Your Financial Goals Are Too Small for the 21st Century

Beyond inflation, the coming decades will cost a fortune.

When I was growing up in the 1980’s, I remember my mother wistfully daydreaming about the idea of having a million dollars. “I could put it in a savings account and live off the interest” she would say.

In those years, she was right. Interest rates were 3%-5% for a standard savings account, so let’s assume 4%. This results in accruing $40,000 per year. Given her salary topped out at $38,000, that would have been plenty of money.

For years, the $1 million mark was a goal that I thought I should reach by the time I retire. I had decades before thinking about retiring in my late 60’s, so it was never really a push to get that much cash early.

Times have changed, however, and I now realize that a) $1 million is nowhere near enough and b) I don’t have that much time.

Rethinking the $1 Million Goal

Between the ages of 8, when I first heard about the concept of living off the interest of a million bucks, and 28, when I finally finished college after dropping out, my financial expectations shifted as drastically.

What started out as an audacious but achievable goal was quickly replaced by the idea of merely paying off a house before I retire, using my pension money to pay the property taxes, and figuring out some way to pay for healthcare and food using some other type of retirement account.

Oh, how the mighty dreams a 3rd grader had fallen.

By my new, lower standards, I was starting to do okay. Just last year I was finally reached 10 years of public service in Indiana, so I was vested in the state’s pension plan. We also paid off both car loans, so that was another monthly expense eliminated.

Over the next two years, my financial situation will get an additional boost by both my wife and I receiving student loan forgiveness via PSLF. Also, our youngest will be transitioning from daycare to kindergarten, which is a huge expense.

Sure, we are “behind” in our retirement savings and still have no college savings for our oldest, who is in 7th grade. But I thought we could start tackling those problems in mid-2025.

We were well on our way to securing our adjusted financial base, but a random YouTube clip changed all that.

I can’t remember what I was trying to find that day, but I happened to run across this clip from the movie The Gambler. (No, not the 1980 movie with Kenny Rogers, but the 2014 movie with Mark Wahlberg.)

In the scene, John Goodman plays a loan shark, Frank, that is chastising Wahlberg’s character, Jim, for being up $2.5 million in his gambling winnings but having nothing to show for it.

No savings. No cash. No nothing.

In response, Frank explains the basics to Jim:

You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that’s your base, get me?

That’s your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you!

Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don’t drink. That’s all I have to say to anybody on any social level.

That level of financial safety makes my initial plan of paying off the house in 30 years and using my pension to pay the taxes look pretty thin. The oh-so-sweet irony is that $2.5 million in 2024 is right around $1 million in 1989 dollars.

This scene made me reevaluate my retirement plans, both in how much I need and how much time I have to accomplish my goal.

What’s the Rush?

We are living through two major worldwide changes right now: climate change and the decline of the American empire.

While both will happen with surprising speed from a historical viewpoint, they will take quite a long time (years and decades) from our individual perspectives.

Neither of these events will result in all Americans becoming poor, or unable to farm, or dead. Rather, we’ll be economically fighting each other more for fewer resources, and the people with the most money will win.

They always have.

I want to be one of them, and I want my children to be one of them, too.

It’s not that I don’t love my fellow man. I just love my own family more. That might come across as coldhearted, but can you honestly tell me that you wouldn’t provide for your family first if given the chance?

Collapse is a process that occurs over time, not an event that occurs in a flash. During the dual collapses of both our country (or at least its position at the top of the global food chain) and our climate, you will need to weather the storm of this sea change in global power dynamics.

You may say I sound like a doomsayer. I say I have finally started to realize the depth of the problems we face in the 21st century.

While the destruction of our environment is all but guaranteed, some places such as my home state of Indiana, seem to be hell bent on speeding everything up and ensuring our timely demise.

Just this week, as the off-year short-session of our state General Assembly is coming to a close, a bill that would remove PFAS from the list of dangerous chemicals was resurrected as part of another unrelated bill.

The result would be the cancer-causing forever chemicals that are, “deemed harmful in every other state will no longer be considered dangerous in Indiana. In fact, they wouldn’t even be recognized as PFAS.”

It’s shit like this that makes me realize I need more money that I thought. Environmental protections, reproductive rights, and myriad other laws reducing harm to our overall population have been and will be stripped away in conservative states like Indiana.

I need to be able to afford to travel to another state if a family member needs an abortion, buy a reliable reverse osmosis system to filter out PFAS, and in general subvert the general backsliding of our civil rights.

So, I’m almost 43 now. My best guess is that we’ve got another 10 years before shit begins to get really bad with climate and even less time before civil rights get stripped back to the age of Jim Crow, so I’m going to put my goal date as 2031, when I turn 50.

Is $2.5 Million Enough?

Now that my timeline has sped up, what should my goal be?

Listening to John Goodman’s diatribe in The Gambler, his character frames the standard end goal (mine included) as the most basic place to be, your starting point, your “fortress of fucking solitude.”

$2.5 million in the bank to pay the taxes on a paid off house and driving a paid off car should be the baseline from which to go to the next level. That will take some time to get there, but what’s next?

Well, that depends on what your expenses will be. If this concept seems simple, that’s because it is. But most people underestimate their expenses, especially as they age, because they can’t imagine costs going up by a lot, much less the exponential increase of some expenses like health insurance.

But backing up to the original question of how much do I need by the time I turn 50? Remembering the $2.5 million is the baseline to provide the minimum income to live off of, I will estimate another $2.5 million to absorb any large financial blow that comes my way without derailing our lives.

If you think that’s a ridiculous amount, then you’ve probably never had a million-dollar medical bill.

My wife has given birth to two preemies who spent 9 weeks and 6 weeks in the NICU. The first preemie cost $1 million in medical expenses. The second preemie cost $750,000. Fortunately had great health insurance and only paid our out-of-pocket maximum of $12,000.

But what happens when health insurance laws get rolled back and companies start charging women different rates than men, or denying health insurance completely due to pre-existing conditions?

Assuming our kids will be under our insurance through 26, and we want to have enough money to cover their emergency expenses, then $5 million in total is not a stretch to be a required sum for comfort.

The Takeaway

My initial goals were much smaller than they should have been, and I’ve been playing financial small ball for far too long. It’s time to up the ante and start taking ownership of where I really want to go.

What does that mean?

For starters, it means truly accepting reality and giving up on the my old goals. This might sound like a simple act of just updating some numbers, but my old goals represent the old world of a stable climate and global geopolitics. That world is gone, and I need to grieve for both myself and my children, then move on.

Next, it means I need to start some form of business. Writing on Medium thus far has been more of a side hustle than anything. I’ve been moderately “successful” but extremely inconsistent. I need to start treating it as the revenue generator is could be an dedicate more time to writing.

Writing on Medium itself won’t get me to $5 million in 8 years, but it’s a start. I need to put a strategy together than expands the income potential and leverages my articles much more. What that is, I’m not quite sure, but there’s something out there.

What that is remains to be seen.