Retiring after 35 years. Been an incredibly exciting career. Can't thank management enough for giving me all of the opportunities. Have worked for so many great leaders over the years. Retiring with over $1,700,000 in my 401k. Thank you Dave Cote, Tim Mahoney, Mike Madsen, Bob Smith, the list goes on.
Sad day to be walking out those doors at Deer Valley for the last time next week. Hope everyone has as rewarding of a career as I did.
@7uxs+1e5eVuP6
Evidently I should give up doing interest calcs at 3AM. I think I crossed up thinking “per paycheck” vs “per month” - the 2.0x error is a clue. Good catch!
8% contributions of $50k for 20 yrs and 8% return nets $197,410.60.
12% (8% + 4% Hon match) nets $296,412.31.
That match is super critical.
Over 35 years, the same contributions + match:
12% (8% contribution + 4% Hon match) nets $1,157,970.17
THIS ASSUMES NO RAISE FROM $50k in THIRTY FIVE YEARS!
In general, my point stands.
But for all my trash talk on the forum, I apologize to all for fu----g up the maths.
Btw, check my numbers here :
https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator
@2cce+1e5eVuP6
How did you calculate $667/month in your hypothetical explanation below:
"If you took 8% of $50k ($667 monthly) and tucked it into your 401k for 20 yrs earning 8%, you would have $392,287.60 today."
8% of $50k is $4000, which comes out to a $333 monthly contribution.
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees
@3pmk, I think we’re just talking about 401k balance, not net worth.
The MAGA mouth breathers are trying to imply that America isn’t great anymore because their parents made better financial decisions and life choices…
Huh, I always thought anyone who was there for 35 yrs or more would have at least 2M saved up. Throw in the house value and it is even higher.
The best things in life are free.
You can only explain it so many times. Math don't lie. Gotta be something unless you had it all in bond funds. Maybe there is more to the story. Did you take 401k loans over the years? Did you cash out some retirement benefit plan instead of rolling it into your 401k? Lower than the max or at least the match contribution?
@2pes, get a lawyer, someone is stealing from you.
If you took 8% of $50k ($667 monthly) and tucked it into your 401k for 20 yrs earning 8%, you would have $392,287.60 today. This is straight from investor dot gov public interest calculator. Hon is a little over 8% over that time.
But, you would ALSO have gotten the Hon match, so it would be more like $1k/mo goung in (different match rates over that 20 yrs complicates things). So, you’re at about $600k.
But wait, there’s more…. Since you probably didn’t go from $50k to $122k salary over night, your $667/mo contributions certainly went up along the way. That’s worth a bunch more for sure.
That’s all well and good, but if you just stuck to your $1000 monthly contributions for 35 yrs at 8%, you would have $2,315,940.34 at retirement.
Given the framing you set up, someone’s stealing from you.
(PS, I’m at about the same salary and length of employment. I didn’t invest aggressively cause it’s not my style; more like 6%. I did run more like 10% contributions after 15 yrs though. I’m at ~$600k and am on target to almost exactly match the OP if I go to 35 yrs. at my present salary and contributions.
That’s an engineer, stay at home wife, two decent cars, house, couple years private school for the kid, and some hobbies that earn a few bucks on the side that mostly went into private school. Worked my way through college and didn’t have sh-t when I started it. Oh, and I never had to sell my soul as a manager…. Sorry, but it CAN be done.)
@2pes I started at $10K under you and am currently not much more than you even though I have 5 years more than you. My average savings have been 12% with a range of 8% - 16%. The higher % was early career. I have mostly stuck with S&P 500 but have held some of all but target funds at one point or another to follow some notable movement trends. I didn't panic and sell low/get back in high during tech bubble pop or sub-prime mortgage crash when my nest egg dropped 40%.. It came back as it always does and now I'm over $1M. Although I have held large HI positions from time to time, I would not recommend holding too much of your employer's stock (think about those poor Enron employees). You might want to up your contributions some. Or better yet, max out your HSA contribution and invest there as well. Don't spend your HSA funds and let them grow as part of your retirement plan. HSA funds are not taxed going in or out assuming you use the money for future health care costs including Medicare supplement premiums. Good luck on your path to a secure retirement.
