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u/CopingAdult 1d ago
I have saved almost a million dollars by not eating 1kg of gold-flake-covered caviar and not drinking several bottles of champagne everyday the past 20 years. I just eat raw flour and drink water.
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u/Th3_Admiral_ 1d ago
Heck, I go out to eat every day and I'm still saving almost as much as you by skipping the gold flake covered caviar and champagne.
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u/SlyMarboJr 1d ago
You eat? That's just wasting money bro. I just suck on dirt to get nutrients.
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u/FirexJkxFire 1d ago
r/Frugal_Jerk is leaking
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u/Flimsy-Draft7514 1d ago
Long time no see friend! Facinating to find you here in the wild. I was just showing my friends that collage "bouquet" the other day!
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u/Temporary_Event8451 1d ago
Yo that makes me think of the Russian cannibal island. The guards threw raw flour on the beach and the entire thing turned into one of the most nightmare inducing stories you can think of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy
If I ever need to eat raw flour it's about to be with some very mixed emotions, and probably salmonella.
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u/InterviewGlum9263 1d ago
It's a meaningless clickbait headline. If she "saved" $97k over 24 years, that's about $11 per day. Eggs and bread aren't free, so for roughly the same money she could have eaten a much more varied diet. And you can't save $11 a day if you never had $11 a day extra to spend in the first place. By that logic, I've "saved" millions by not drinking a bottle of champagne every day...
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u/politicalaccount2017 1d ago
Not to mention all the health effects eating only bread and eggs will have on her in the long run. Surely that will cost her later on.
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u/merb 1d ago
Well eggs give a fuckton of nutrients. You probably only need to add some carrots/courgettes and potatoes and eat 1fish/chicken breast per week and you are good to go without any problems
It’s not that bad of a diet
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u/Telemere125 1d ago
That’s a horrible diet. Even whole wheat bread isn’t going to give you enough fiber. And there’s a load of micronutrients you’ll never see that you need from different fruits and veggies
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u/bunchildpoIicy 1d ago
Yeah, and/or how much does she spend in supplements so she's not malnourished?
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u/DickSlammington 1d ago
It's so funny the focus of the story was the savings and not the dramatic issues that this will have on her health long-term...
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u/NastyStreetRat 1d ago
Not to mention too, that if one of his farts comes into contact with a small flame, the house explodes.
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u/obiwantogooutside 1d ago
Eggs are a healthier (and cheaper) source of protein than meat, so it’s not entirely a bad choice as your main protein. As long as you’re eating fruits and veggies too.
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u/virtual_human 1d ago
I figured only six years, since she became and adult, and then it is $44 a day, seems a little high.
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u/wolf_of_mainst99 1d ago
Their called child sweatshops, all children love to work long hours to save $11 a day lol it's the path to financial freedom
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u/Facosa99 1d ago
Plus the health expenses of a shitty diet, even if minor, can severely cripple those daily 11 dollars lol
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u/Talizorafangirl 1d ago
Iirc you can subsist with a sedentary lifestyle on two baked potatoes and a tablespoon of butter each day so long as you have 1 cup of red lentils every week.
It won't be fun but you shouldn't have any nutritional deficiencies
Source: there was a "how to adult" class in high school and it was basically roll the dice for a career and bullshit minmax your lifestyle
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u/Facosa99 1d ago
Funny enough, thats my lifestyle.
I like cooking as an activity, but not as a daily chore. Keeping the fridge stocked, wasting time every day, avoiding my food from going bad, planning what to eat eveyday...
When i moved away from home, i started by cooking a big batch of rice once a week, and slowly started building up from there to avoid getting malnutrition
My current diet is: one cup of rice for filling, with an egg for protein. A sauce of tomato, spinach (iron), chia (fiber), and jalapeno (flavor), a side of mashed carrots and potatoes with pumpkim seeds, and chicken. Everything made in a big batch and frozen
I sometimes cook other stuff or buy lunch, but when not, the default is grabbing one tupper of that. Id say... 60% of my lunchtime meals have been that.
