Bram Berkowitz, The Motley Fool

Sun, Jun 22, 2025, 6:39 AM5 min read

• Choosing when to retire can be difficult for many reasons.

• Common retirement advice involves saving a certain multiple of your annual salary by a certain age.

• How much to save for retirement and when to retire depends heavily on your planned lifestyle in retirement.

• The $23,760 Social Security bonus most retirees completely overlook ›

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Everyone has a different journey in terms of reaching retirement and saving enough to fund their daily expenses and potential aspirations later in life.

Some work their entire life and are unfortunately still living paycheck to paycheck, while others may hit it big early and be able to retire in their 20s and 30s. For many, saving enough to retire comfortably involves working for a good 30 to 40 years and making smart financial decisions.

Today, I will take a look at one Reddit question that asks: Should I retire early at 49 with $1.3 million in investments and $150,000 in passive income?

Here is the initial question from Reddit:

Should I retire early? I'm 49, military + VA retired, two rental homes, $1.3M in investments, and $150K+ in passive income. What would you do?
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First, we should applaud this savvy investor. Having a $1.3 million investment portfolio at the age of 49, as well as enough passive income from rentals to make $150,000 in annual income, shows this person has invested well and made smart financial decisions thus far.

Now, whether to retire boils down to several factors, but first, we can look at professional investment advice and use publicly available data to see how this Reddit user is doing.

According to Fidelity, which manages trillions of dollars worth of retirement assets, by the time one reaches the age of 50, they should have saved six times their salary. This is based on several assumptions, including a person saving 15% of their income annually starting at the age of 25, investing more than half of their savings in stocks over their lifetime, retiring at the age of 67, and planning to maintain the same lifestyle in retirement as they had before retirement.

Assuming we go by this advice, if this person's annual earnings are $150,000, then they should have saved $900,000 by age 50, which this person has easily eclipsed.