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“$100 million isn’t enough to live on!”
“$125 million to be economically secure.”
“You’ve got one year to make generational money and escape the matrix, or you're doomed to the permanent underclass.”
“In Thailand, you can live like a king for less than $3,000 a month.”
Here’s the crazy part: all of these statements can be true.
High-testosterone athletes who spend time around billionaires and have legions of groupies begging for sex can burn through millions at warp speed.
When Scott Galloway recently went viral for saying that $125 million is his baseline for economic security, he was probably speaking honestly. Galloway has served on the boards of several companies and even briefly hosted his own show on CNN. Given his lifestyle, he likely has an enormous burn rate driven by business and networking obligations.
Meanwhile, someone with no debt and few financial obligations could easily have the time of their life living on a beach in Southeast Asia for less than $100 a day.
Depending on your lifestyle, the amount of money you need to achieve financial freedom can vary dramatically. As a rule of thumb, your "freedom number" is the total amount of invested assets needed to cover your annual living expenses. A common way to estimate this is by multiplying your annual expenses by 25.
If you spend $60,000 per year, your freedom number is $1.5 million.
If you spend $250,000 per year, your freedom number is $6.25 million.
In traditional financial circles, this is known as the "4% Rule," which assumes you can safely withdraw 4% of your portfolio each year without running out of money over a 30-year retirement.
If you're a dividend investor, you can apply the same concept while aiming to never touch the principal, instead living off your dividend income. Funds like the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF ($SCHD) currently offer a starting yield of around 3.24%, meaning you could potentially use ETFs and index funds to achieve your goal. Beyond that, plenty of utilities and blue-chip consumer staples offer starting yields above 3%, along with strong histories of dividend growth.
There are other income-producing assets worth considering as well.
Royalty income is semi-passive and can be surprisingly lucrative over the long run. In the book Writing Invisible, author Noelle Adams discusses selling five million romance novels over 13 years, generating roughly $3 million in royalty income. While he's hardly a typical example, and his fame certainly skews the numbers, Stephen King's novel 'Salem's Lot still sells tens of thousands of copies each year.
A hands-off business is another potential asset.
When I first started traveling around the world, digital nomads and remote work really weren't a thing. Most expats living abroad were either English teachers working at local schools or business owners operating in odd but essential niches, like distributing napkins and paper cups to coffee shops, who had delegated most of the day-to-day operations to a competent manager.
Royalty income or building a business that can be largely outsourced isn't for everyone, and there are certainly nuances that make these ventures less passive than simply investing in the stock market. Still, they're alternative assets worth considering.
In the spirit of Independence Day, it's worth taking a few minutes to calculate your own freedom number. There isn't a single magic number that works for everyone, but it's worth asking yourself one simple question…
What does "enough" look like for you?
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GTM Atlas by Attio is back with more frameworks, systems, and insights for early teams navigating growth from scratch, straight from the people shaping modern GTM.
Read six new entries from operators at Anthropic, Notion, Stripe, Linear, Granola, and Wispr Flow.
Mapped by operators. Curated by Attio.
Disclaimer: This article is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice, always do your own research.
