A data scientist has revealed how he saved enough to retire before his 40th birthday.
Yaron Goldstein, 36, received his PhD 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 City, he had encountered a Wall Street investment advisor who had become something of an unofficial mentor.
The advisor recommended that he read books, including Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which prompted him to think about the connection between happiness and money.
Yaron Goldstein, 36, PhD in computational and applied mathematics and has worked at Boston Consulting Group, Google and Meta, retired in May 2023
“This guy makes a good case: maybe in 40 years I don’t want to be the guy who focuses his whole life on making a career,” he said. Business insider about his reaction to Ferriss’ book.
At the beginning of his professional journey, he decided he didn’t want to worry about making money for the rest of his young life.
In the summer of 2017, he set €5,000 as the amount he would like to live on each month after retirement.
At his first job as a postdoctoral student at Freie Universität Berlin, he was able to save a few hundred dollars a month, according to Business Insider.
When he was hired at the Boston Consulting Group in Berlin, he was able to save up to €1,500 ($1,638) every month.
At the start of his career he lived on about two-thirds of his income; As he started bringing in bigger salaries, he started living on about half his income and putting the rest into 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 with his spending.
Yaron emphasized that his thrift, both before and after retirement, is and remains the key to increasing and saving his wealth (stock image)
“Is there anything else that would satisfy me in a similar way for a third of the price?” he asked himself with every purchase.
His love for green tea was a good example of this.
Instead of buying Starbucks every day, he treated himself to “luxury tea” for $50 per 50 grams.
“Even if I buy fancy tea at the end of the month, which costs $50 per 50 grams, 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 I enjoy very much.”
Plus, he could get away with never buying a car, given the robust public transportation systems in Zurich and Berlin, the two main cities he worked out of.
Another smart move was investing a large portion of his wealth in Tesla stock in 2016, just as its value started to rise.
After ten years of cutting back, saving and investing, while continuing to work full-time, Yaron retired in May 2023.
He now follows the four percent rule followed by those in the “financial independence, retire early” community – known as FIRE – which dictates that it is safe to withdraw approximately four percent of your portfolio each year once you are retired.
But Yaron added that he aimed to reduce that figure 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 going to work at a big company, staying there for 40 years and climbing the career ladder,” he concluded.
His current position on LinkedIn simply reads: “Opinionated Data Guy, June 2023 – Present.”
