Everybody can retire when their investment income is enough to cover their basic living expenses. But when it comes to retiring early (before 60), there are different levels of difficulty.

The easiest way to retire early is to have a working spouse. If you’ve got no kids to care for, you’re truly free to do whatever you want. All you’ve got to do is keep encouraging your spouse to keep on providing.

Read, How To Convince Your Spouse To Work Longer So You Can Retire Earlier, to learn the secrets from several early retirees I interviewed who used this strategy.

Another easy way to retire early is to be willing to live in or near poverty in retirement. Ironically, being willing to live like a monk is also one of the hardest ways to stay retired. You might start asking what’s the point of retiring early if you can’t live it up with your free time.

A much harder early retirement to achieve is one that maintains the same standard of living in retirement which you had while working. Without some budget sacrifices, this route to early retirement is difficult.

Nowadays, simple math suggest that it’s hard to accumulate enough capital to sustain a middle-class lifestyle. Yet, just like proponents of the Roth IRA, there are plenty of misguided people who think their investment income will be higher than their average working income.

Finally, there’s the hardest early retirement of all – retiring early while raising adolescent children. Once you have children, you suddenly realize that retiring early without children is like going for a walk in the park. It seems so easy, you wonder why more people don’t get on board!

Let’s take a look at the subjective and objective reasons why retiring early with children is nearly impossible. Then we can discuss some potential solutions.

One of the most popular posts on Financial Samurai is The Average Net Worth For The Above Average Person.

The “above average person” is loosely defined as someone who was a B+ or better student in high school, graduated from college (~35% of the American population), works hard, plays well with others, takes full advantage of their pre-tax retirement plans, saves additional disposable income, stays on top of their finances by utilizing free financial tools, expects nothing from their parents or the government and is not delusional.

If you were a “C student” and expect to live an “A lifestyle,” you’re definitely not the above average person! You’re the type of person who wants to go straight to the corner office without putting in his or her dues.

Depending on the source, the average net worth in America is somewhere between $150,000 – $250,000. But the median net worth in America is closer to $90,000.

Take a moment to study the above average person’s net worth chart again. Somewhere between the ages of 45-50, the above average person’s net worth reaches over one million dollars.

We can all agree that thanks to inflation, easy monetary policy, a roaring bull market and a recovery in real estate, becoming a millionaire by the time we retire is fast becoming the rule, rather than the exception.

It’s important to note the figures in my chart are for individuals and not for couples. For those of you who combined your household net worth to see where you stand, so sorry. That’s cheating. At the same time, not everybody can find someone they love, hence why I initially created a per person chart.

It would be presumptuous to assume we can all live in marital bliss. Further, not everybody is even allowed to get married thanks to the government telling us who we can and cannot be with. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to “married couples” as anybody who is in a long term relationship.

This article comes up with reasonable “above average couple net worth” charts based on what I think, what the government thinks, what you think, and the realities of life.

One can also define “above average” as one standard deviation beyond the midpoint of the normal distribution curve (top 16%). Not every couple can be above average. But every couple can certainly try.