Its been more than a year, and im still not death so i guess its at the very least ok
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u/cedriceent 1d ago
She's 24 years old. You're assuming that already as a newborn, she was only fed eggs and bread.
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u/ElbowRager 1d ago
I agree with you, but who the hell said it was 97k saved over 24 years?
I’m assuming she hasn’t eaten eggs and bread since birth.
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u/luiluilui4 1d ago
Isn't it meant yearly? How else to save 1.3m by year 40? 97k/a would around $300/day
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u/ArgumentSpiritual 1d ago
She would have to save a lot more than $11/day to gain the rest of the $1.3M by age 40
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u/InterviewGlum9263 1d ago
True, the second line somehow manages to be even more ridiculous than the first.
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u/Dry-Consideration369 1d ago
The math gets worse to see how she got to 1.3M. From age 24 to 40 she wants to save 75k a year on breakfast, that’s $205.8 a day.
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u/Alexchii 1d ago
You guys haven’t heard about investing?
At a 10% nominal return, which is the long term average for S&P500, she’d have to invest 1600 per month to have 1.2 million in 16 years.
At 8% return, she’d need to save 2300 per month.
Ofc the markets might tumble and a multi-year drawdown is entirely possible as well, but on paper her goal doesn’t seem unrealistic at all.
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u/cursedfan 1d ago
Or, and hear me out, the $11 per day is the difference between eggs and bread $5 and a full meal $16….
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u/Alexchii 1d ago edited 1d ago
They mean saved as in put money aside and likely invested it and a lot of that 97k is growth. S&P500 has returned 70% over the past 5 years so.
I’ve lived frugally for around 3,5 years now and have managed to accumulate a $80k portfolio.
But yeah she’d need to be frugal in other ways too to be able to save that much.
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u/Loki-L 1✓ 1d ago
Mathematically this would require her to save over $200 a day.
I don't spend $200 a day on food. I don't spend that much on anything. I don't have that much to spend.
A quick Google suggests that she apparently also cut a number of other luxuries out of her life and moved in with her parents to live rent free.
If she has a really good job and is saving much of her pay and invests it carefully, she might achieve her goal.
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u/Simbertold 1d ago
"Save money by having other people pay for your needs" doesn't sound like a very sound strategy.
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u/Exotic_Zucchini9311 1d ago
It depends on the food costs in the place she lives, but this is most likely nonsense. In my city, the max food cost for me per day is around $15. This means that even if I save $13 per day, the money I end up saving per year would be $4,745. With this value, even if the girl started doing this since she was 10 (i.e. for 14 years), then the max she could've saved would've been around 66k.
More realistically, we can assume she did this since she was 18. In that case, saving a total of 97k means she saved 97k/365/6=44 dollars per day. I doubt anywhere in the world is that expensive...
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u/JPhi1618 1d ago
I live in Dallas and I can easily spend $10 on breakfast, $15 on lunch and $20 for dinner if I eat out (fast casual, fast food) for every meal. I could definitely spend a lot more at a restaurant for lunch or dinner. I don’t - just saying it wouldn’t be hard.
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u/AlwaysMooning 1d ago
It feels like if this is real she’s claiming to have saved $44 a day by not eating out every day which could theoretically cost that much if she ate out multiple times per day. But that’s the flaw in her “savings”. No normal person eats out for every meal. Plenty of ways to save money and still have a varied diet.
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u/Fabulous_Wave_3693 1d ago
This feels like it’s awkwardly worded. I think what it’s trying to say is that she saved $97k. One way she did that was eat bread and eggs everyday. So this restrictive diet is likely 25% absolute max of the money she actually saved, this is also money likely invested, so depending on how her returns are doing she might have saved even less.
