How To Retire Early with Mr. Money Mustache (Rebroadcast)

It turns out there's a really simple formula. You just take your spending... So, let's say $25,000. If you multiply that number by 25, roughly, that's how much money you need invested in order to be able to quit working forever. So, if you spend $25,000 a year, you need about $625,000... to be retired forever. If you spend $100,000 a year, you need $2.5 million invested to sustain that living style.

Number one, you gotta realize what money is for. Money is not for buying yourself stuff; money is for freedom. So, any stuff you buy is a direct subtraction from your freedom.

I kind of focus not so much on investing... I focus on how to get much of your earnings, like a lot of your earnings, into those investments because that's the real thing that's missing in America—everyone's got these super piddly like 5-15% savings rates, and they think they're doing fine. And meanwhile, they have like a brand-new $30,000 car or they have hundreds of dollars per week in restaurant budgets and fancy coffees and all this other stuff.

You need a few hours of hard exercise per day... That's totally lost on our culture. Like, everyone thinks if you just do 30 minutes on the treadmill, then that's good enough. It's not, man. You got to be out like a caveman or cavewoman doing stuff all day, especially as you get older.

I try to kind of encourage people to think retirement is not the end of work anymore. I had to redefine it. Now, retirement is the end of mandatory work.

You can get a complete meal of healthy ingredients from the grocery store for like a dollar or two anywhere in the country. That means we're all incredibly rich compared to the cost of our true needs.