This afternoon I met with someone from Sun Life Financial at work for a bit of a financial analysis of my current situation. I hadn’t really done something like this before so it was a very interesting process.
The nice lady from Sun Life took all my relevant financial info from me, then asked me how much money I thought would be required per month in my retirement. I didn’t really know but she suggested that $2000 was a conservative amount. Using a program that she had on her laptop computer, she estimated that I could retire at age 57.
While I appreciated the analysis, I believe there’s very little chance I will be able to retire at age 57 with the amount of money she thought I could have. The analysis assumes that I’ll be working at EA until age 57 and that my salary will stay relatively the same. There’s no way I’ll be making games until I’m 57. This industry is for young people and while developers have started to skew towards being older, the percentage of people making games over the age of 50 is still really small. Also, even if I stayed in the industry until I was 57, very few people stay at one company for such a long time. I know someone who just left the company and he was at EA for seventeen years. His tenure is quite rare these days.
I believe the analysis did have merit however for some of my short-term financial goals and it also clarified where I need to put my money to maximize its potential. I’m not expecting to be retired before 60 but hopefully I can do my best to get there.