When can Mario retire? | Unraveled

Mario he can jump he can dance and he can successfully avoid conviction for war crimes it seems like the only thing he can't do is settle down and just enjoy life for a bit mario has been cleaning up messes in the Mushroom Kingdom and beyond since 1981 that makes him almost 40 years old most forty year olds I know are paying off a mortgage buying a peloton and desperately trying not to become their parents but Mario is still out there grinding at the same job and also every other job doesn't Mario deserve some time off doesn't he get a chance to kick up his heels enjoy a tropical drink while visiting the old timeshare and more specifically hasn't he made enough coins to let him coast for the rest of his life that's why I'm here to give him a little financial advice exchange mission circulation investment by section two before most because with the party market visualize financial by somebody for Security's not qualified potential buzzer and figure out when Mario can retire [Music] thank you both why should Mario retire you might say Mario loves his job and when you love what you do you never work a day in your life but that's [ __ ] I love what I do and let me tell you something I've worked some days I personally can't wait to retire as soon as I hit 50 I'm gonna be out there on the beach pina colada in one hand sci-fi novel and the other soaking up Mother Nature's cosmic rays but Mario has a history of risk-taking behavior and it's possible he's planning to live fast die young and leave a beautiful beautiful corpse that said he's made it out of every scrape so far and ground-pounding at age 86 is hard on the hips Mario needs a back-up plan now I'm not here to tell Mario how to live his life but I can take a look at his finances and figure out when he'll have enough money to finally hand peach his resignation letter foolish old me thought that I could just Google how much money do you need to retire and there'd be a link that says a million bucks but no turns out that everyone needs a different amount to retire based on what you're used to if you're making millions every year you're gonna need a lot more to retire because how else are you gonna support your [ __ ] fail sons bad business ideas but with all of the retirement calculators online I was getting a little overwhelmed so I decided to reach out to a qualified financial advisor hi my name is Nate Chow I'm a certified financial planner with the Northwestern Mutual and I basically help people answer questions about money that's exactly what I needed you to do today this call is not about me I feel like I'm in a great spot right now in terms of my finances but I have some worries about my good friend Mario I was looking online to see if there was like just a number that of money you need in order to retire and it turns out that that's not a thing that exists how do I figure out how much money you need to retire yeah yeah there are a lot of different things that you need to know at the most basic level you need to know how many are you gonna spend in retirement so basically when you're gonna retire and at what age you're going to die so I have to know I have to be able to to just discern when I'm willing to croak is what you're saying yes you have you have to calculate a death at some point I don't know you need what if I'm never gonna die then you're never gonna be able to retire and then you'll need to know how much money you're gonna spend every single month and then they listed off a bunch of other very important pieces of retirement info and I paid close attention got it okay I figure out what how much money he's gonna need per month and then I'll work backward from that based on how much money he can accrue and then that will be how I can figure out when he can retire that work backward model is actually what we do in the industry but we have to offset what he has against inflation as well is there a minimum amount of money per month that you suggest people have for retirement yeah typically what we're talking about like the average American it's going to be about $3,000 a month of today's I feel like Mario is a very humble man and so I don't think he's gonna need more than 3k a month okay just to make it easier for me so now that I've got a basic gist of the information I need to calculate Mario's retirement age it's time to collect the information let's start with something easy going and figure out when Mario's gonna die to keep things simple we'll assume that Mario was born the year he first made a game appearance this might not be perfectly accurate but it would make him almost 39 years old and that feels pretty right for a strangely smooth skinned mustachioed man though current male life expectancy is around 80 years old I personally can't come to grips with the fact that Mario is halfway through his life so I'll be generous and say he'll die at 90 he's spry in order to retire Mario is going to need a monthly budget of at least three thousand US dollars but he uses coins tons and tons of people have tried to figure out how much a coin would be worth in US dollars but most of them have been thinking about coins as a solid gold object judging by the amount of coins you need to purchase simple objects in the Mushroom Kingdom it seems like coins are not really worth that much using Super Mario RPG as our guideline for a coins purchasing power the cheapest items are a mushroom and able juice for coins a pop shirt and pants are the cheapest non consumable items at seven coins each I wanted to compare these with the most expensive items in Super Mario RPG but I don't think I can figure out the real-world price of a firebomb without getting put on a watch list after doing some heavy research I settled on a conversion rate of one coin to eight US dollars given our 3k figure for retirement that just means Mario needs three hundred and seventy five coins a month right wrong Super Mario RPG came out in 1996 and we haven't accounted for inflation that's why we got to compare these prices to similar items in Mario and Luigi superstar saga which came out seven years later I built my mushroom price index on these six items and just from a cursory glance it's obvious that the prices have gone up but to figure out by how much we got a head back to algebra 2 the PERT equation it's something I learned about a very long time ago and I'm pretty sure it's used to figure out compounding interest basically I got to plug in some prices and do some natural logs and whatever else the internet tells me to do and it will