Sean Pyles

Yeah.

Or public transit.

I mean, think about living in New York.

You can just hop on the subway or a bus and be anywhere you want.

And, you know, it might take you 30, 40 minutes, but still you don't have to get in your car, drive somewhere, look for parking.

That's been the sacrifice living in Portland where the public transit infrastructure is not quite as robust as like I kind of drive everywhere, but I do love to drive.

So at least that's okay.

Saving as early as you can is really important.

And I'll give you an example with some numbers that lays this out.

So if you start saving at 26, you save $500 a month, retire at 67, and you have a pre-retirement rate of return of 6%.

At your retirement age, you'll have just under $1.3 million.

Now, take those same figures, but you start to save at 32 when our listener says that they'll be done with their residency.

At their retirement age, they will only have around $850,000.

So that's a difference of around half a million dollars in those six years of saving.

And that's why you're a nerd, Elizabeth, because you enjoy playing with the retirement calculator.

But a big thing that our listeners should be considering, too, is that they're in a really different situation from most people because they may be making $500,000 to $750,000 a year once they're post their residency, which you mentioned earlier, Elizabeth.

So that does slightly change the calculus here.

Yes, we want people to be saving as much as they can for as long as they can, but they might have the opportunity to backload all of their savings and catch up for those six years that they weren't able to save as much, which might make the difference in how much they can save in each location less of an important factor compared with the lifestyle question of where they would want to live and what kind of life living in that kind of city would afford them.

I would love to talk with this listener in six years after they finish their residency and see how much or how little they're tempted by lifestyle creep.

Because going from making $100,000 to $750,000 a year would make me want to buy a brand new house with cash and maybe a really nice car and maybe a nice handbag too.