Americans are their own little bubble again - I'd wager that most of the world's programmers don't live in US. Globally your average programmer will be someone writing utterly boring code making same salary as a teacher, maybe slightly above that if lucky. Happy to be proven wrong, but the whole "If you aren't making 6 figures as a programmer you failed at life" meme needs to go away - it's a tiny tiny sliver of all programmers that actually manage to achieve that.
Retiring early is more about expenses than income. If you can't retire early with $100k income, you probably can't do it with $300k either.
Most people can't do it, because their expenses grow to match their income. They want bigger and better everything, and they always find new "mandatory" expenses. Especially if they have kids.
My spouse and I make just a touch over the GP, combined of course. Our mortgage is 1.3k/month, and our daycare costs are 3k/month. In a year darcaye goes down by half, and 2 years after that we’re going to have money coming out our ears.
I am fortunate my spouse was on board with this plan, which was mine. I’m 38, spouse is 36, for reference. Assuming we have college saved for, I don’t want to work a day past 55 if I can manage it.
I probably dragged things out a year or three past where I prudently could have. Not sure if I made the right call or not. COVID messed up a lot of things (and obviously sadly killed a lot of people) and I might have made different decisions on a more normal timeline.
With age, your ability to spend money greatly diminishes. Even driving to expensive restaurants is tiresome. The need to impress other people goes away, and rocking chair on the porch doesn't cost much. I'm struggling to spend 1/5 of my investment income. And the kids have forbidden me from giving them more money because they want to 'make it themselves'.
