Dear Financial Samurai,
Everybody should contribute to their 401(k), ideally up to the maximum. The 2026 employee contribution limit is $24,500, which is finally a meaningful number. A working couple can sock away $49,000 between them before any company match, and total contributions from all sources can reach $72,000 per person.
Please don’t take your tax-advantaged space for granted. Ten years from now, the gap between contributing and not contributing will be much wider than you expect.
Fidelity, one of the largest 401(k) providers, just released some stats worth sharing. Here’s what their participants have socked away on average:
30s: $75,200
40s: $156,800
Better than a poke in the eye. But clearly not enough if your 401(k) is all you’ve got to rely on in retirement. Yes, Social Security should still be there after age 62. But at the current underfunded amount, I doubt we’ll see the full promised payout.
Fidelity also reported the number of 401(k) millionaires on its platform surged to a record 769,000 at the end of the second quarter of 2026, up 19% year over year.
Their 401(k) savings rates hit record levels as well with an overall total savings rate of 14.4%. Not getting company matching is one of the biggest things I miss about work. During my last two years, I was getting $20,000 a year in matching and profit sharing. That’s free money I’ll never see again.
Here’s my classic post: How Much You Should Aim To Save In Your 401(k) By Age. Contribute, then mentally write it off, just like you would Social Security. It frees you up to focus on the account that actually funds early retirement: your taxable brokerage account.
Why We Self-Select
I’m a public school graduate. High school, college, and graduate school. My experience was fine and I appreciated it. So I understand the tendency to look at people who join private schools, social organizations, and sports clubs and assume they’re doing it for status.
But my experience with the two park rangers while teaching tennis to my 6 and 9 year old on public courts validated something for me. What I want isn’t status. It’s the desire to feel safe and be left in peace to focus on my own thing.
If I cared about status, I would have kept grinding away in finance and climbing the corporate ladder toward bigger things. As I get older, I just want to live in peace. So if joining a private organization provides more of it, I’m more willing to pay. Same reason I want to manage fewer physical rental properties every year.
Do you feel the same?
Check out: The Sad Reason People Go Private And It’s Not About Status
But We Do Want Recognition For Our Hard Work
At the same time, I assume all of us want recognition for our hard work. When it doesn’t come, we feel down. Nobody wants to be taken for granted.
Feeling unappreciated is something I’ve tried to combat as a worker, a writer, and a father. I don’t think this is unusual. One of the reasons I left finance in 2012 was that I didn’t feel properly recognized for my work. I was also failing at office politics, which is its own kind of talent.
I’ve written about the importance of intrinsic motivation, because without it nothing lasts long term. There is no way I could publish three times a week for over 17 years without it. But something else clicked after I read this book, and my desire for recognition dropped. I’ve been happier since.
If you’re feeling a little invisible, maybe this post will help: The Sting of Not Being Recognized, And How You Cure It
The Quiet Period
We just got back from a birthday party on Saturday, and I felt for the gracious hosts and their birthday girl. They rented out a trampoline park for extra time, at what I estimate cost $2,000, provided all the food and drinks, and seven or eight families were able to make it out of a potential 18 to 22.
We showed up on time at 4pm and stayed until the very end. Years ago I made a promise to myself to always show up to every birthday party and personal gathering I’m invited to. When I was 14, I spent a lot of time organizing a party of my own and a few friends didn’t come. I still remember the disappointment. I never want anybody else to feel it, especially little kids.
In fairness, it’s Labor Day weekend, so of course people are traveling. But it reminded me that we’re all kind of in cahoots with each other, and that everything is arbitrary. For example, bankers decided to take summers off, so fewer IPOs get done in July and August. Everybody just goes along with it.
Speaking of arbitrary calendars, we’re now in the quiet period for Anthropic before the media frenzy begins, perhaps as early as next Wednesday. I’m an AI maximalist and a shareholder in Anthropic through three private VC funds and two public ones, so I’m highly interested in its IPO progress.
So I put together what the quiet period actually is, what a company can and cannot say during it, and how that should shape the way you allocate capital to private investments going forward. Fighting for a decent allocation in a hot IPO is extremely difficult. I worked on dozens of them, and it is a battle.
Check out: The IPO Quiet Period Explained: What Anthropic Can And Cannot Say
Have a great long weekend everyone. And for those of you grinding away while your peers are playing, I see you.
To your financial freedom,
Sam
If you want the full roadmap from where you are now to seven figures and beyond, that’s exactly what I wrote Millionaire Milestones: Simple Steps To Seven Figures for. It’s a USA Today bestseller published by Portfolio Penguin, and it lays out the sequence, from maxing out tax-advantaged accounts to building the taxable portfolio that buys your freedom early.
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Everything I write comes from firsthand experience since 2009, because money is too important to be left up to pontification.