I'd love to see a Financial Independence plan around growing [a] business(es) and retiring early but not crazy early (40-55) and living on a substantial middle/upper-middle income for several decades.
Even assuming you're a gambler and put all your savings into stocks and get that mythical "steady 7%" return, you need to set aside $75K every year to reach $3M in 20 years.
I'm not claiming to be the world's best saver, but I think I live frugally enough, and after 20 years into a fairly good tech career, my savings is an order of magnitude+ less than that.
That's roughly my plan. My goal is to achieve financial independence, but my wife and I will continue working even after that. FI just gives us the freedom to do work the way we want.
My current projections put us at retiring roughly when we hit 40.
I just started my own business, which I hope to grow into a indiehacker/lifestyle type business; not a rapid growth startup. Just something I like working at and that earns a reasonable income.
All that said, I'm not sure why you think $24k/yr is a pauper lifestyle. In fact that's roughly our yearly expenses once we achieve "initial FI" * . That's in Southern California, and we hardly live like paupers.
By the way, I never got involved in the FI "crowd". I read through /r/personalfinance in the past, and check it occasionally. It's definitely very heavily expense management. Makes sense, since most people are really bad at expense management. And there is definitely not a lot of discussion about where to draw the line between cutting expenses and having fun. I can imagine that FI specific communities would be much worse in that regard.
But I think all of that is driven by the fact that these communities are composed of, well, everybody. And most everybody can only dream of maxing their IRA. For people in the HN crowd financial management is quite a bit different. We need advice on what to do after we max our 401k! (HINT: Start your own company and do a solo 401k). I think a lot of us are also very privileged already in what work we do. If you're a programmer, you can generally find a programming job you life that pays very well. For most everybody else, finding a job you life is either rare, or would mean taking a massive pay-cut. So while most people dream of FI being an escape from work, I think a lot of the HN crowd is like me; dreaming of FI as just ... freedom. Freedom to take a year off and work on a startup. Freedom to work for a local company for $150k/yr instead of working for Google to earn that fat $300k/yr.
EDIT: * Forgot to clarify that "Initial FI", for us, occurs after our house is paid off so $24k/yr is without a mortage. I editted out long-winded sections of my original comment and forgot to clarify :P
EDIT: See my edit above; I realized I forgot to clarify that my $24k/yr figure was excluding mortgage.
It's really a personal experience, I know myself I don't feel like my life is missing anything even if I'm putting money aside to my future. I'm still traveling at least once a year, and I eat pretty good food all the time. At the same time, I don't have a car and rent one whenever I need one.
