I'm a teacher on track to retire by 55 with $2 million, but I refuse to put off my life until then

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• I don't get paid much as a teacher, but I'm investing aggressively for retirement.
• While I might have the ability to retire early, that isn't where my attention is focused.
• I'm more concerned with living the best life I can right now — not the age when I'll stop working.

I chose to be a teacher, but despite having chosen a low-paying career field and not working full-time consistently since graduating from college, I'm on track to retire early. This path is open to more people than many realize, particularly if they start investing early and continue to invest consistently throughout their careers.

I know quite a few people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who are still working out of necessity, and statistics for the US show that this is becoming a startling norm. With life generally becoming more expensive, many people who are at retirement age today were not aware of how much they would need to retire comfortably when they started their retirement planning.

Seeing this firsthand has motivated me to do what I can to ensure that I'll have the opportunity to retire when I'm ready.

I'm living my life to the fullest today

There are many movements in the personal finance world that focus on early retirement, but I didn't feel that any of them were a perfect fit for me. Some of these movements encourage people to give up whatever they can to retire as early as possible, which seemed too extreme for my lifestyle.

I wanted to find a more balanced approach; there's no guarantee that I'll make it to retirement age, so it's important to me that I live my life as fully as I can today as well. Because of this, I read about the different movements and figured out a retirement strategy that would work for me — one with an investing strategy that allowed me to invest as much as possible without detracting from my life today.

I should be able to retire in my 50s or earlier

At the moment, I'm on track to likely be able to retire in my 50s or even earlier if I increase my income substantially or live in a two-income household. Even if neither of those changes happens, I will have the option to either stop working or significantly reduce the amount I work when I reach my 50s.

Currently, I have over $70,000 invested for retirement. The majority of this is in my 403(b) and Roth IRA, which I won't be able to access until I'm 59½, and a smaller amount is in personal investments, my HSA, and I Bonds, all of which I'll be able to use earlier.

This is lower than what it could have been. That's because I've made some non-traditional career choices, like living abroad with a very low income for three years. However, it's higher than the average 401(k) balance (which is substantial considering I received no generational wealth).

I was primarily able to save this amount over the past three years of consistent employment by prioritizing investing and paying myself first. Three years ago, I had less than $10,000 invested and was starting to doubt that I'd ever pass that threshold. Today, I have more than seven times that amount.

If I continue to invest at the exact same rate as today (about half of my income) and the market continues to grow at the rates it has since its inception, I'll have over $2 million in my 50s. Retiring at 55 with $2 million would allow me to withdraw over $5,000 a month until I'm 100.

I'm focused on the present, because I'm not worried about the future

Based on how much I expect to need in retirement and how much I plan to grow my income by, I will likely have the option to retire even earlier than that. There are many factors that could change these plans, but that's enough for me to know that I won't be without options in the future; this has allowed me to feel comfortable with where I'm at right now.

Thinking about retiring early — or even comfortably and "on time" — can seem far off and impossible, but that doesn't have to be the case. Even if you don't identify with stories of people retiring in their 30s, there is a long spectrum between that and still working every day when you're 80.

What's important is setting a goal of how much you'd like to have and when you'd like to have it by and using a retirement calculator to get an idea of how much you need to save each month to make that happen. I've been able to pair making choices that excite me now — like a recent $5,000 trip to the Maldives — with prioritizing investing for the future so that I can gracefully and without stress step into retirement … eventually.

This article was originally published in September 2023.