“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” — Confucius 

They say if you want to reach your goals, that you should write them down.

Well, here goes.

Dear Financial Diary,

It’s a jungle out there. Inflation is up. Wages are stagnant. Paychecks are down. And taxes are always going up.

My goal is to have $1 million in investments. Within the several years I am aiming to invest 20-30 percent of my income.

I know success is the sum of small goals that are repeated daily.

Only about 3.2% of all retirees in the United States have $1 million or more in retirement accounts. And among all households with retirement accounts, about 4.7% have $1 million or more saved.

I know this is no small feat, but my dreams will not be deferred nor ignored.

I will continue to increase my contributions by 1 -2% per year.

I am to save $2,000 to $2,500 per month.

But is this enough?

I feel as if the goalpost keeps moving. Is $2 million the new goal?

How would the new goal be achieved? How hard would it be to build up $2 million in retirement savings?

Starting at zero, if you invest $10,000 per year ($833 per month), at a 10% rate of return over 31 years would put you at $2,001,377.67.

Stay focused. Any goal can be achieved with the right plan.

I started with $5 and as a teenage waitress making $2.65 an hour. Then continued to climb the corporate ladder.

My first goal was $100,000. Then my next was $250,000.

It took over a decade of diligent saving to reach $250,000. By the time I got featured on Business Insider, I had made it to $350,000.

My original goal when I started out was $500,000.

I have now blown past that. My next goal is $750,000.

Continuing to invest over the next several years in stocks like Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon as well as funds such as the VFIAX 500 index fund, I figure I can make it to $1 million in investable assets in about 1400 days.

It took half the amount of time to go from $250,000 to $500,000 as it did to make the first $250,000 to the next one.

I estimate that starting with $1M and getting a 10% return would take me 7 years to get to $2M.

I am willing to stay disciplined and sacrifice today for a better tomorrow.

I don’t need a BMW. I don’t need a 5,000 square foot house, that costs $1.2 million with a $9,000 mortgage. I don’t need $5,000 vacations.

Doing the math. This is what it would take to get to $2M.

If you start working at 25, to build a $2 million nest egg by the time you reach 72, then you have to sock away more than $5,677 per year.

If you don’t start to save until age 35, then you’ve got to sock away $11,658 a year, or more than $948 per month.

If that’s 10% of your pay, you would have to earn $116,580 a year.

That’s totally doable, but harder than if you start saving at age 25.

The biggest hurdle is if you start saving at 45. You’d have to save more than $25,000 a year to build a retirement balance of $2 million.

That would work out to saving $2,078 per month.

That would be incredibly hard to do for most workers. Therefore, I aim to start as soon as possible.

I just have to set the goal, aim, and shoot.

So keep your head down and investments up!

xoxo, Greenback Magnet

About the author

Miriam started Greenbacks Magnet in 2016 to keep a scorecard of her goal of $1M in investable assets. Armed with a Master in Management (MiM) and a calculator, she teaches readers how to achieve financial independence while also helping them learn how to smell the roses along the way. The palpable response she got from sharing her personal finance goal in a public speaking course at Georgetown University encouraged her to share her story and teach finance on her website. She invests in AI companies as artificial intelligence is the new iPhone of the moment as she likes to invest in companies that are disruptive.