And it's not even that "easy". Say you make $1mm from the sale of some stock in a startup. First off, this is incredibly rare. Second, your take home is roughly $600k in the U.S. after federal and state taxes. So even $1mm doesn't get you much. Good luck starting a business with only $600k.
At 600k you could work a job that covers your expenses only while investing the money, and have ballpark 1.2M in a decade. Another decade could put you around 2.4M. Saving just 10k/year would massively inflate these numbers.
I encourage you to think in terms of percents. The Trinity Study says you'll need about 25x your expenses saved. If you can lower your expenses by 5k/year, you can not only invest that money, but your target also lowered by 125k. That double whammy allows diligent savers to do very well and retire on a much shorter timeline than those spending 95%+ of their paycheck.
Pretty much this. It’s a rough trek and requires a lot of saving. And even once you get there, you don’t feel rich — not with a few kids and more expenses. Having said that, I estimate around 30k passive per month should do it if you have a family and are living in a major city.
That's still 180k a year post-tax. That's still enough to fund an absolutely lavish lifestyle, even in the highest cost of living locations. It's not MTV Cribs rich, but it'll still put you in the 95%ile in Manhattan, to say nothing of more reasonable locales.