Millionaire Interview 449

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 June.

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)?

I am 51, and my wife is 42.

We have known each other for almost 20 years and have been married for a little over 12 years.

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

We have one daughter who is 11 years old.

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

We live in the Pacific Northwest, in a friendly and quiet suburb of Portland, Oregon. So, we have the best of all worlds, i.e., the amenities of a large metro area close by, with an international airport, shopping, and entertainment.

However, we face very few of the typical large-city problems, such as crime and traffic. We also live in a town with one of the most desirable school districts in the area.

What is your current net worth?

As of June 2025, we had a net worth of about $6.5m.

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?

We own our primary residence, valued at approximately $500,000, free from any mortgage. We have no other debts either.

We also have approximately $800,000 in rental real estate investments and about $5.2 million in brokerage accounts. Roughly half is in retirement accounts, and the other is in taxable accounts.

Within our financial asset portfolios, we maintain an approximate 75% equity share plus 25% in fixed-income assets.

EARN

What is your job?

My wife and I are currently retired. Before retiring, I worked in finance as a senior researcher for a large asset management firm.

My wife was a registered nurse. Of course, in retirement, I’m still doing a few side projects. I occasionally teach as an adjunct professor, run a small personal finance blog, and undertake other small freelance projects related to finance and technology.

What is your annual income?

We derive no significant income from my side gigs, and we fund more than 90% of our current retirement budget from passive investment income, including dividends, interest, and capital gains.

The taxable income from dividends, options trading, rental income, and other sources is currently around $200,000 per year, but this amount fluctuates. I have just finished my taxes for 2024, and our taxable income for that year was just above $300,000.

However, this was due to an unusually favorable investment climate that year.

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?

While in graduate school in the late 1990s, I held various part-time jobs, including teaching assistant and research assistant, which earned me approximately $10,000 to $15,000 per year. My first real job out of the university in 2000 paid $84,000.

That grew for a few years into the low 100,000s until I moved to a more prestigious Wall Street firm in a more prestigious segment: asset management for large institutional investors, such as pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, etc. I started at $300,000 in that new job and finished at around $400,000 to $420,000 right before retirement.

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

I might be the wrong person to ask, because while I worked in Corporate America, I wasn’t the most efficient or the most aggressive corporate ladder climber. A few thoughts, though: I have always felt that growth within an existing corporate environment is slow.

I got a mid-career boost by changing firms. I could have done even better if I had moved to another firm once more before retirement.

However, I became a bit complacent and didn’t want to move anymore as I drew closer to my FIRE date.

I’m also a strong advocate for maximizing educational opportunities. Academic credentials helped me in my personal career, not just the letters behind my name but also the skills that come with them.

I went through multiple cycles of layoffs, and I always positioned myself as one of the few hard-to-replace members of the brain trust to stay safe.

What’s your work-life balance look like?

I am retired, so I can decide how much I want to “work” on passion projects. Or I can watch YouTube all day long if I want to.

Of course, I still lead a very structured life due to my daughter’s school schedule. So, I set my alarm for 6:00 AM every weekday, help my daughter get ready for school, and walk her to the school bus.

My wife and I also have a lot of extra time to volunteer.

During my daughter’s summer break, we typically travel for almost the entire two months, so our early retirement gives us a lot of freedom to plan extravagant trips that would have been hard to pull off with a corporate job and 20 or 23 annual vacation days.

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?

I earn around $12,000 per year from my blog. Teaching as an adjunct professor pays shockingly little, typically around $4,500 to $6,000 per class.

Not one class session, but the entire 15-week class, that is. So, that’s something I do primarily for fun, maybe one class every two years.

The bulk of my retirement budget comes from my investments.

SAVE

What is your annual spending?

We spend approximately $12,000 per month or $144,000 per year.

This already includes our regular quarterly tax payments.

