Here’s our latest interview with a millionaire as we seek to learn from those who have grown their wealth to high heights.
If you’d like to be considered for an interview, drop me a note and we can chat about specifics.
This interview took place in September.
My questions are in bold italics and their responses follow in black.
Let’s get started…
OVERVIEW
How old are you (and spouse if applicable, plus how long you’ve been married)?
I am 57 and my spouse is 60.
We met in the military and have been married for more than 30 years.
Do you have kids/family (if so, how old are they)?
We have one son, who is 29.
His spouse is 27, and they recently had their first child.
What area of the country do you live in (and urban or rural)?
Our retirement home is in western South Dakota, in a rural town with about 5,000 residents.
We split our time between South Dakota and Hawaii, where we have a small house in the suburbs on the island of Oahu.
What is your current net worth?
Our current net worth is $8.05 million.
What are the main assets that make up your net worth (stocks, real estate, business, home, retirement accounts, etc.) and any debt that offsets part of these?
Our assets include real estate (two homes, two rentals) and retirement accounts invested in US ETFs tracking the S&P500.
We have about $175k remaining on a mortgage that will be paid off within the next year.
EARN
What is your job?
We both retired from the military. My spouse maintains the South Dakota property full-time.
I became a lawyer and recently took a position with a private litigation firm.
What is your annual income?
Our annual gross income now is $440k.
More than half of that amount is our military retired pay, about 15% is non-taxable VA disability, and the rest is my salary as a lawyer.
Tell us about your income performance over time. What was the starting salary of your first job, how did it grow from there (and what you did to make it grow), and where are you now?
We each served in the military for 30 years, so the majority of our income was dictated by our rank. We each made less than $20k the first year, but by the end, it was about $150k per year.
We never tried any side hustles to increase our income. We maintained a very high savings rate (never less than 50%), and invested consistently and aggressively over time, primarily in the US stock market.
What tips do you have for others who want to grow their career-related income?
We don’t have direct experience in a corporate environment, but we think that pretty much every organization values people who work hard, strive to become excellent at whatever task they are assigned, and find creative ways to solve problems.
Having a reputation for excellence and the ability to figure things out meant that we were trusted in ways that many of our peers were not.
What’s your work-life balance look like?
My spouse retired six years ago and is completely happy with the farm/ranch lifestyle. The physical challenge of maintaining the property, hunting, and fishing provide the balance he needs.
I spent much of my first year in retirement handling my father’s intestate estate, then went to law school, clerked, and am now working as an attorney in a private law firm. I need a mental challenge to feel balanced.
Both of us enjoy traveling, visiting extended family, and thrifting, so we have all the individual and team activities we need.
Do you have any sources of income besides your career? If so, can you list them, give us a feel for how much you earn with each, and offer some insight into how you developed them?
As mentioned above, we derive most of our income from retirement and from my attorney’s salary. On our South Dakota property, we harvest hay and are incrementally planting apple trees and adding hives to our apiary.
Eventually, the apples and bees will provide income, too.
SAVE
What is your annual spending?
We average $168k per year on necessities and “routine fun.” We use the rest to maintain one year of cash in a high-yield savings account and invest the rest.
We have elderly mothers, and occasionally provide support for them.
What are the main categories (expenses) this spending breaks into?
Our largest line items are the mortgage (approx. $7300/month, which will be paid off by the end of 2026), insurance on six vehicles and real/personal property (approx. $1800/month), food/transportation (approx. $1800/month, including travel between SD and HI), carrying costs of both homes ($1200/month), and quarterly estimated taxes ($800/month).
Do you have a budget? If so, how do you implement it?
We have a budget. Once a quarter, I update our budget (handwritten on ledger paper), showing our monthly income and expenses and how each of the bills is paid (e.g., autopaid from particular bank account or credit card).
We sit down together at the end of each quarter to review and update it, and to sweep any excess into investments. We have a standing list of “things we would like to buy at the right price” and stay on the lookout for them at a good price- if we find an item, we let the other know and buy it.
If either of us find something that will cost more than $250 and it is not in the budget plan (which has a fun money component), we always check in with the other first to make sure we are on the same page. We almost always agree.
What percentage of your gross income do you save and how has that changed over time?
We have always saved at least 50% of our net income (while in the military, we decided that since most families lived on less than one military paycheck, we could, too).
Once our mortgage is paid off, our rate will be approximately 75%.
What’s your best tip for saving (accumulating) money?
Never pay retail and always compare prices.
What’s your best tip for spending less money?
We buy generic or the store-brand of most items. (But we buy “real” Q-Tips, good beer, and quality toilet paper and paper towels.)