I don't know if ya'll hw propagandist, but this is my real case and I have questions:
I started HW 20 years ago with $50K/yr. My annual salary now is $122K. I faithfully put 8% in 401K every pay checks for 20 years. My 401K consists of 75% honeywell stock and 25% international stocks.
I just checked my 401K today and I have a total of $424,000.
If I extrapolate it out to 35 years, it's still under $1M.
So my question is: Do you think the evil Honeywell stole from me? Or people who claim multi-million dollar 401K are bull$hitting me?
I don't care if you're a financial guru or not, but I hate bull$sh-----g. If it turns out Honeywell stole from me, I need to know that from you financial gurus.
To the down voters on this thread that don't believe a modest salary can produce a million-dollar nest egg, a monthly investment of $333 in the S&P 500 over a 35year career will likely produce a $1.1M nest egg. That $333 per month is only 10% of a $40k salary and the calculation does not account for any 401k match or increase in investment amount as your salary grows. It only assumes a historic annualized S&P 500 10% rate of return (actual annualized return is over 11% over the last 93 years). So, do yourself a favor and get some financial education. Those daily lattes and lunches may very well cost you a million dollars of lost retirement security. As a fellow worker bee, this is my attempt to help you understand that your future is in your hands. Nobody is going to do it for you. Those who want to remain ignorant, go ahead and down vote my post. The only up voters on this post are ones who understand that your mechanic friend next door may be a millionaire.
1utm
Suggest you go take a night finance course at your community college.
I posted earlier that my 401k is growing by more than my gross income for past 10 years with a little shuffling
Not bragging, but you really need to ask your question to ‘any’ certified financial planner and you will be surprised by his answer
@1rol+1e5eVuP6
How can you "amass wealth" with just 401K match to build millions dollars from less than $1M earning in a lifetime? You're the one with real sad state of financial literacy.
$tupid is as $stupid talks. But you can't seem to stop spilling your idiocy although that's not what you want everyone to see.
Notice how the corporate shills, bootlickers, and HR goons always pin their arguments against false dilemmas and assumptions. They say that wage stagnation, offshoring of jobs, importation of cheap & desperate labor, and job elimination through automation are all factors that cannot be influenced or changed. How very convenient...
The truth is that all of these factors are a direct and deliberate result of shameless capitalist greed on behalf of the fattest of the fat cats, the board of directors, and their wall street overlords...
You know, you can call me a troll or HR goon, or any name you prefer. I am retired from Honeywell, am not a fan of how I was treated for the last 15 years of a 33 year career and have made my thoughts known on this board, of how the company has devolved into a snake-pit. I won't call you any names, but can imagine that you're a member of a small number of employees with whom I had to work around during my career...just another poorly educated person with grand illusions of how things work. I recently read that 75% of college educators are Adjunct Professors. Ask yourself, how valid the "worker struggle" theory of employment is, when it is taught by folks, for whom permanent employment is unattainable. Find a successful person and ask them to mentor you. Choosing to follow people for whom permanent employment and financial success are foreign concepts will doom you every time.
I don't engage you in your socialist psychobabble other than to look up some statistics of the "worker cooperatives" you so fondly speak of on other threads...the new business model of the 21 century, right? They seem to be mostly coffee-houses and bicycle repair businesses. Lots of them go out of business and those that don't, can spend 10 or more years voting and wrangling about such important things as a canopy over outdoor diners. So much for changing the world via Democratic Worker Cooperatives. Try starting a car company with 20,000 employees, all of whom have the authority to change a policy, decide where to invest in infrastructure, and no one single person with the authority to so much as lead a meeting.
There is no point discussing the cost of living, wage stagnation or off-shoring with you as I cannot influence any of that. You cannot, either, whining not withstanding. I will, and do, engage you when you try to make the case that 1. No one can retire comfortably today, 2. that today's workers have far less advantage in getting ahead than those past, and 3. that there are no sound techniques for retiring well and sometimes early. That is baloney, and those that are trapped in that thinking are ill served by your championing and encouraging their misery. You are so trapped in the same talking points that I must surmise that you are the King of the "Poor-Me's".
