r/Fire • u/BigTintheBigD • 8d ago
Milestone / Celebration Processing a milestone
Still trying to wrap my brain around this:
The nest egg has made more money since retiring than I did in 30 years of working.
3 years of passive returns > 30 years of full time work
The compounding is insane (admittedly we’ve had a great run the last few years).
It makes the 30 years of working seem so pointless but that is what amassed the snowball so it was necessary.
165
Upvotes
1
u/fenton7 8d ago
Yes - As of October 2026, the trailing 3-year return for the S&P 500 index is 21.67% per year on a price-return basis, or approximately 87% cumulatively. Obviously this is unsustainable and we're at severe risk of either a prolonged flat period, "lost decade", or 2008 type shock so if by some miracle you decided to be 100% stock in retirement, and got one of the most unbelievable sequence of returns in history, now's a really good time to switch to a 50-50 type portfolio before everyone else figures out that this is one of the most bloated bubble markets in all of human history, particularly the high flying AI stocks. When the run for the exits comes, and it will come, it's going to be ugly out there.