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

Here is our approximate annual spending breakdown:

Going through the major categories, 

• Health insurance and copayments are approximately $10,000 per year for a high-deductible Christian Care Share plan. 
• Food, including dining out, costs approximately $900 per month or $10,800 per year. 
• Our home expenses have been substantial despite not having a mortgage. The $16,500 includes approximately $4,800 for taxes, $1,000 for insurance, and $600 per year for the HOA. The bulk of our other housing expenses was spent on repairs and updates. We bought this house at a cut-throat price in 2018, but it certainly had some deferred maintenance issues we needed to address over the years.
• Utilities cover electricity, gas, water, garbage, mobile phones, and internet. We have no cable TV.
• We must be one of the few couples with only one vehicle. It’s a modest car—a Honda CR-V—and we spend around $6,000 per year on driving and maintenance. This also includes a depreciation allowance of $200 per month.
• We spend lavishly on travel, approximately $36,000, to cover around 10-12 weeks of travel each year. 
• Entertainment, outside of travel, costs about $6,000 per year.  
• I also set aside approximately $25,000 for estimated federal taxes. 
• Shopping costs approximately $700 per month, or $8,400 per year.
• We contribute $200 a month to a 529 plan for our daughter. The plan is already well-funded with over $100,000, so we have scaled back the contributions. We may even set this to zero soon to ensure we don’t overfund the college savings plan.
• Charity and gifts total around $800 a month, or $9,600. 
• The rest is for miscellaneous spending, plus a cushion.

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

We never had a formal budget, but I track our expenses in Quicken. It’s more of an FYI thing.

With our current financial net worth, we can safely afford withdrawals of at least $180,000 and even $200,000 per year, and we’re confident that we’ll never run out of money. Therefore, we currently don’t see the need for a formal budget that we must adhere to.

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

We are already retired and live primarily off our investment income. When I was still working, I tracked my savings rate, which initially started at around 20-25% but rose to about 50% by the end, thanks to my significantly larger income.

In the savings rates, I counted explicit investments, such as flows into retirement and taxable brokerage accounts, as well as the principal paydown of the mortgages we had over the years.

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

While accumulating, I’ve done well automating my contributions. So, keep it simple: don’t try to time the market or your asset allocation.

The ideal asset allocation while accumulating is 100% equities for most folks with some flexibility in their retirement date. In retirement, it’s often too risky to keep 100% equities due to Sequence of Returns Risk.

So, during the last few years before retirement, one should shift down to about 60-75% equities and keep the rest in diversifying assets, like U.S. Treasury Bonds. 

What’s your best tip for spending less money?

We’ve never been overly frugal, so don’t count on me for great hacks on spending less. But here are a few ideas.

First, we’ve managed to survive with one car. But I understand that not everyone can pull that off, especially when you still work and rely on two incomes from two jobs in two different locations.

But for us, it’s still a big money saver. Since we enjoy doing most of our free time activities together anyway, we can easily get by with just one car.

Cooking at home saves a significant amount of money and also helps with portion control, allowing us to eat healthier by knowing precisely what’s in our food. So, we don’t eat out much.

I still take my wife on occasional romantic dates to an exclusive, member-only restaurant: the Costco Food Court. Just kidding. Don’t worry, my wife finds that funny.

And of course, when traveling, we like to explore the local cuisine, but outside of vacation time, we likely eat out at a sit-down restaurant only about once a month.

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

I realized that folks who are not yet rich try to show off their luxury goods. Now that we’re affluent, we no longer have that urge.

In fact, quite the opposite; we like to fly under the radar, and if we splurge on anything, we usually keep it to ourselves. We live in a modest home and drive a modest car.

We may still appreciate other luxury items, such as jewelry and watches, that are easier to keep private and display only in circles where we feel comfortable.

We primarily focus on experiences over material possessions. As you can see from our budget, we enjoy spending money on travel.

Our primary constraint is not so much the financial side but mostly time due to our daughter’s public school schedule. We will likely spend more than that once our daughter is off to college and my wife and I can also travel more extensively.

Our favorite mode of transportation is cruising. Outside of the pandemic, we’ve averaged three cruises per year since retiring.

