This couple retired early with $500K over 30 years ago

i'm billy caterly and this is my lovely wife acacia we retire january 91 we're into our 31st year the 68 year old caterlies have spent the last 30 years of retirement bouncing around between the u.s mexico and thailand the former restaurateurs didn't decide to retire early until after they turned 30. billy initially when i met him was a trained french chef so he worked in a lot of places in michelin star restaurants and so on and his big dream was to open up his own restaurant we met and we went to france and he cooked over in france and we came home and bought a restaurant and and ran that for 10 years one of the couple's customers offered bill a job as a stockbroker his drive and attention to detail as a michelin star chef translated well to asset management and so i excel i led the office in new accounts every month from the first month i had came back from training and then after three years they gave me my own office and so then i was branch manager and i was managing a fair amount of money from for my age i was the youngest branch manager in their system at the time between the restaurant and the brokerage the catalyst were making more money than ever i was running the restaurant still working nights weeks weekends and holidays and billy was working monday through friday getting off at one in the afternoon going to the beach and that didn't set real well so he came to me with this idea of selling everything and traveling the world and i thought it was kind of a hairbrained idea and he'd forget about it but he didn't and here we are caterly applied everything he'd learned over the last three years to come up with a bulletproof retirement plan we took two years to plan this we didn't just come on you know i didn't come home for education one day and said okay we're gone no we took two years we discussed that we tried to poke holes in this plan every way we could and everything seemed to always come out on the top side so what we did is we figured out if we could just limit our spending below what we could earn in the market then what was left over would go back into the market or stay in the market and continue to grow it's you know compounding the couple retired in 1991 now when people retire early many use the four percent rule a principle that wasn't established until 1994. i saw from my experience at the brokerage business how much money other retirees whose money i was managing had and i said i got more than they got and so i started you know thinking and and said well you know maybe this is possible maybe i don't need to sit here until until the end and then you know like i said we knocked holes in education i challenged each other we had high volume discussions we had a few of those to settle on a goal the couple would first need to know exactly how much money they spent every year the first thing we did was um we tracked our spending because we didn't know how much we were spending for our lifestyle that we were currently living and so what we did is we we diligently went back to a few years prior and then we started tracking them for the two years after uh how much we were spending and when we eliminated our cars our house payment insurances clothing for the work apparel when the lunches out we came that we were only spending about twenty thousand dollars on ourselves caterly figured if he could save 25 times his annual spend or 500 000 they would have enough money to retire back then etfs weren't around either yeah you know this is this is the dark ages man yeah so so we had we had vanguard accounts and we started buying vanguard spy which now spy index 500 fun then we switched everything over to etfs back in the 2000 2000 2007 2008. caterly's initial nest egg of 500 000 has grown to over 1 million outpacing inflation while funding their retirement through a series of recessions we were invested in 1987 when the market went down 20 plus percent one day so you know that'll that'll put a cruise in your pants i'm telling you you know so and then again in 91 right in there there was there was another big hit and then 2000 remember oh remember y2k oh my goodness yeah we're gonna go and then we had the 2002 seven and eight recession the 2008 recession was the only time the couple ever considered re-entering the workforce and that 2008-9 i think that was the first and last time we had that discussion because that it was our biggest hit since retirement and when we we thought about it we'd have to get to a place live in a place where we could find employment then we'd have to buy a car and then we'd be back into that whole spending thing of how much it costs to work the caterlies now help others to retire early and their best advice comes down to two rules i would say to invest as soon as you can as young as you can get started now to monitor your spending that tracking spending is really important because if you don't know where your money is going it you know you put it in your wallet and then it's gone you gotta learn your own finances you've got to think of yourself as a business and you're the ceo of your own business of your financial health so look at it that way and uh you know get get invested as early as you can for the young young guys getting the index funds and uh you know 10 20 years down the road you're gonna whoa invest in you ready set grow cnbc and acorns you

Channel: CNBC Television

Views: 292,957

Rating: 4.9169884 out of 5

Keywords: Invest in You: Ready Set Grow, CNBC

Id: ZPUoNcLAg1g

Length: 5min 53sec (353 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021