Absolutely. And it is always interesting how there are so many different ways that people have planned to achieve the goal from FIRE to high paying roles to living well below ones means. There is such a myriad of different ways to approach this goals based upon your particular methodology.

I played the long game as when I was 15yo I had a reading assignment in my high school economics class and the instructor gave us a selection of books to read and I choose “The Richest Man in Babylon” and though I did not know it at the time but that book was life changing for me financially. The basis of all the short stories was “Pay Yourself First” regardless of how much or little you make. So I had just started my first “real” job and the 401k was fairly new at the time and I chose to save 15% of my minimum wage pay and never looked back. I then married my lovely wife that I had known since 4th grade and also had the same financial mentality I had so we implemented this approach in our late teens and it has now been 40 years of this approach on top of our career opportunities as we simply never changed that habit regardless of educations, family, raises, struggles, economic down turns, etc. we just stayed the course and the results have been astounding to be honest but we just treated those deductions as missing money the rest of our working life so we have had between 15-30% of our pay taken out for that entire time and never less then 15% as once we learned to live without it in our late teens, it was a non-issue and we managed to be with companies that matched a portion of that for at least 35+ years so the dollar cost averaging of investing for such a long period of time on top of anything else we had access to, has paid off insanely well.

We will retire in the next 5 years or so unless the companies we work for “pay us” to leave as we could go now but to be honest we love our current jobs and the flexibility they provide so it would be stupid for us to leave at the moment but we would not complain if they RIFd us at any time and we are both heavy users of A.I. in our work places which adds to our value to our particular organizations as we both know that “partnering” and learning how to best utilize A.I. to the benefit of our organizations is how to add niche value in an A.I. driven environment and extend our value within our companies but in the end many of the roles we have historically had will be toast long term without a doubt.