leave me with an annual inflation rate for that item then I just gotta average out the rates and it'll leave me with a workable annual inflation rate for the Mushroom Kingdom as a whole so I'll just go ahead and do that math in my head real quick [Music] thank you clean now rounding that number up that's an average annual inflation rate of about 15 percent per year which is really high the US Federal Reserve tries to keep inflation at a healthy 2% whereas the Mushroom Kingdom Federal Reserve doesn't exist due to aggressive lobbying by Wario in order to understand this a bit better I googled Mario hyperinflation and I got some exciting search results that were ultimately unhelpful but from what I gather this means that if Mario spends a hundred coins to buy a shirt this year next year he'll have to spend a little more than a hundred and fifteen for the same shirt if inflation stayed the same from when superstar Saga came out in 2003 we can assume that by 2020 a simple mushroom is going to cost a hundred and twenty-eight coins a pair of entry-level pants will cost two thousand and forty nine coins so that original 1 to 8 conversion rate doesn't really make sense anymore using those same 2020 price comparisons the conversion rate is more like 36 coins to 1 US dollar if mario retired today he would need a hundred and eight thousand coins per month but let's remember that mario has been doing this for a long time he's definitely got a little something was stashed away so I talked to Nate about his job and ways he might be saving money he hasn't been of a strange job he's he's technically a plumber I guess in title is he part of like the plumbers Union doesn't have a pension so I I would be willing to bet he doesn't have a pension just because I think he might be the only plumber he's not being employed by anyone necessarily he's just doing it and then finding his payment along the way okay it's so it sounds like he's almost like a freelancer if he's not getting w2 income he can't save into things like 401ks or Roth IRAs now when you say a Roth IRA what is that it's a way to save for retirement and you know as a young person you should definitely be doing one trying to max it out every single year it's crucial for retirement when but when you say crucial do you do mean optional so maybe Mario doesn't have a rough IRA or a four in one cake or whatever but no one has those I don't and I am well on my way to that beach chair in Boca and the fact is that Mario could get a lot of coins in his games how else could he spend so much on go-karting in tennis in the most recent Mario games the coin counter can only go up to 9999 which is the maximum amount you can store in a mattress so let's assume that mario has been saving 10,000 coins every year since the release of mario odyssey we can assume that since he's not in a union he isn't getting any raises to offset inflation so to finally figure out when Mario can retire we need to know how much money he'll need every year before his death for example if he lives to 90 years old he'll need 2.7 billion coins which is the cost of living for just one year but we have to remember that he's been saving 10,000 coins for 54 years which means that he would have 540 thousand coins saved up which is point zero two percent of what he needs to retire for just one year before his death and actually if the monthly cost of living is already a hundred and eight thousand coins he's gonna be unbelievably deep in debt which is actually what Nate told me via text mario can never retire you know that's bonkers though because there's there's no way that you know inflation is gonna stay that high for that long in fact in later Mario and Luigi RPGs the prices are the same or lower so let's just assume that from here on out the inflation rate stays a healthy 2% and you know what let's assume that Mario can save more than ten thousand coins a month in New Super Mario Brothers to the counter maxes out at one less than ten million coins granted this is an outlier and a ridiculous one at that but so is spending 2.7 billion coins just to survive at age 90 there's no way you could spend that much on Werther's Originals so let's say he's saving 10 million coins a year since age 31 which might I point out is over a quarter of a million US dollars now if we just add up the cost of living of each year leading up to 90 we can see that Mario will have saved enough money to chill out on his boat at age 77 which is it's just one year below the average American male life expectancy higher okay you know what just for fun let's just throw some random numbers in here just to just for just to see you know just just for fun let's say Mario is starting to save money at I don't know my age 26 the inflation rate can stay the same two percent and let's just say that the coin ratio is actually just one to one with US dollars so he just needs 3,000 coins today in order to retire and and you know what let's let's say he could save 10 percent of an average video producer salary in New York City something completely random like that assuming Mario lives to the ripe old age of 90 we can just plug these figures into the equation and figure out that Mario will be kicking back on the white sands boombox blastin Jimmy Buffett at the youthful retirement age of 88 are you [ __ ] kidding me that can't be right because if mario can't retire then that would mean I would well he excuse me for a moment in order to understand this a little better I googled Mario hype that's just I'm sorry I'm just accepting this map I'm just accepting what I'm saying [Music]

Channel: Polygon

Views: 1,740,039

Rating: 4.9696169 out of 5

Keywords: unraveled, Mario, retire, brian david gilbert, bdg, retirement, super mario, mario odyssey, retirement age, finance, money, dollars, cash, theory, videogames, video games, polygon, n64, nintendo, switch, sunshine, beach, chalk, chalk board, algebra, math, financial, planning, planner, suit, funny, comedy, humor, ridiculous, jimmy buffett, mustache, pina colada, financial planner, ira, roth ira, 401k, gaming, game, unraveled brian david gilbert, super mario odyssey, mario game, mario video games, game over

Id: XUKW0EsMSyQ

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Larxxxene]

Alternate title: Brian gets depressed about his own finances.

[u/ghee]

"But when you say crucial... do you mean optional?"

[u/Tomorrow_Is_Today1]

Why did I actually feel a lump in my throat by the end of the video...guys this is not okay

[u/Movor]

You’re so fast

[u/buddyvulpes]

That is some deep, deep pain.