What is your favorite thing to spend money on/your secret splurge?
My spouse buys hunting and fishing gear.
We both enjoy going to auctions and thrift stores, and have had to implement a rule that in order to buy more stuff, we need to sell or donate other things to make room.
INVEST
What is your investment philosophy/plan?
Slow, steady, and boring is the way. We maxed out our military TSP contributions and IRAs every year those programs were available to us (more than 20 years), and when we were deployed, we took advantage of being able to save more in our TSP accounts, as well as the Savings Deposit Program (10% interest on up to $10k).
Additionally, we invested in mutual funds that tracked major US indices. We had a few rental homes at one point.
Those houses kept us in a lower tax bracket for about 7 years, but as the homes aged and started needing expensive repairs and remodeling, we decided we were done being landlords. We were lucky to have had great tenants, but we just didn’t want to handle them anymore.
My spouse tried day trading, and even though it went really well, the stress was too high to maintain while also on active duty.
What has been your best investment?
Our homes and land.
Our Hawaii home has nearly doubled in value in less than 8 years, and our South Dakota home and land have appreciated by almost as much in about 6 years.
What has been your worst investment?
When Russia invaded Ukraine, I was in law school and focused on exams.
I missed the signal to sell our Russia-related holdings, and instead of selling and making several hundred thousand dollars, we ended up stuck in a forcibly closed fund, a two-year wind-down process, and a loss of about $50k.
What’s been your overall return?
Since we married, our overall rate of return on all investments is just above 8%.
Not the greatest, but it’s obviously worked well enough to make sure that we will not need to worry about money.
How often do you monitor/review your portfolio?
I check our performance and update our spreadsheet at the end of every quarter. We meet to discuss any changes we want to make, make them, and repeat the next quarter.
After our Russia investment loss, we both pay more attention to the news and general markets to make sure that we don’t have any surprises like that again.
NET WORTH
How did you accumulate your net worth?
As discussed above, we did not “make a lot of money” compared to many of our successful peers. We saved like crazy (always at least 50% savings for the majority of 30 years) and consistently invested primarily in major US indexes.
Our results are proof that slow and steady investing works. We did not inherit anything.
In fact, at different times, both sets of our parents asked us to buy real and/or personal property that we thought we might one day inherit. In the end, we bought a farm, a bunch of personal property items with sentimental and cash value, and passed on a different plot of land.
My parents later sold that land because they needed the money.
What would you say is your greatest strength in the ESI wealth-building model (Earn, Save or Invest) and why would you say it’s tops?
Our discipline as savers is probably our best trait. We are lucky that we agree on almost everything (especially money matters) and communicate well with each other– that made it easy to stay the course we had set.
We did improve our lifestyle over time, but we maintained at least a 50% savings rate until we retired from the military. Since we retired, we have had a mixed experience with saving and spending.
For example, we planned and made a separate budget to purchase our retirement home and the things necessary to live on a large property (farm truck, tractor and related implements, etc.). My spouse came in well under budget, bought a fishing boat with some of the excess, and saved the rest.
We later used more of the excess to install a pneumatic lift in the garage and buy two “assemble it yourself” metal buildings (2-car garage size) to house the boat, tractor, and a full winter of firewood. We never reached the original budget for setting up the home and property.
We do splurge a bit now and then. Our biggest “splurge” since either of us retired was buying a new car. We normally buy used, low milage cars in good shape and drive them until they have 100k miles or more on them.
In this case, our best used car (a Subaru Crosstrek) was totaled in an accident, and the replacement used car (same model, one step lower trim) started acting strangely about 9 months later.
Because that car is the one we use for long-haul trips, we did not want to risk a roadside breakdown or worse. After discussing it, we bought the newest version of the car with top-of-the-line trim and the extended warranty, and we’ll drive it until it has lived a good lifetime with us.
It’s been a great decision- it’s comfortable, gets great gas mileage, and does the job we need. (We have owned 4 new cars in the 30-plus years we’ve been married. In each case, we kept them until they were well over 100k miles before selling or donating them. One of those formerly “new cars” (1992 Jeep Cherokee Laredo) is still in service with nearly 300k miles.)
What road bumps did you face along the way to becoming a millionaire and how did you handle them?
Our biggest issue is having family members who are not good at managing their money. For a long time, both of our families thought we were really poor because we were in the Army.
Once they figured out that we were better off than they thought, some tried to treat us like a piggy bank. That was really hard to handle for several reasons.
One is that my spouse is from a large family that is solidly blue collar and almost uniformly horrible at managing what money they do have. There were a few times that we gave money to a relative, but only after talking it over and deciding that any amount given would be a gift to avoid drama later.
