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I would love to retire early. Like, tomorrow. I would not get bored. I would start volunteering and have more time for spending time with our eventual child and write my face off. Sometimes I will go on financial websites and read testimonials from people who took early retirement. It seems like many of these people who wrote these articles should have affixed asterisks to the headlines, asterisks so big they blot out their own premises and completely eclipse the dream that you might be able to retire early.

I don’t know if websites feature these articles to inspire regular people that they too can leave the workforce before age 65 but the subtext in many of these articles “We can — you can’t.” What many of these people seem to gloss over is that they own their own companies or have sources of income that the hoi polloi does not. It’s not just “financial savvy” or not buying that daily latte or clipping coupons.  

I read an interview with a guy who retired at a young age and his secret was selling the record company he co-founded. This is his life now:

This passive income is mostly royalties from music, book, and t-shirt sales for items I’ve released in the past … So if you combine the surplus in dividends of $18,000 plus the $7,700 in passive income, my disposable spending becomes about $25,000 per year, or just a little over $2,000 per month. That’s definitely enough for my hobbies and any unexpected expenses that come up.

Well, awesome. I can’t identify at all. I don’t have a surplus of dividends because I am a normal, non-record-company-founding person. Am I supposed to actually be inspired by this advice at any level? Here are a few other examples:

Graduating from college in the late 1990s, Josh, who is now 35 and wishes to remain anonymous, started an Internet marketing company with his roommate. In their late 20s, they sold their company and were suddenly faced with the reality that they could retire -- as in never work another day in their lives … Josh's financial partner, Gabriel Fancher, says you "must get lifestyle and spending down to lower levels so you can live off of income from your assets." Fancher says that to achieve financial independence, you must, "live within your means, and save as much as you possibly can."

“Live within your means” means something different to a 30-something who founded and sold an internet company than it means to me. “Save as much as you possibly can” also means something different because the owner of a company is presumably on better footing to save money than 9-to-5 schlubs like me. Here’s somebody else:

Todd Tresidder retired at age 35, after working 12 years as a hedge fund investment manager running a $20 million-plus portfolio.

Well, the secret to early retirement is so obvious. I’ll just go back in time to age 23 and manage a hedge fund. Seriously, what is the point of these testimonials? Anybody who can manage a $20 million hedge fund can figure out a retirement plan on his own and the rest of us couldn’t follow his path even if we wanted to. So why publish this?

Tresidder says to build assets faster, you must live frugally and save a high percentage of your income … Leverage is another way to create savings more rapidly, he says. For example, investing in rental real estate provides income and cash flow that keeps up with inflation in the form of rising rents.

Again, “save a high percentage of your income” means a much quicker retirement for you than me. There’s just not that much money available to leave the workforce at 35 and people don’t need a financial adviser to understand that. And I’m already doing the whole “invest in rental real estate” thing but it’s not as glamorous as it seems. We are renting our old house until we pay it down enough that we can sell it. We lost $30,000 (not including all the money we invested in the house) since the housing bubble popped. We make a small profit on the rent but that’s it. Renting the house was not some kind of brilliant financial decision on our part — it was what we had to do to move on.

I don’t want to complain too much because we are doing OK. But you know what: I work at a regular office job, have a mortgage and credit card debt. I don’t own my own company. Is there any advice for regular people to retire early? These people tout “save as much as you can” and I try but I’m not making a mint to begin with and have middle-class things to pay for. Articles like these seem like they’re offering solid financial advice but they skip the huge step of “be rich.”