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A Fidelity simulation scared me. But when I looked at the full picture, the story changed completely.
What You’ll Learn
- Why retirement simulations only tell half the story
- How to calculate your actual net worth (not just retirement accounts)
- Why real estate equity matters more than most people realize
- The framework I built to stop panicking and start planning
In my last post I talked about the emotional side of feeling behind — the comparison trap, the Bay Area tech workers, the social media envy, the Korea work culture I carried with me for years. If you haven’t read that one yet, start there.
This week I want to talk about the actual numbers. Because feelings are one thing. Math is another. And when I finally sat down and looked at everything honestly — not just the Fidelity simulation, but the full picture — what I found was more complicated and more encouraging than I expected.
What Fidelity Said
Let’s start with the tool that started the panic.
Fidelity has a general benchmark for retirement savings by age. It’s not a perfect rule, but it’s a widely used guideline:
- By 30: 1x your salary saved
- By 40: 3x your salary saved
- By 50: 6x your salary saved
- By 60: 8x your salary saved
At 39, with a salary in the $125K–$175K range, Fidelity’s benchmark said I should have had somewhere between $325K and $475K saved in retirement accounts.
What did I actually have in retirement accounts?
Somewhere between $100K and $200K.
The gap was real. Roughly $200K–$300K behind where the benchmark said I should be. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. When the simulation ran and showed me that number, the panic was legitimate.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
What Fidelity Didn’t See
The Fidelity retirement simulation is looking at one thing — your retirement accounts. Your 401K. Your IRA. The money sitting in tax-advantaged buckets specifically labeled for retirement.
It is not looking at everything else.
And at 39, I had everything else.
The Real Estate Picture:
Back in 2017, when I was living in Korea, I bought a condo in Manila. No mortgage — paid off. At the time it was worth somewhere between $60K and $75K. Not a huge number, but real equity, in a real asset, in a country I was already thinking about retiring to someday.
I also owned a rental property in Mississippi. That one had a mortgage — about $140K remaining — but the property itself was worth somewhere in the $180K–$190K range. Which meant roughly $40K – $50K in equity, plus a tenant paying down the mortgage every month.
So let’s look at the full picture at 39:
- Retirement accounts: $100K–$200K
- Mississippi rental equity: ~$40K–$50K
- Manila condo equity: ~$60K–$75K
- Total net worth (rough): $200K–$325K
That is a completely different story than what the Fidelity simulation was telling me.
Was I behind on retirement accounts specifically? Yes. Genuinely, meaningfully behind.
Was I behind on building wealth overall? Not nearly as much as I thought.
This is one of the most important things I’ve learned on this journey — a retirement simulation is a useful tool, but it only sees part of your financial life. Your full net worth picture matters. Real estate equity is real. Assets are assets, even when they’re not sitting in a Fidelity account.
The Benchmark Problem
Here’s something else worth talking about.
Those benchmarks — 3x your salary by 40, 6x by 50 — are built around a specific assumption. They assume you’re going to retire in the United States, at around 65, with a lifestyle that requires roughly 80% of your pre-retirement income to maintain.
That is not my plan.
My plan is to retire early in a lower cost-of-living country, where I already own property and where expenses are a fraction of what they are in the Bay Area. The number I need to hit is completely different from what Fidelity’s simulation is calculating for.
So not only was the simulation missing my real estate assets — it was also benchmarking me against a retirement scenario that doesn’t apply to my life.
That doesn’t mean I get to ignore the gap. The gap is real and I’m actively working on it. But it does mean the story is more nuanced than a red gauge on a simulation tool.
What I Actually Did About It
Here’s the honest version of what happened after the wake-up call.
I didn’t immediately max out every account and overhaul my entire financial life overnight. That’s not how it actually works for most people, and I’m not going to pretend it was for me either.
What I did was make a plan. A real one — not a vague intention, but an actual year-by-year roadmap. I decided that 40 was going to be a setup year. A foundation year. And I started moving in the right direction — increasing my 401K contributions, getting more intentional about where my money was going, and educating myself on strategies I had been putting off learning.
Not perfect. Not maxed out. But moving. Consistently and deliberately moving.
That’s the part nobody talks about in those Reddit posts. The messy middle. The year where you’re not hitting every benchmark but you’re pointed in the right direction and building momentum.
I’m still in that middle. But the trajectory is different now than it was at 39.
What This Means for You
If you ran a retirement simulation recently and it scared you — I want you to do one thing before you close the app and try to forget about it.
Pull up your full financial picture. Not just your retirement accounts. Everything. Your home equity if you own property. Any other real estate. Investments outside of retirement accounts. Assets you might be undervaluing because they’re not sitting in a 401K.
Then ask yourself — Am I actually behind, or am I behind on one specific metric while building wealth in other ways?
The answer might still be “I need to do more.” Mine was. But the full picture matters. And understanding the full picture is the first step to building a plan that actually works for your life — not someone else’s retirement simulation.
What’s Next
Next week I’m diving into the concept that eventually became the foundation of everything I’m building — the framework that changed how I think about money, work, and what retirement can actually look like.
It’s the thing that made me realize I wasn’t crazy for thinking this was possible.
Have you run a retirement simulation and felt panicked? Have you looked at your full net worth picture instead? Drop a comment — I’d love to hear what you found.
Posted on: June 23, 2026
Reading time: 6 minutes
Word count: 1,200
Written by: Ono
Categories: My Journey
Tags: retirement planning, net worth, real estate investing, financial independence
About the Author
Ono is a banking professional documenting his journey toward early retirement. What started as a personal question at 39 turned into a real plan backed by numbers, intentionality, and the willingness to do things differently. He’s sharing CraftYourExit because the path he’s building didn’t have a blueprint—and he thinks you might be building something similar.
Learn more about Ono’s story →