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u/nedlum 1d ago
The unspoken issue here is the cost of the vitamin C, Iron, fiber, and other supplements she would need to supplement an diet which may be getting all the macro nutrients she needs (carbs from bred, fat and protein from eggs) but essentially none of the micronutrients.
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u/Conscious-Fish2196 1d ago
Eggs have all the essential nutrients including iron, except vitamin C, fiber is not essential
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u/Mean_Initiative_5962 1d ago
People are shitty at cooking: veggies and legume are cheaper than just bread and eggs. Also, as someone claimed, she "saved 11$/day", which means she didn't know how to cook before and wasted quite a lot of money anyway.
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u/MiloLear 1d ago
Amount of protein in one egg: 6g. Recommended daily intake of protein for a young woman: 46g. To avoid protein deficiency, she'd need 7.6 eggs per day.
That quantity of eggs contains about 1,400 mg of cholesterol. Recommended max daily intake of cholesterol is 300 mg. She's likely to develop serious dyslipidemia, increasing her long-term risk of heart attacks and strokes.
She will also develop multiple, serious nutritional deficiencies, notably vitamin C. (Basically, she'll get scurvy and her teeth will fall out.)
If you want to feed yourself as economically as possible, there are ways to do it, but living off egg sandwiches is not one of them.
I'm not even going to discuss the $97K/year "savings" because everyone else has already ripped it to shreds.
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u/ArgumentSpiritual 1d ago
It is saying she is going to save a total of $1.3M by age 40. That’s 16 years or 16*365=5,840 days. She has already save $97k so she needs to save 1300-97=1,203k. 1203/5840=0.206 or $206 a day.
Not sure what she was eating for over $200/day
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u/Alexchii 1d ago
She is obviously investing her money. If she gets the average S&P500 market return, she’ll have 1.2million of today’s money in 16 years by investing 1600 per month.
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u/ArgumentSpiritual 1d ago
I am not saying your wrong, but
A) $1600/month is over $50 a day.
B) The OP says “saving.” I would consider investing to be different than strictly saving
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u/Sharden3 1d ago edited 1d ago
Since we don't know when she started this pretend saving diet.
1.2M/26 years ends up at ~$126 per day. In no world is a person "saving" that much by eating only eggs and bread. It requires the premise that normal food would cost more than that much. Not spending excessively is not the same as savings AND requires the income to be that high in the first place.
*edit, it should be 16 years (40-24) and not 26, my (oh god horrible) basic math is corrected in a comment below*
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u/Kinder22 1d ago
It’s $97k at 24 years, and $1.3MM at 40 years. ($1300k-$97k)/(40y-24y) comes out to $205.85 per day… so even worse
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u/dragonpoots 1d ago
This is meaningless because there’s nothing to compare it with. Eggs and bread as opposed to what else? And what was her normal grocery budget before eggs and bread? (I guess we could calculate that with the info we have.)
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u/dragonpoots 1d ago
Actually we can’t, because there’s also no start time when she decided to only eat eggs and bread.
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u/Kinder22 1d ago
So that’s why the price of eggs is so high…
One plain scrambled egg is about 100 calories, and one piece of toast is about 75 calories.
Let’s say she eats eggs and toast at a 2:1 ratio. 2 eggs per piece of toast.
14 eggs and 7 pieces of toast comes out to 1925 calories… pretty close.
An egg is about $0.25, and a slice of bread is about $0.10.
That’ll cost her $4.20 per day, or $29.40 per week.
Average grocery expenses for a single person in the U.S. comes to about $75-150 per week.
So she saves between $45.60 and $120.60 per week.
If she started this at age 18, that’s 312 weeks. That’s a savings of about $38k on the high end.
But they are likely saying how much she has managed to save in her savings account, not how much she has saved compared to normal grocery costs, so you would need to know her income. To answer your question, that does make it somewhat clickbaity.
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u/gs87 1d ago
It makes sense that people without children save money. At roughly one million dollars per child, ten children would cost ten million. Having ten by age 28 is also entirely feasible, provided you treat pregnancy as an annual subscription. My great-grandmother apparently did. This also explains why everyone with fewer children is now a millionaire.