We cruised only a few times in the Caribbean because it got boring after a while. We’ve had some of our most rewarding experiences in other exciting locations, such as the South Pacific, the New Zealand Fjords, multiple Alaska cruises, Norway, Iceland, and Greenland.

We’ve done multiple cruises in the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and two Transatlantic cruises. We also cruised through the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal.

Later in 2025, we plan a cruise out of Buenos Aires to Cape Horn and Antarctica. We also place a strong emphasis on spending time with family and friends.

On most of those cruises, we were accompanied by our loved ones.

INVEST

What is your investment philosophy/plan?

My investment philosophy is to keep things as simple and passive as possible. I used 100% equities while accumulating and have now shifted my financial asset portfolio to about 60-75% stocks and the rest to safer fixed-income assets.

Of course, one might also incorporate a more active investment style. I trade options, but that’s neither necessary nor sufficient for reaching financial independence. 

I’d stay away from all the hyped products that are mostly ineffective, high-fee gimmicks, such as Small-cap value, High-Dividend Yield ETFs, Leveraged ETFs, Commodity ETFs, Managed Futures (a.k.a. CTA, Trend-following, momentum strategies) ETFs, Risk Parity, etc.

These were all invented by the financial services industry to sell you products with higher expense ratios. The finance industry needs to compensate for lost revenue from the trend toward index funds and lower expense ratios, and must find alternative ways to generate revenue.

I say, “No, Thank You!” and mostly stick to passive broad index investing.

What has been your best investment?

I once conducted a P&L analysis of my primary residence, and it had a higher internal rate of return than my index equity investments.

I also still have my equity index fund tax lots, acquired at bargain basement prices in February and March 2009, which have since appreciated to about 10 times their original value (when you count reinvested dividends).

What has been your worst investment?

Of course, the worst investment was a great one that I missed out on. Or the car I bought with money that could have been invested in the S&P 500 index fund.

But no investment has gone completely sour (yet!), knock on wood.

I also have a few private investments in real estate where it’s challenging to track your true returns due to illiquid and hard-to-value assets. I’m still crossing my fingers that they turn out all right.

A small angel investment in a tech startup yielded a tiny profit. On the one hand, that’s a great success story because most angel investments ultimately result in total losses.

On the other hand, this investment was somewhat of a failure because I could have earned a lot more with an S&P 500 index fund.

What’s been your overall return?

Since my investments are mostly US index funds, my returns have largely aligned with the S&P 500 total return index. The buy-and-hold return from my earliest substantial investments (August 2000) to June 2025 has been quite underwhelming, by the way; just under 5% in real, CPI-adjusted dollars.

Of course, my accumulation journey wasn’t a buy-and-hold exercise. Using Dollar-Cost averaging, i.e., regularly buying even during dips, enhanced the return.

I have a few tax lots from 2009 that have appreciated 10x in 16 years, resulting in a 15% annualized return.

My options trading strategy has contributed an additional 3-5% return on top of the underlying assets in the portfolio, which includes stocks and bonds.

However, because I can only do my options trading in a taxable account, roughly 35% of my total net worth, the extra return is then diluted to about 1.0-1.5% of the overall net worth. But that’s still a large boost to my retirement portfolio returns.

How often do you monitor/review your portfolio?

You may be surprised to learn that I closely monitor financial markets, including my own portfolio performance, on a daily basis. It’s not because I’m stressed over my retirement finances, though.

It’s mainly because it’s fun; economics and finance have been a lifelong passion for me. You don’t just retire from that and stop thinking of and caring about these topics.

Some people watch birds or sports; others follow celebrity and influencer gossip. I like to watch financial markets.

It’s not even following individual stocks – that would again feel like celebrity gossip – but more of the macro picture, like interest rates, (total index) corporate earnings, credit spreads, payroll employment, inflation numbers, etc.

NET WORTH

How did you accumulate your net worth?

I’m more than 99% self-made. I never inherited any sizable amount.