(We did loan money once, too, with a loan agreement, interest, etc. and it worked out fine.) Another issue is that my side of the family is equally awful at managing money, and it is compounded by gambling addictions or other mental health issues.
While we help relatives out occasionally, we don’t pay for things we don’t endorse (e.g., we’ll direct-pay a power bill, but won’t give cash), and that has ruffled some feathers.
Another issue was reaching financial freedom and having no one who understood us. We didn’t know that we were “seeking FI” before that was a widely known concept, and most of our peers and family made fun of us for living frugally.
They had no idea how much we were saving, and hiding that part of our lives was exhausting. It sapped some of the joy of having done well- we never told anyone that we’d become millionaires until we had made $3M because we didn’t know anyone like us. We certainly could not discuss it with anyone in our families.
We had a few friends who were high-earners, but they burned through their income pretty fast, and the vast majority of our peers were living in the moment and completely uninterested in the long-term value of financial stability. It was lonely for a decade or more, so we are really happy now to have access to so many others like us.
What are you currently doing to maintain/grow your net worth?
We are not actively trying to grow our wealth. We feel like we have enough. We maintain it by living a simple life (it helps that we don’t like flashy things and don’t have any really expensive hobbies).
We pay attention to changes in tax law, meet with our tax professional regularly, and do our best to plan ahead.
We keep a year of cash in a high yield savings account (probably overkill, but we sleep well at night), we plan to return to being debt free by paying off the mortgage by the end of 2026, and we are trying to plan for ways to spend and gift more during our lifetimes to enjoy it together and with our son and his family.
Do you have a target net worth you are trying to attain?
We do not have a target net worth now.
We have far exceeded what we once had as a target, so we are focused on maintaining it and teaching our son how to manage it so that our hard work and good fortune can benefit future generations of our family.
How old were you when you made your first million and have you had any significant behavior shifts since then?
My spouse was 38 and I was 35 the first time our net worth topped $1M. I remember being so excited and proud that we had reached that point, but as mentioned above, we didn’t have family or a community to share the victory with.
We have not really changed how we think about or use money. We are a bit more willing to “buy back” our time or sanity when we feel like the situation warrants it, but we also like challenges and figuring out/fixing things ourselves.
(We have fixed our AC, water heater, showers, toilets, cars, etc. and usually enjoy doing that… but if we have a time constraint or it’s going to require buying expensive one-time-use tools, we’ll hire a professional.)
What personal habits and/or traits have you developed that have made you successful at growing your net worth?
Aside from a share of good luck, our discipline in saving consistently and letting that money grow over time has been the foundation of our net worth. The fact that we are fairly utilitarian and really don’t care what other people think has also been really helpful.
For example, we have (and continue) to get comments from friends and family about what kind of house we live in, what cars we drive, what brand of clothes or shoes we wear, etc. “Oh, you can afford better than that, why don’t you get something nicer?” Because we’re happy with our choices.
We don’t really care if anyone else is happy with them.
What money mistakes have you made along the way that others can learn from?
There were a lot of them. I mentioned the biggest one earlier — not paying attention and not reacting fast enough to cash out our holdings in a Russian-related fund when they invaded Ukraine and the government forced those kinds of funds to close.
That cost us what would have been a large gain and turned it into a realized loss. The second worst one was a failed 1031 exchange—the loss in dollars was significant at the time, but what hurt the most was that I had misjudged the character of a person assisting us with the 1031.
Taking my focus off the “just business” part of the transaction cost us both money and a friendship.
What advice do you have for ESI Money readers on how to become wealthy?
We did it the slow, boring way, but it worked. There are so many ways to get the same result, and perhaps faster than the path we chose.
If we could go back and do this again, I think we would maintain the basic, boring, tired-and-true way of saving and investing, and would also couple it with seeking and implementing plans for additional passive income streams. I think our general family rule on risk (which is conservative) would remain—only put at risk what you can tolerate losing altogether.
FUTURE
What are your plans for the future regarding lifestyle?
Our next decision point will be when the existing mortgage is paid off or when our neighbors decide to sell their land that adjoins ours. If the mortgage is paid off first, I’ll need to decide if I want to keep grinding at the law firm, or if I want to re-retire.
If the land goes up for sale, we will likely buy it and I’ll need to decide if I want to work an extra year to pay for it, or if we’ll just spend some of what we’ve saved. Right now, I’m leaning toward not working and instead spending as much time as possible with my family.
I can change how I work in the law so that I’m still using the skills, but on my own schedule. I’m sure that my spouse will never really want to change his retirement lifestyle, except to travel a bit more to see and adventure with our son and his growing family.
What are your retirement plans?