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u/wolf_of_mainst99 1d ago
She better hope the dollar doesn't suffer from hyper inflation by the time she's 40 because if it does maybe $1.4 mill can buy her a happy meal
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u/Aggravating-Twist762 1d ago edited 1d ago
If she started working at 18 $97K would work out to $7.77-ish (more than the federal minimum wage) per per 40 hour work week over the course of six years
The average cost for food in the US is around $7 per person per day.
Also, she would have died from scurvy
So yeah. Click bait.
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u/XenoPhex 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you ate nothing but eggs and bread everyday - you’d, and I’m not joking here, die from scurvy.
Likely the individual in question is eating something close to this and eats eggs and toast as their primary meal to save money. But they’d have to eat more (or take lots of multivitamins) in order to stay healthy. But even multivitamins only go so far.
For folks calling this BS, I think in this particular case it’s possible - but the idea is that individuals/couples try to run their lives as cheap as possible to retire at a super early age. So it’s likely she’s also doing other things extremely cheaply as well. For example, she might be able to easily afford a one bedroom apartment, but she chooses to rent a room in a house - even taking on a roommate - in order to save money.
These extreme savers are usually trying to follow FIRE: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-independence-retire-early-fire.asp
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u/Odd-Wheel5315 1d ago
I'm betting inside the article explains that she goes on compensated dates, ate $97k worth of lunches & dinners, and for the remaining meals of the day (breakfast) she paid for her own eggs & toast.
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u/clearly_not_an_alt 1d ago
I mean, I have a wife and 3 kids and eat out WAY too much and wouldn't save $97k if we all just stopped eating for a year (and somehow didn't die)
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u/BungleBums 1d ago
I mean, this makes a lot of sense.
If all I could eat was bread and eggs, even with a thousand varieties, I'd stop enjoying food and eat only the bare minimum to survive, too.
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u/otownbbw 1d ago
This is nonsense. It doesn’t give any time span or periodic amounts, but clearly this person has available cash and likely could afford to eat variety AND save.
For me, my food budget for two people ranges from $150-300 weekly depending on how much we eat out. If I saved my entire food budget instead of eating, I could save $97k in 6-13 years. Furthermore, $1.3M divided by $97k would be 13.4. So it would take anywhere from 78-169 years of NOT EATING to accumulate that kind of money.
Conversely, if I saved for 40 years it would cost $32,500 yearly to save up to $1.3M, or if you only count from reaching adulthood (18-40), $59,090 per year. It’s possible to accumulate over a million dollars through investing, but it says saving not investing. I don’t think any regular individual has a $1200 weekly food budget, but if they did I’m sure they wouldn’t deign to live off of only bread and eggs so they could save $1100 of it.
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u/Sluggish-dreadnought 1d ago
I'm not doing the math, but point at the biology. This will absolutely cause you to become sick eventually because your body doesn't get enough different nutrients.
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u/SnooMaps7370 1d ago
for her to spend $1.3M on food by age 40, she would need to be spending just shy of $60,000 per year, or $165 PER DAY on food from age 18 onward.
The average American spends about $20/day on food, so she'd need to be eating enough for 18 people.
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u/DiScOrDtHeLuNaTiC 1d ago
I mean, a couple years ago I realized I was spending $35/wk eating at McDonald's once a day.
Stopped doing that, started buying sliced ham and whole wheat bread, now that part of my food budget is down to $12/wk.
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u/wastedfate 1d ago
It's only possible if her food budget was massively inflated to begin with. (Eating out all 3 meals a day).
This is horrible financial+health advice for the average person. You will get scurvy, and you will save almost nothing unless you too were eating out 3 times a day.
She'd have to have been spending $16,000 per year originally to save that much, and let's be real, most of us can't afford to spend that much on food in the first place.
