Why I’m Not Saving for Retirement (And Neither Should You)
By Joseph Drups | Published: 2025-10-29 17:02:00 | Source: Inc.com
The smartest financial move I ever made was to stop contributing to retirement savings. This may seem counterintuitive, even reckless. Dave Ramsey may be having nervous dreams about this article, but maybe it’s time to get a divorce from his 401(k).
Here’s the truth: You don’t actually need millions to retire.
Retirement calculators like to show impossible numbers: $3 million, $5 million, sometimes more. The numbers are so large that they make financial freedom seem like five decades of hard work.
This is the part they left out. Most people who follow the “save for 40 years” script never reach these numbers. They keep working and waiting, but they are aiming for a moving target.
This is not just about money. It’s about decades of your life that you won’t be able to get back.
The real transformation is not hoarding wealth one day, but creating passive income now. You don’t need millions. You need cash flow. Changing your perspective on it changes everything.
Why is the “retirement number” a mirage?
Here’s the dirty secret about retirement calculators: They’re built on a foundation Modest returns.
Financial advisors like to show you diversified portfolios that earn 2% on Treasuries, 4% on bonds, and maybe 8% to 10% on index funds if you’re lucky. Then they add up these small numbers over 40 years and tell you this is the path to freedom.
But what if I told you that I routinely invest in small companies that generate annual returns of 32 percent or more? Same dollars, radically different results.
The magic number of $3 million to $5 million is no magic at all. It’s a moving target designed to keep you paying fees to Wall Street. Inflation pushes it higher. Lifestyle creep makes it bigger. Market fluctuations make it unpredictable.
And here’s the part Wall Street didn’t mention: The longer your money stays deposited in their products, the more fees you collect. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a business model. Their incentive is to keep your money locked up for decades.
What $120,000 Taught Me About True Wealth
Early in my investing journey, I had a choice regarding my $120,000 in savings. I can do what most people do: put it in bonds or index funds, let it grow slowly, and maybe, decades later, it will turn into something meaningful. At 4%, this money would earn about $400 per month. I’ll have to wait 30 years before I can really use it.
Instead, I bought a small business that was already making $150,000 a year. I made a few simple changes, tightened up operations, hired a virtual assistant, improved my SEO, and that same business grew by about 40 percent.
This decision changed the way I think about investing forever. Once you see cash flow hitting your bank account in real time, “waiting to retire” at 6 percent earnings won’t make sense. Some investments pay your entire income.
Since then, I have iterated and improved this model over and over again, not only with my own capital but also with the investors I work with. We buy existing companies and sell them for three to four times earnings, translating into annual returns of 32 percent or more. Unlike stocks or bonds, these returns do not appear in a statement. They generate cash flow starting from the first year.
Compressing 40 years into five
Here’s the most important lesson I’ve learned: The difference between traditional investing and high-yield investing is not the return, but the time.
Traditional retirement thinking limits you to a 50-year plan. You keep saving, hoping that compound interest will eventually enable you to achieve your life goals. Cash flow flips this scenario. It allows you to start living off your investments almost immediately.
I started this approach in 2017 and have acquired, merged and managed eight companies. After mastering the process, she helped other investors and operators do the same. None of us waited for the magic retirement number. We’ve built predictable income streams that pay for our expenses, and with these returns, financial freedom is available in as little as five years.
What surprises most people is: You don’t need hundreds of companies to create significant passive income or diversify. A portfolio of eight to 10 small, uncorrelated companies can provide 60 to 80 percent of the diversification benefits of thousands of stocks, without diminishing returns.
The future of financial freedom
Building wealth is not about chasing a number. A net worth goal is a goal of someday, and “someday” often never comes.
Cash flow is about today. It’s about building predictable income that pays your bills and funds your lifestyle now. It’s about having the freedom to pursue meaningful work while you’re still young enough to make an impact.
Financial freedom is not a number on a screen. It’s a system that pays you month after month and returns the contracts that most people trade.
Retirement Lie Costs You 30 Years Cash Flow Brings Them Back.
(tags for translation) businessman
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