Buy a copy of "The Millionaire Next Door" and try to salvage your life while there remains time.
For everyone else: Bring on the down-votes...your King needs the validation that he is indeed your leader...
Notice how the corporate shills, bootlickers, and HR goons always focus on smaller secondary factors whenever there is a discussion surrounding family finances, making ends meet, saving for retirement etc. Their strategy ... by design ... is to keep the conversation strictly about factors associated with the employee and never about the corporation. How incredibly convenient...
Keep the pressure up. Let them keep complaining about getting downvoted. The truth is not on their side so why should they expect any sort of validation? If they are so bent out of shape about it then maybe we can give them a tiny trophy for "participation"? Or maybe give them a little blue ribbon for "effort"?
@1kwd What a great job of proving that you have no concept of how investing works.
Your participation trophy is on it's way.
It's scary how little people understand about retirement math and compound interest. To the person who thinks it is impossible to have a larger balance than the total take home made during the career - spend some time playing around with a retirement calculator. Its the same principal that when people make minimum payments on a $100k student loan balance - it easily balloons to $500k+ over 20 years.
Stop being ignorant and angry - educate yourself and take charge of your own retirement.
Congratulations to all of the 16 year olds on this forum. Your down-votes proved my point. What is even more remarkable is the fellow who just stated it is impossible to amass more wealth than the salary you were paid in a life-time. Now THAT is a sad state of financial literacy.
Those who talked "discipline" in here don't even have the discipline to pass highschool, otherwise they would have basic arithmetic skill to figure out what it takes to accumulate millions in 401K. But they keep bragging and bragging $tupid nonsense. People with real money don't talk like that. And real smart people don't talk like that.
About 75% of HW employees are average workers who started with about $5/hr 35 years ago. Even with consistent 5% raise per year they barely make $1M in total before tax. So what kind of "discipline" do they need to have more than $1M in 401K ?
About 18% of HW employees are engineers. 35 years ago most engineers started with about $40K annually. Even with consistent 3% raise EVERY year, he would make a total of $2.4M before tax, or $1.8M after tax. What kind of "discipline" does he need to accumulate more than what he made after paying all the living expenses?
Maybe the remaining 7% of HW employees at management level can do that. Most of them are id--ts who don't even deserve what they got paid. They just con their way up and make big bucks on the back of the 93% below them. What kind of pride in it to brag about ?
"Discipline" my a$$.
When guys tell you how to retire comfortably, or maybe even with excess, and you follow up that post with a "down vote" it is no surprise to me that your failure(s) in life are usually attributed to someone other than yourself. Sometimes I wonder if this site is frequented by no one older than 16 years old.
You know, some young guy in your family likely scrambled out of a trench in WWI because he would rather risk dying from a bullet than heave his lungs out onto the ground after being gassed. He was rewarded with the roaring '20's and then lost it all in the depression. His son fought in WWII and survived the Death March and spent most of his time in POW camps, but did live to have a son who was the first in the family to go to college, working part time to put himself through. By the 4th generation, there was an opening at Honeywell, but little attempt was made to better their lot in life and they spent their career moaning about how the past generation(s) had it so great and how rough life had become ... In the real world, you don't get a trophy for just showing up, and the person advising you how to become successful is not the stupid one in that conversation.
You would be surprised at the power of compounding earnings on invested savings. Skip the daily Starbucks/Dunkin coffee and bring your lunch instead of visiting the food truck. And why do so many people use fast food drive thrus multiple times per week? And then they complain about not having enough money to make ends meet. There are many other ways people waste money that could have been deployed to earn more money over time. Pay your future self first.
There is nothing unbelievable about the OP's results. Careful living, chicken instead of steak, ditch the 506 channel cable and buy an antenna, use a flip-phone and think long and hard before taking a $6K+ vacation every year...there's your savings for investing. Saving/investing is a choice, just like taking on more education debt than the job can repay. I retired at 57 before I as----ted someone in management for yet another bone-headed decision...and trust me, the steak that I frequently had to forgo in my working years tastes just fine now...probably better.
If a new employee lived like an "old employee" and did without things now, that didn't exist "then" then the new employee will live well in retirement. Life isn't so terrible actually talking to your spouse and not watching utube on your expensive phone and paying for a ridiculous data plan...
