pay for a hotel.
• Buying a vacation rental – we lost money every year but our kids grew up with amazing memories of family time at the beach. When we finally sold, the accumulated losses wiped out any capital gains tax and depreciation recapture owed.
• Buying a second home – purely a luxury expense but it has created significant family time, kept us active in the winter, and as the kids have grown it is a place they want to come back to. This is an infinite return on our investment.

What are you currently doing to maintain/grow your net worth?

Continue to focus on savings.

If we hit our goals we will save over $350,000 this year including company contributions.

Do you have a target net worth you are trying to attain?

Ideally we would like to be able to generate $300,000 with a 3.5% withdrawal rate. This would put our target at $8.6M.

If our real estate portfolio stays at its current value, I estimate that our net worth will cross $9M in 2027 so we are right on target.

How old were you when you made your first million and have you had any significant behavior shifts since then?

Based on statements we were 401k millionaires in early 2013. Sometime between then and the end of 2014 our 401k balance was high enough that our total net worth would have been over $1M.

No behavior shifts. We really didn’t know that it happened until going back much later to look (emphasizing the “forget it” part of “set it and forget it”!).

What personal habits and/or traits have you developed that have made you successful at growing your net worth?

We have mentioned hard work and dedication multiple times. Without this our income growth would not be what it has been.

Identifying as savers, but not being frugal. This allowed us to be critical of our spending when needed but not causing ourselves to feel guilty when we make decisions to spend money.

Living for today AND for tomorrow. Once we were set up to meet our savings goals, the rest was ours to enjoy however we saw fit.

Avoiding credit card debt for the entirety of our marriage.

What money mistakes have you made along the way that others can learn from?

The only thing I wish we would have done differently would have been to prioritize Roth IRA savings earlier in our careers. We did a few backdoor contributions with some bonus money but most of our Roth balance came from a mega backdoor Roth conversion we did with our after-tax 401k contributions.

That effectively blocked us from more Roth contributions because we now have money in a traditional IRA that we haven’t converted for tax reasons. We have passed this learning along to our son who is investing enough in his 401k to get the match but shifting other savings to maxing out his Roth before directing more money to the 401k.

What advice do you have for ESI Money readers on how to become wealthy?

Work hard in a field with strong income potential. Save early and often.

Don’t get caught up in influencer “must-dos”. Set a strategy that works for you and your family’s goals and stick to it.

Focus more on FI and less on RE. This will keep your attention more on the things you can control (savings rate, spending, job performance) and less on the things you can’t (market downturns, corporate reductions in force).

The journey is the most important part.

FUTURE

What are your plans for the future regarding lifestyle?

Our plan is to retire at 55. Barring a stock market implosion, we are on track to do that.

Currently no plans to move but we may consider something more coastal in the future.

What are your retirement plans?

We self-manage our rental properties and will continue to do so. We will handle most renovations that will come up on these properties as well.

We are both active with non-profit organizations and expect to continue to volunteer. Some things that we are considering and/or planning for one or both of us:

• Part-time work in a fundraising or development-type role
• Expanding our volunteer efforts with charitable organizations
• Joining the ski patrol
• Collecting ski days when there are no lift lines
• Visiting all the national parks
• Hiking the high peaks in our area and beyond
• Travel near and far
• More time with family and friends

Are there any issues in retirement that concern you? If so, how are you planning to address them?

Health care isn’t necessarily something we are concerned about – we know it is an expense we will have to deal with – but it is something we need to do more research on the best approach for us.

Drawdown strategy – how to put ourselves in a position to minimize tax impact and the best strategy for the early years of retirement.

Running out of time – we have seen many people retire and then pass away shortly after. Most of them worked well past 60.

This is a primary reason we want to retire at 55. We enjoy spending time together and we want to maximize what we have.

MISCELLANEOUS

How did you learn about finances and at what age did it “click”?

We both grew up in loving homes that were lower middle to middle class. We worked typical teenage jobs to earn some spending money and contributed to our college costs by working some during school.

Neither of us can say that we missed out on anything growing up. Our parents had high expectations of us, knew the value of hard work, and supported us in our education.

What we came to understand as we matured financially is that one of us grew up in a “earn and save” household and the other grew up in a “earn and spend” household. One family lived below their means, the other lived at or above their means.

We took valuable learnings from each of our backgrounds that helped shape our financial future. Specifically – earning the things we wanted, not waiting for them to be given to us; delaying gratification (we did this a lot more in our early days than we do today); avoiding high-interest debt; living together before we were married to minimize expenses (quite the controversy back then 😊); owning assets and not renting; investing early and continuously.

Our families laid the groundwork for who we would become, and we are extremely grateful for that.

There was not really a click moment, but our collective experiences and observations helped us choose the road we wanted to go down financially. As we got older, it became more about education.

Reading, learning how to invest in stocks, understanding what benefits were available to us and working to maximize them and seeking out and paying for financial advice all contributed to growing our financial literacy.

Who inspired you to excel in life? Who are your heroes?

We mention above the impact our families have had on us. Our kids inspire us as we watch them grow and make their own impact on the world around them.

We are also inspired by people who do good. These aren’t names anyone would know.

They are the people in our community who help others, they are the people who work at the charities we support who give their lives to the mission, and they are people who do these things selflessly, without seeking recognition.

Do you have any favorite money books you like/recommend? If so, can you share with us your top three and why you like them?

Not a lot of money books. Early on, magazines like Money or Kiplinger’s were staples on business trips.

Lots of learning from blogs like Financial Samurai, Retire by 40, Retire Before Dad, and the Retirement Manifesto. Most real estate learning has come through Bigger Pockets podcasts and blogs.

And of course, so much learning from every single millionaire interview on ESI!

Do you give to charity? Why or why not? If you do, what percent of time/money do you give?

Last year we donated a little over 2% of our base salary. By taking advantage of a generous corporate match, our total financial impact was about 3% of our base.

We are working to increase this amount as we feel we should do better with the wealth we have been blessed with.

We are very active in organizations. Between us we sit on three non-profit boards, are hands-on on actively supporting youth and HS sports that our kids benefited from, and leading efforts to fundraise for our corporate charity. We expect in retirement this list will grow.

Do you plan to leave an inheritance for your heirs (how do you plan to distribute your wealth at your death)? What are your reasons behind this plan?

Our will is set up to distribute any remaining wealth to our kids after some charitable donations. We don’t feel compelled to do this and won’t constrain our spending to make it happen.

It is our hope that we can help our kids out along the way if they need it and spend money making memories together with them. We have already given them a solid foundation.

They will finish college without debt, they have established Roth IRAs with their summer jobs during high school and the one who has flown the coop should hit a six-figure net worth by his third year out of college (yes he is tracking it!).

If they continue down this path any inheritance they receive in 35 or 40 years won’t impact them financially so we may as well enjoy it with them!