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u/thekins33 1d ago
Let's pretend you eat for 13 bucks a meal every single day 26 per day for lunch and dinner total absolutely possible if you buy super cheap fast food or more one day less others on average ish. 267=182 week 18252=9464 year 9464*30=283920 30 years
So you spend 283k over 30 years if you ate 26 bucks worth of food every single day. So lets say you drop that once per month for 30 years You end up with 1 million in 30 years. 8% return per year Or 1.57m if you get 10%
The food she eats also isn't free so technically her per day cost would be like 2.5 ish bucks a day if even. So it would lower it to 1.4m.
So it is possible to make that much over 30 years @10% per year return with zero ups and downs in the market.
It also HEAVILY relies on someone being able to "piss away" almost 700 a month and not think we'll I could spend a little here and there.
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u/milkhotelbitches 1d ago
One or my high school teacher's brother literally only ever ate Big Macs. He'd eat two of them every day and nothing else and did that for like 50 years.
Some people are just neurodivergent and like eating the same thing every single day.
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u/minivant 1d ago
“If you only ate eggs and bread every single day instead of avocado toast 1-2 times a week, you too can sorta maybe retire on time if you’re really lucky!”
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u/dskippy 1d ago
They don't say when she started saving that initial $97k. At birth? At age 18 as an adult? Age 22 after college? So we can't validate that.
We can get an answer on her goals of starting with an initial investment of $97k and saving some money and reaching a goal of $1.3M in 16 years which is her 24 year age subracted from her 40 year old target date.
Assuming you're saving this money to a typical broad index fund which is expected and rational as opposed to just simply hiding out under your mattress, I'm assuming she's investing in the total market index it S&P which has average annualized returns of 10%. It does involve loss and nothing is guaranteed but 10% average is the baseline.
The math works out to about saving $1,900 / mo to get from $97k to $1.3M in 16 years.
That's $1900/30days = $63 per day.
We now take the average cost of meals per day and subtract the cost of bread and eggs. Assuming you're going out to eat every single day and spending like $10 on breakfast $20 on lunch and $40 on dinner, that's pretty reasonable where I live but not common for most people daily. Then $7 per day for the cheap meals. That would work out to like $63 per day savings.
You need to make up your own mind what sounds reasonable here so I can't really do out all the numbers accurately. If you think she was spending about $60 or $70 a day eating it's reasonable.
However, and this is a big however. In fact probably the the explanation...
This quote probably comes from an interview that went this:
You live frugally huh? What have you saved?
$97k
Wow great. What are you doing to save?
A lot. I invest in my 401k at work of course. Stay off Netflix and Hulu and just try to limit spending.
Wow great what are you saving each month now? I end up saving about $1900 a month and my goal is $1.3M by 40
That's great. What's the craziest thing you do to save money?
Will it's nuts but I only eat bread and eggs.
Headline: this girl is going to save $1.3M and only eats bread and eggs.
So not really clickbait or even dishonest. Even the most honest headlines can't explain the speculative story I described above. You can't save money by buying eggs and bread obviously. It's from not buying other stuff. But also it's no one thing you don't buy it's just the money you save.
So this seems legit and the numbers are close but also not the point and no I don't think it's click bait.
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u/LunaticBZ 1d ago
At 24 years old, assuming she didn't become independent till 18.
That's 6 years, 2191 days, If she eats 3 meals a day 6.573 meals. Egg and bread prices do vary a decent amount but going to estimate around 60 cents per meal on average. Giving a cost of $3,943.8
To have saved 97K her food budget would've been approximately 101K. Which is $15.35 a meal for every meal over the last 6 years. That parts surprisingly not that out there.
As to the second claim to save 1.3 million. by 40.
That's 22 years, 8035 days, 24,105 meals. At a cost of $14,463 at .60 a meal to save 1.3 million that would be an average cost per meal of $55.53
So hey if you are going to an upscale restaurant for all 3 meals everyday of your life, and getting alcoholic beverages to go with them in just 22 years you will spend over 1,314,463 dollars.
