My First $1 Million: Oil Industry Engineering Manager, 67

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THE BASICS
THE FUN STUFF
LOOKING BACK
LOOKING AHEAD

Welcome to Kiplinger's My First $1 Million series, in which we hear from people who have made $1 million. They're sharing how they did it and what they're doing with it. This time, we hear from a 67-year-old married and retired engineering manager in Chapel Hill, N.C.

See our earlier profiles, including a writer in New England, a literacy interventionist in Colorado, a semiretired entrepreneur in Nashville and an events industry CEO in Northern New Jersey. (See all of the profiles here.)

Each profile features one person or couple, who will always be completely anonymous to readers, answering questions to help our readers learn from their experience.

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These features are intended to provide a window into how different people build their savings — they're not intended to provide financial advice.

THE BASICS

How did you make your first $1 million?

I made my first $1 million, at age 39, by:

Maximizing savings from every paycheck, starting on the very first one
(Investing in) 401(k) (and getting) company matching funds
Investing in the stock market (following Kiplinger magazine advice)
Working hard in pursuit of promotions
Taking foreign and domestic assignments that colleagues bypassed because they did not want to change their comfortable lifestyle to bump pay
Never taking any money out from investments
Living below our means

My wife, a teacher, believed the same way and worked everywhere we went during my domestic and international assignments.

A winking piggy bank sits atop a pile of cash.

That first million increased several-fold over a 27-year career span, and we were able to retire when I was 53 and she was 54.

What are you doing with the money?

I continued to keep that first million invested in the stock market and to save at an even higher level than before as my career continued to thrive.

THE FUN STUFF

Did you do anything to celebrate?

Nothing. Continued with the same strategy of maximizing savings and living below our means.

Does anyone know you're a millionaire?

No. Only my wife and I know our net worth. There is no need to brag about reaching your goals.

The only thing I do is dish out advice to young people, without ever mentioning my net worth.

However, I always mention the strategy I pursued to be able to retire at 53, and I am sure that they realize that my net worth must be sizable, judging by our lifestyle.

What is the best part of making $1 million?

Seeing the payoff of all the moves one made to reach that goal. It is validation that everything we did throughout our lives was definitely right.

Confetti thrown in the air against a blue sky.

My parents were not wealthy. I was the first and only of my siblings to go to college, which I paid for with scholarships and campus work.

Did your life change?

It made me realize that it was possible to achieve a great goal, made me feel very confident about the future and motivated me to keep going so that $1 million was only the beginning and not the end of a great achievement.

LOOKING BACK

Anything you would do differently?

Absolutely not. The results speak for themselves.

Did you work with a financial adviser?

I did not for most of my career while working. I read financial magazines (Kiplinger was always the main one).

A man sits on the sofa and reads a magazine.

I also got investment tips from Fidelity (where I kept all my holdings and still do) and always maintained a conservative investment strategy:

70/30 stocks/bonds in the first 15 years
50/50 in the next 10 years
30/70 the year before I retired

I started working with a financial adviser only five years before retirement, mostly for tax-related reasons and because I wanted to be able to fully enjoy retirement without worrying about how to invest once my holdings had reached a sizable level.

Did anyone help you early on?

Not exactly. Everything I learned about investing, saving and spending was through reading financial publications, books, attending seminars, etc.

I did fine without getting help, not because I did not want it but because no one ever approached me to offer financial advice.

LOOKING AHEAD

Any advice for others trying to make their first $1 million?

Save at least 15% to 20% of your monthly check, starting with the first one. Maximize your 401(k) savings to get the full company matching contribution, if available, and don't even consider taking any money out of your savings until you retire.

401k written on a spiral notebook on a desk.

Use credit cards sparingly and, if you do, pay off the balance every month. I have never carried a credit card balance. I have always paid whatever the balance is at the end of the month.

Plans for your next $1 million?

I already have enough millions, so my wife and I live a very comfortable life in a golf club community and a 7,000-square-foot home that's fully paid for.

We are spending our money wisely and avoiding extravagant payments, maintaining a budget (as we always did) and fully enjoying the fruits of our labor.

Do you have an estate plan?

Yes, we do. The estate plan includes revocable and irrevocable trusts, wills, powers of attorney and more.

Estate planning documents with a pen, calculator and eyeglasses.

We worked with a great estate lawyer who advised us on what elements we should consider and include. So, after doing my own research, I agreed with the recommendations and finalized the plan.

What do you wish you'd known …

Before you retired? That I should have been less apprehensive about retiring early. There was always the fear of running out of money, even though our financial adviser repeatedly assured us that, despite our conservative investment strategy and zero debt of any kind, our chance of running out of money at age 99 was less than 1%.

So, we were very conservative about spending money during the first five years in retirement, but upon realizing that, despite not having any income, our retirement nest egg continued to grow every year, we relaxed and now spend more, but always in a moderate way.

When you first started saving? That the power of compounding was much better than I thought. I never imagined that I was going to be able to make my first $1 million at age 39 from salary savings and investments alone.

Like everybody else back then, I thought that reaching the $1 million milestone would happen in my 60s and that such an amount was going to be more than enough to live happily ever after. Boy, was I wrong!

Not to sound condescending, but those who still believe that $1 million will be enough are in for a rude awakening.

When you first started investing? I started after I got my very first salary check in a very conservative way. I put my savings in the bank and in money market funds in my 401(k) because I knew very little about the stock market.

However, I wanted to educate myself, so I studied on a night-and-weekend program and got an MBA degree, in addition to my engineering degrees, to be able to feel comfortable about investing in the stock market.

Hence, I did not start investing until about seven years after I started working.

When you first started working with a financial professional? I started working with a firm many years after I had been investing on my own, and by that time, I had already accumulated significantly more than $1 million, so I was very familiar with investing and able to discuss, question and provide detailed feedback to their investment strategy for my portfolio.

An adviser and a client work together at a desk with paperwork, only their hands and forearms showing.

That was great because they knew they were working with someone who was more like a partner than a client.

Anything you'd like to add?

The American Dream is more than achievable in spite of all the negative coverage we hear in the press these days. I am proof of it, and I achieved the dream through hard work, good decisions, living below my means and never wavering from reaching milestones, targets and objectives.

If you have made $1 million or more and would like to be anonymously featured in a future My First $1 Million profile, please fill out and submit this Google Form or send an email to MyFirstMillion@futurenet.com to receive the questions. We welcome all stories that add up to $1 million or more in your accounts, although we will use discretion in which stories we choose to publish, to ensure we share a diversity of experiences. We also might want to verify that you really do have $1 million. Your answers may be edited for clarity.

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As Contributed Content Editor for the Adviser Intel channel on Kiplinger.com, Joyce edits articles from hundreds of financial experts about retirement planning strategies, including estate planning, taxes, personal finance, investing, charitable giving and more. She has more than 30 years of editing experience in business and features news, including 15 years in the Money section at USA Today.