The little money I inherited makes up less than 1% of our net worth. I accumulated my net worth through above-average income, above-average savings rates (compared to the overall population), and investing returns that were in line with the S&P 500 total return index, which had a pretty nice run over the last 25 years.

I also had a positive experience with the real estate I owned over the years. The price return never looks very impressive, likely in the low-to-mid single-digit percent range.

However, once you factor in the implicit rental dividend (i.e., not having to pay rent), then, even after accounting for maintenance, taxes, etc., your primary residence can make decent returns. I also like the idea of not having to pay rent in retirement because, with a mortgage-free home, we’ve eliminated a considerable mandatory expense, such as rent, from our equation.

It helps with Sequence of Returns Risk.

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?

Our investment returns were mostly average. Our savings rates are likely lower than those achieved by others in the FIRE community.

I probably did best on the earnings side.

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

One constraint I faced was that I finished graduate school at age 26, so I had a slightly later start than the average American. It came with one hidden advantage, though.

Living like a graduate student well into your 20s and avoiding some of the financial mistakes that some college graduates often make was a blessing. No urge to buy a 3-series BMW after graduating from college!

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

I’m withdrawing funds from my taxable brokerage account, where the cash flow from my options trading, dividends, and interest is currently enough to pay our bills. I also have substantial retirement accounts, which are primarily equity index funds that have grown without any withdrawals to date.

Maintaining a sizable taxable account while allowing my tax-advantaged accounts to grow has been effective, as it has enabled my money to continue growing, even after accounting for withdrawals.

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

We retired with a net worth of approximately $3.3 million. Now, it has grown by roughly 100% despite living off the money.

So, I have already reached and doubled my target. If I wanted to set a new lofty net worth target, it would be nice to join the 8-figure club and eventually reach $10 million.

Hey, even without any real growth, if I just maintain the $6.5m inflation-adjusted, I would reach $10m in only 22 years. Of course, that would also be a failure of sorts because overaccumulation means that I worked way too long and/or spent too little in retirement.

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

My net worth surpassed the $1 million mark for the first time in 2013, when I was 39 years old. Between that and my retirement in 2018, my investments have been on autopilot with additional contributions until 2018.

As mentioned elsewhere, retirement has convinced me to take slightly less risk than I did during accumulation, so I have since reduced my equity share to “only” 75%. And the portfolio grew further despite modest withdrawals over the last seven years.

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

I’m naturally optimistic. If you’re overly pessimistic about your life, the economy, politics, etc., you will likely fail at everything else, i.e., your career and investments.

For example, I never tried to time the market. While accumulating, I was always optimistic about putting money into my nest egg.

If the market is doing well, I follow the momentum. If the market was down during the major bear markets or even the smaller market dips, I consider it a great time to buy.

This mindset created great consistency in my savings and investments and beautifully captured several significant dollar-cost-averaging opportunities.

Outside of options trading, I don’t think that any of my economics and finance training contributed to my investment success. Any hands-off, financially untrained investor could have achieved nearly the same results with a simple, regular, and automated index fund investment plan.

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

I don’t think I made any significant financial mistakes. I stayed away from high-cost financial products.

I invested aggressively, but I never took too much risk. If I had to start over, I might have prioritized Roth IRAs earlier when I was in a lower tax bracket.

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

There are no secret skills needed. Starting early, investing regularly, and investing in every market climate will eventually get you there.

As mentioned earlier, don’t try to time the market. Keep funds in the stock market, even and especially during the bad times when everyone else throws in the towel.

There will always be people who achieve financial independence faster and more efficiently, through picking the right individual stocks or starting the right business at the right time. I also acknowledge that real estate investing can accelerate the path to financial riches.

However, the hands-off, passive investing approach through equity index funds is likely the most reliable path to becoming wealthy, albeit slightly slower than the best-case scenarios of other routes.

FUTURE

What are your plans for the future regarding lifestyle?

We enjoy our current lifestyle and will run at this pace until at least 2032, when our daughter will likely head to college. At that point, we will reassess our situation.