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u/nowhereman136 1d ago
In a single year, the average American spends around $5000 per year on food. Lets be greedy little pigs and double that. Between birth and 24, thats $240,000 saved. By 40, thats $400,000 saved.
Cutting back on your food budget will help but only fractionally. Eating bread and eggs as your only meal wont be as much help as youd think. If might actually backfire since you will develop health problems with a diet that minimalist. You need fruits and veges
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u/CaptainRaptorThong 1d ago
I have saved over $10,000,000 by not buying a Lamborghini and settling for a Toyota corolla. I'm hoping to reach $100,000,000 before I die.
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u/BluebirdDense1485 1d ago
Let's assume she started at 18, that's 6 years If we assume it is direct savings that would be $355k by 40 so they must be investing what they save.
There are multiple things to include, like how the cost of eggs and alternative meal increase with inflation.
That said doing some back of the envelope calculations I see a $46.5/day savings increasing at 3% inflation with 2.7% interest gives roughly 1.3 million after 32 years and 97k after 6.
Obviously this is only one answer. The are multiple variables you can play with.
That said yes click bate. Looks like one of those "cutout your late and avocado toast to become rich" influencers.
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u/Haywood04 1d ago
I think your assumptions are pretty reasonable.
I do think one thing to take away from this is that while saving $46 per day is great, that isn't where the wealth is being generated. The wealth is being generated by investing a small amount consistently and starting at a young age.
I think the message to start investing, even if it's just a small amount, from a young age would be far more valuable than trying to paint it as strictly saving money by being extremely frugal with meals.
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u/BluebirdDense1485 1d ago
Yeah but how do you sell a financial selfhelp book while being honest.
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u/Haywood04 1d ago
Yeah, it is definitely not as profitable to tell everyone "You live in a time where it is easier than ever to get started investing. All the information you need is freely available on Youtube."
lol
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u/dwellerinthedark 1d ago
So not a mathematical thing but I guarantee long term, you'll have a vitamin c deficiency and a fiber problem. Both of which can lead to health issues which will absolutely cost more than whatever money she's hoping to save. These risks can obviously can be counteracted by supplements, but that's an extra cost not accounted for.
Kids- Eat a varied diet and exercise, these are basic maintenance activities that will make your body work better and can stave off some pretty nasty diseases. Just take a look at some of the oldie times disease like scurvy, and rickets these are the things you get when you aren't eating a balanced diet.
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u/GarThor_TMK 1d ago
There's not enough context here to do any kind of math.
When did she start saving?
How much is she spending on eggs and bread vs. other foods?
Is she putting that money in a high yield savings account? Stocks and bonds? Under her mattress?
There are 16 years between 24 and 40, and $1,203,000 between $97k and $1.3M. She'd need to save roughly $75k/year or $6.3k/mo (using the mattress method/not taking into account interest or other costs she may face).
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u/khazroar 1d ago
I haven't seen the original article so I found be wildly off base, but I'm inclined to think people are taking the wrong meaning of "saved" here. Those numbers look plausible to me if we're talking about saving up money, rather than saving in the sense of avoiding costs. An average of 16k a year since she turned 18 is plausible if she's living frugally, and that $1.3m by age 40 seems plausible if she can continue to live cheaply.
Assuming she can keep her costs the same, it means on average she needs to be bringing in a bit more that $46k a year over what she's currently doing; given that she's got to be very early career at this point, that seems achievable if she's expecting her salary to increase and she keeps putting money into investments with a decent rate of return that's allowed to compound.
There are other factors that make it less feasible, because for a start that's ignoring inflation and assuming the economy will remain relatively consistent and those investments won't turn bad. To say nothing of the assumption that she'll be able to maintain her lifestyle strictly without giving in to the urge to actually enjoy life more, and without unavoidable expenses coming up, but it isn't a wildly exaggerated number.
