Most of you do not need a pep talk or a motivational speech for me to tell you the benefits of retiring early.

You want to retire early. You want to spend more time on what you care about most.

There are some statistics that might surprise you, though.

So if there was any more motivation you needed, this hopefully will be insightful for you to give you some more firepower so that every time you add more money

to your 401 or to your Roth IRA or to your superhero account, which is what I call a

brokerage account, you know exactly why you're doing it. So this is less of an episode of, hey,

I'm going to learn a really specific tactic and I'm going to go save, you know, 10% of taxes on my future years earnings.

That's not what this is.

These are just some statistics that I have gathered from my research in addition to

take in from my clients who have actually retired.

Now, a quick story before we hop into the five statistics.

When it comes to an early retirement, there are a lot of

people who are really excited to retire, but they're also hesitant to spend in the early years of

retirement because they're worried if they overspend from, let's call it 55 to 60, which I call an

early retirement any time before 65. So if they overspend from 55 to 60, that they're going to be 80 regretting and wishing they had more money. At the same time, they have another thought in their head of, hey, I don't want to be 80 with $7 million. I wish I would have spent more when I had my energy and my health. So in a weird way, there are a lot of people that I talk to who are on track

for retirement, I'm going to say it again, on track for retirement, who I don't advise retire. And you're

like, that doesn't make any sense. You can be on track for retirement, which means lifetime income

from, let's call it, 65 to 95. But it doesn't mean you should retire if you have not

really dreamt of what you want those early years of retirement to look like. If you want to spend

hypothetically $100,000 a year after taxes adjusted for inflation for the rest of your life,

you, if you're following the right rules, if you want to use the withdrawal approach I use, which is called John Geithen's guardrails

approach, where you shift income based off of market conditions, what happens is you start at $2 million,

...