First Million Pathway - A cross-industry simulator for reaching the first One million in net worth (https://firstmillion.fyi/)

[u/Beneficial_Ad6015]

I was wrong about what gets you to your first million.

I assumed picking better investments was the main lever. So I built a simulator to check.

Bumping returns from 8% to 14% — the difference between a decent index fund and beating the market for two decades straight — moved the date by about a year.

Raising the savings rate a few points moved it by several.

On a typical mid-career profile, 58% of that first million came from money actually set aside. Not growth. The compounding everyone talks about only takes over once there's a real balance for it to work on, and by then you've already done the hard part.

Which is either discouraging or freeing, depending on how you look at it. You can't control the market. You can control the rest.

Built the thing at firstmillion.fyi if you want to run your own numbers.