Financially, we probably can’t spend the money we have now. We agree that educating our son about our holdings, how to manage it, and giving him the reins while we are still available to be his “training wheels.”
As for activities, we love to travel, so I will be planning a 2-3 week family trip with our son and his family at the end or 2026 or the beginning of 2027.
Are there any issues in retirement that concern you? If so, how are you planning to address them?
We aren’t really worried about much.
I probably need to go through (and video) instructions for some of the mechanical things that could go wrong on our Sough Dakota property (e.g., tractor maintenance and swapping out implements by myself; our well is 300ft deep with a pump house that is about a half mile from the holding tank at the house, so I should make sure I’m up to speed on troubleshooting so that I’ll know whether an issue is just inconvenient or one that requires a professional in case my spouse isn’t available to help).
MISCELLANEOUS
How did you learn about finances and at what age did it “click”?
What I learned about finances from my parents and immediate family was ridiculously incorrect, and aside from learning about how to write checks and balance a checkbook in 7th grade Home Economics class, I did not get any financial education until after I left college.
I learned from watching my peers and how they handled money (mostly what not to do), and by reading newspapers and books. My spouse grew up in a blue-collar family with many kids, so he learned about the lack of money and how hard it is to earn more of it.
He worked hard in the summers to afford college, and used the military as a way to forge a different financial path. My spouse was ahead of me in thinking about the long term, and ever since we married, we have been on the same plan financially.
We clipped coupons (we still do), we learned together, discussed pros and cons of various options, and essentially decided that as a team we could easily live on one paycheck and save the other. We agreed to invest aggressively, but limited high-risk investments to only what we could afford to forfeit.
Who inspired you to excel in life? Who are your heroes?
Both of my parents were blue-collar and perfectionists, and my mother is an “off the boat” immigrant. In our house, second place meant you were just the “first loser.”
My parents knew that education was the key to a better life. They taught me to do my best every time, learn and improve every day, and to expect to have to earn whatever I wanted because nothing is free.
Luckily, I was a good student and excelled in precision target shooting. My parents invested all they could in my development in that sport, and that led to free college and a military career, which has changed the entire trajectory of my life for the better.
My spouse is the third of four children and is the “favorite” because he works hard and doesn’t cause or entertain drama. His parents were blue-collar, too, and worked very hard to provide for their family.
My spouse’s father was his hero for the lifetime of hard work and hardship he endured to give his children a better life.
Do you have any favorite money books you like/recommend? If so, can you share with us your top three and why you like them?
1. The Millionaire Mind by Stanley and Danko (and its sequels). When I read the first book, I thought it was amazing because it largely described me and my spouse, how we thought about money, marriage, coupons, used cars, and long-term goals.
There were parts that talked about how these millionaires lived and retired, and it inspired us not only to stay the course, but it helped us more clearly define what we wanted for our family’s future.
2. The Military Guide to Financial Independence and Retirement (Doug Nordman). Not only did this reinforce the idea that slow and steady was a winning investment plan, but it contains pretty much everything you need to know about how military pay, benefits, and retirement work. (And Doug and his daughter’s new book, Raising Your Money-Savvy Family for the Next Generation, is great, too.)
3. A Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins. I wish I had read this at the beginning, but I didn’t hear about it until years after we had started investing.
The 2025 version is worth getting as a gift for those you know who are getting started, perhaps also with The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel as a companion gift.
Do you give to charity? Why or why not? If you do, what percent of time/money do you give?
We give to established charities once in a while, but not consistently. Scandals involving United Way and other charities have made us skeptical, even with services like Charity Navigator to help us understand how much of our gifts go to overhead.
We prefer giving in-kind gifts directly, generally to people/projects with which we have a high degree of personal connection. I give to my undergrad alma mater because it changed the direction of my life for the better, but even then, I prefer to give an in-kind gift so that 100% of my money goes where I can see it doing the most good instead of the administration taking a cut.
My spouse gives to a few charities dedicated to a particular subset of military veterans and their surviving families because he worked in that field and knows the challenges they face after their military service is done.
Do you plan to leave an inheritance for your heirs (how do you plan to distribute your wealth at your death)? What are your reasons behind this plan?
We have one son and plan to leave almost everything to him. We have a few special bequests, but they are mostly sentimental.
We are proud (and lucky) that our son has grown into a good man. When he was a teen, we had no idea that he was actually listening to us and judging us.
(It turns out that he was silently comparing what we said to what we actually did. Fortunately, our words and actions were well-aligned.) He understands where we came from, how hard we worked, and he is thankful.
We’ve shared the details of our assets, are preparing him to take over, and trust him to carry on what we started.