Thank you for being the voice of reason in this discussion. Apparently too many folks don't realize how favorable the times were in the past in regards to wages ... versus cost of housing, living, childcare, education etc ... compared to now. You don't need to be a math wiz to figure this one out...
Years ago a janitor would have been able to make enough money to afford a house, a car, a stay at home wife, three kids, vacations etc. Neither he, nor his wife, needed a college degree yet he was still able to afford to send his own kids to college. Now fast forward to today and what do we have?
Undoubtedly the naysayers will come out from the woods and say that discipline is the key factor that made the difference here.... Discipline? Really? Somehow the veterans mentioned above had the discipline to defend our country, fight for our freedoms, and put their own lives on the line so the rest of us could live a life of comfort back home... Somehow they had the discipline to do all of that yet now, when they are down, they are being written off as individuals who lacked the discipline to make ends meet?
You folks need to think long and hard before you go around gaslighting others that this all comes down to discipline. The situation is way more complicated than that...
The last decade has been phenomenal! Most people have no financial discipline and live paycheck to paycheck no matter what they make. Several engineers I work with don't even contribute enough to get the company 401k match, but then have a $400/mo car payment for a brand new car.
Or they are so emotional that they move funds in and out of stock constantly whenever some talking head tells them to.
As a 64 y/o adult I take exception to the statement that "it only takes discipline" to save for retirement.
I see my two 30ish daughters both with professional healthcare jobs struggle with housing, child care, education loans & health care costs, etc. that are much more proportionately expensive than they were 30-40 years ago when we were their age.
Discipline to save for retirement is an easy statement to make IF you have the disposable income available after you pay all the bills simply to live.
I left a few years ago after 37 years at Aero with well over $1M in 401k.
I stuck around for the until the first Friday in January.
Got the match, about a dozen paid days off and insurance thru the end of the month.
Just like here, the poor planners and people who are not ambitious enough to get out were blasting me.
Nay sayers gonna say Nay.
Haters gonna Hate.
I left 2 years ago with 2.2M in 401K. It only take discipline.
Jealous much??? I'm willing to bet most you barely put in a minimum effort, then complain that you are not valued enough.
Yeah, right. A smart person who had accumulated $1.7M wouldn't leave before the 401K match and year end vacation days (if exempt - and if you're thanking BS, then you're an exempt engineer). Sounds like HR trolls don't have enough to do this week.
Not fake news. With proper planning and diligence, its easy after 35 years to accumulate a tidy sum for retirement. Glad they are able to retire early and hopefully in good health and on their timeline.
I have always been a saver, have similar number of years, and for the past 5 years my 401k has grown more than my gross salary yearly (not including additions). You have to manage it, and make changes to investment mix occasionally.
I’m not management, just crank turner, but no worries when I retire in next five years, or today if thats how it works out.
Good luck OP!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurarittenhouse/2019/02/20/the-ceo-who-succeeded-in-making-employees-millionaires/?sh=181b8fe61693
See the article at the link and a quote pasted in below.
"Among these investors were roughly 2,500 employees who had become 401(k) millionaires. He proudly added that 94% of these millionaire employees were below the executive level."
I agree it's in poor taste to state your personal balance in a discussion like this.
I believe OP but OP is probably one of those annoying people who no one wants to hang out with. Not jealous just feeling sorry for someone who feels a need to brag like that. In the Bay Area where I'm from, you can't retire on that. People with real money don't talk like that.
Fake news
OP - congrats and well done.
For all of the jealous bashers - if you don’t have at least $1.5M saved by retirement age, you’re doing something wrong.
Obviously, he is not the average worker, or even engineer or manager. If he is real, he's some band 5+ clown who didn't do much in his career except talk a lot and brag. How many people under him got pip'd and were let go to promote his incompetence?
Most HW employees don't make a total of 1,700,000 before tax in 35 years, how come this incompetent POS has that much in 401K ???
You retired two weeks before 401k match? Doh!
I wonder how much of the OP's soul was sold to the highest executive, but at the expense of his 9-block underlings?
Must have been a slow day for HR trolls for them to trot this out!