In terms of investing your money, there are three factors that are important to consider: the amount of money you contribute each month, the rate of return, and the length of time it will take you to accomplish your objective. For those who want to become financially independent regardless of how much money they have, keeping those in mind may help.
At Finbold, we crunched the numbers to see how much money 30-year-olds would have to invest each month in order to become a millionaire by the age of 50 with a starting amount of $5,000.
When conducting our calculations, we took into consideration four potential return rates: 3% (for a cautious portfolio consisting mostly of bonds), 6% (for a mix of stocks and bonds), 9% (for a portfolio consisting primarily of stocks or including index or mutual funds that typically produce around 9%), and an optimistic 15% which would (incorporating stocks, ETFs, bonds, index, and mutual funds).
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What we discovered
If an investor earns a 3% annual return on his or her assets, we discovered that a 30-year-old would need to invest $3,020 each month to achieve $1 million by the age of 50 with a $5,000 starting amount, which would be worth $1,000,576. In order to arrive at these conclusions, calculations were performed using the Smart Asset investment calculator, which assesses the growth of investments over time.
While it would take $2,130 each month for 20 years for them to accumulate $1 million if they instead contributed to assets that yielded a 6% annual return instead.
Conversely, as an alternative, if they chose assets that provide a 9% annual return, which is comparable to more aggressive investing, they would need to invest $1,460 every month for 20 years to obtain $1 million.
Finally, if they choose assets that provide a 15% annual return, which is an exceedingly ambitious aim, they would need to invest far less, at $610 per month for 20 years, in order to reach $1 million. In all, the equivalent of $146,400 in contributions throughout the time period, which would accrue a total interest earned of $860,494.
The magic of compound interest
The sooner you start investing, the less money you will need to put in to reach $1 million since compound interest works best when it has a longer amount of time to grow your money.
Making such bold contributions may be difficult, depending on your circumstances. Particularly since, as you become older, you may have to take on expenditures that you didn’t have when you were younger, such as raising a child or caring for aged parents.
All of these expenses might make it tough to make aggressive contributions to your assets while still paying your bills. Therefore, it’s important to remember that even the smallest contributions may add up over time and have a significant influence on your financial situation.
It is more impactful, to begin with, something small, and it puts you in a better position than it would be if you did nothing at all. In other words, even if you can’t afford to put away $1,460 a month, you should start investing what you can as soon as possible so that compound interest has more time to work.
For this reason, we started the calculations at the age of 30 since you are of a mature enough mindset to invest with and, presumably, with more money than you would have had in your early twenties, but also opening the possibility to become a millionaire while still in your prime working years.
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Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.