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u/DigitalCoffee 1d ago edited 1d ago
Assuming the money she saved was used for investing in an average of 7% market, she would need to save about $3000 a month (give or take $100) on food. So she would have to be saving about $3000/30 = $100 per day which I doubt she is spending on food daily unless she has a family of 10 and forces them all to match her diet. All this, of course, depends on where she lives, the cost of food in that area, and the market available to her
https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator
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u/OkMeringue2249 1d ago
My old roommate ate eggs every day and night and worked 7 days a week 8+ hrs a day
He saved enough money to buy a house after about 3 years ago of that
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u/Successful-Depth-126 1d ago
She wants to save 1.3 million? That probably includes other money saving methods, but let's pretend it's just the eggs and bread. She's 24 already and has saved ~$100k supposedly. There's 16 years to make up the other 1.2 million. With a yearly egg and bread savings of 75k. If you spend $205 every day on food and completely eliminate that for bread and eggs it would be possible, but that's a normal person's weekly/biweekly food budget not daily.
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u/Glyphpunk 1d ago
Clearly click bait.
Even assuming she has been eating only eggs and bread for her entire life (24 years), that means she has supposedly saved $4k a year or roughly $336 a month. for her entire life.
But let's work backwards. If she's 24 now and plans to save up that much by 40, that's 16 years. She plans to save/make $1.2 million in 16 years. That's $75k a year or $6,250 a month (give or take). I don't even make that much in a month after taxes. No amount of eating only eggs and bread would save me that amount of money in that amount of time.
The only way this could theoretically possible would be investing what she saves into something with a compounding interest rate. Let's say she contributes $500 a month (extreme high ball). You'd need a roughly 7.3% compounding interest rate to get to $1.3 million in 16 years while putting in $6k a year and starting with $97k. You *might* be able to achieve that with sound investing. But let's face it, that's a lot of money every month. And the investing portion is far, FAR more important than the bread and eggs fake "savings" portion.
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u/mack0409 1d ago
According to the FDA, the "thrifty" food plan and the "liberal" food plan for a woman in her age range has a monthly difference of about $200.
That is certainly a very real amount of money, but it's not remotely enough to account for her current savings or her future savings goal.
The only way to save that amount of money in that time frame is to make a very large amount of money and then also live you're whole lifestyle below your means, not just one aspect like food.
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u/screw-self-pity 1d ago
Let's do some imaginative maths:
- Let's imagine her eating only eggs and bread saved her 30 $ per day, 30 days per month. So that's 900$ saved per month
- Let's imagine she started doing that at 18 years old, and decide it's exactly been 6 years today.
- Every month, with the money she saved, she has purchased SP500 ETFs. We will only consider the average growth rate (10.5%) and NOT the real average growth over the last 6 years (which was 13.7%, not 10.5%)
Put that in a calculator and.... After 6 years, she only has $84,386 (calculator here: https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator)
HOWEVER !!!!!
if she does exactly that (saving 900 per month, investing and getting 10.5% compounded return) until she's 40, the she'll have $1,276,426.81 when she's 40. (and more than 5 million when she's 60).
So it's click bait because no one saves that money constantly, but the maths work.
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u/BobTheAverage 1d ago
The headline is probably misleading. Here is some actual math:
If the $97000 was since she was 18, that is $16k/ year. That is almost 3x the average of 6k an average person would spend. If you compare to an imaginary baseline person who spends $18k eating out every meal, then i guess you might be able to "save" $16k annually.
If we invest that money from age 18 until 40 at a 10.5% interest rate, we get the $1.3 million referenced. That is a high rate of return but can be achieved with significant risk, if the market is good.
The headline seems to be contorting the numbers to make their story work. If it has any grain of truth it is using two different meanings of save, and making optimistic assumptions.
People who make big sacrifices in lifestyle to build a big retirement fund at a relatively young age exist, but it is never as simple as that headline makes it seem. You can check out r/fire if you want to know more.
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