A data scientist revealed he saved enough to retire before his 40th birthday.
Yaron Goldstein, 36, earned his doctorate in computational and applied mathematics in 2012 before working for Boston Consulting Group, Google and Meta.
Early in his career, during an internship in New York, he met a Wall Street investment advisor who became a sort of unofficial mentor.
The advisor recommended he read books, including 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which got him thinking about the connection between happiness and money.
Yaron Goldstein, 36, who holds a doctorate in computational and applied mathematics and worked at Boston Consulting Group, Google and Meta, retired in May 2023.
“This guy makes a very good case: Maybe 40 years from now, I don’t want to be the guy who devotes his whole life to having a career,” he said. Business Insider about his reaction to Ferriss’s book.
Early in his professional journey, he decided that he didn’t want to worry about making money for the rest of his young life.
In the summer of 2017, he set the amount he would like to be able to live on each month in retirement at €5,000 ($5,460).
During his first job as a postdoctoral student at Freie Universität Berlin, he was able to start putting aside a few hundred dollars a month, according to Business Insider.
When he was hired at Boston Consulting Group in Berlin, he was able to start saving up to €1,500 ($1,638) a month.
At the start of his career, he lived on about two-thirds of his income; When he began to reap larger salaries, he began living on about half of his income and investing the rest in stocks.
In 2020, Yaron earned €330,000 ($360,416) per year as a senior data scientist at Google.
The more money he earned, the more conscientious he became in his spending.
Yaron emphasized that his frugality before and after retirement has been and continues to be the key to growing and saving his net worth (stock image)
“Is there anything else that would satisfy me in the same way for a third of the price? » he asked himself before each purchase.
His love for green tea was a great example of this.
Rather than buying Starbucks every day, he treated himself to a “luxury tea” for $50 for 50 grams.
“Even if I buy luxury tea, which costs $50 for 50 grams, at the end of the month it’s still cheaper than going to Starbucks every day and getting coffee,” Yaron said.
“But I have something much more exclusive in my life that brings me a lot of joy.”
On top of that, he was able to get by without ever buying a car thanks to the robust public transportation systems in Zurich and Berlin, the two main cities in which he worked.
Another smart move was investing much of his wealth in Tesla stock in 2016, just as the value was starting to skyrocket.
After 10 years of saving, saving and investing, while working full time, Yaron retired in May 2023.
It now follows the four percent rule adhered to by members of the Financial Independence, Retire Early community – known as FIRE – which states that it is safe to withdraw about four percent of your portfolio each year once you retire.
But Yaron added that he aims to bring that figure down to three percent, with the aim of being even “more frugal” than when he was working.
“No one can ever force you to say that success means joining a big company, staying there for 40 years and moving up the career ladder,” he concluded.
His current location on LinkedIn simply reads: “Opinionated Data Guy, June 2023 – present.”