What are your retirement plans?

We are retired already, but we may certainly “re-retire” or retire differently in the future. Right now, we live in a location that has good public schools; both K+12 and state universities, so we would like to milk this benefit for as long as possible.

When our daughter finishes college, we may consider moving to a different location. That could mean we move closer to where our daughter settles down.

Our retirement activities will likely stay the same, as long as our health permits. Thus, we will continue to pursue outdoor activities, like hiking and skiing.

My wife and I also plan to do a lot more cruising when we no longer have the constraint of traveling only during school breaks. For example, before our daughter started Kindergarten, we did two repositioning cruises crossing the Atlantic, one in the Spring and one in the Fall.

We plan to do a lot more of those. We also plan to do a 120+-day world cruise at some point.

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

When I first retired, my main concern was whether my safe withdrawal analysis was sound. Seven years later, I’m quite confident that’s no longer an issue.

We’ve doubled our portfolio, albeit only in nominal terms. Now I start to “worry” about other issues like taxes.

Looking at the way our government, at all levels, spends borrowed money, I suspect that taxes will rise. Just to be sure, it’s not that I have any existential fears or concerns about taxes.

But tax minimization is certainly on my mind.

Another concern is setting up our daughter for a successful and productive life. Like every dad before me, I am concerned that my kid will have a harder time than I did.

Of course, with the help of economic growth, the next generation will likely have it much better, so maybe I’m worried for no reason. Then again, what if that growing national wealth becomes increasingly unequally distributed?

For example, young Americans today find it increasingly difficult to save up a down payment for a house, especially in high-cost-of-living areas. Maybe young folks today need help from their parents more than any prior generation before them.

Therefore, I’ve penciled in some future expenses to help our daughter in that direction.

MISCELLANEOUS

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

Growing up in a working-class home in Germany, I developed some financial skills early, such as pursuing education as a means to climb the social ladder and spending very cautiously.

So, in the “ESI trinity,” I learned the E=Earn and the S=Save parts early. However, I didn’t have any exposure to the I=Invest part, which I had to acquire on my own.

As a math enthusiast, I have always found compounding fascinating. Having an interest in business and economics, I learned about investing in publicly traded securities.

So, I was confident enough to deploy my retirement savings into the stock market once I got my first paychecks.

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

My older brother was a trailblazer and the first person in my extended family to go to college. I also had two wonderful Math teachers in high school who steered me in the right direction.

I could also credit my high school English teacher, who once told me that I would never amount to anything and I should just drop out of school and become a gas station attendant. That certainly motivated me to excel in school.

By the way, I retired before him.

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?

I found “The Millionaire Next Door” the most impactful. I read that book right around the time I finished graduate school and landed my first well-paid job.

It’s the danger zone when you get your first real impressive paycheck, and you risk lifestyle inflation. Learning about how many American millionaires are self-made and live modest lives was highly educational.

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

We give about 6-7% of our budget to charity. Most of that is our church, plus some other worthy causes.

I serve on the church council and as the Treasurer of my homeowners’ association (HOA). We also volunteer at our daughter’s school.

I never measured the hours we spent on that. It would be seasonal, too.

For example, I coached my daughter’s mathematics team early in 2025. Leading up to an important contest that involved three 90-minute sessions a week with the kids.

Adding my prep time, that felt like a part-time job. But that was for “only” two months.

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?

My wife and I dedicate a lot of time, money, and energy to ensuring that our daughter will be well set up. If all goes according to plan, she should have a world-class education and finish college without debt.

She can become financially independent on her own with that jumpstart. But we would be happy to provide some additional financial assistance while we are still alive, and also to leave her a substantial inheritance in the end.

If we feel that our net worth grows too large and reaches a point where our daughter no longer needs all of it to be happy and productive, we will also give a sizable amount to various charities.

We follow that Warren Buffett philosophy, i.e., give enough to our daughter that she can do anything with her life, but not so much money that she can afford to do nothing.