Even with our prior marriages draining us financially, forcing us to start over, we’ve put kids through vocational training/college (as long as they career planned first), we now have a net worth of a million, my wife retired in her mid 50s and takes care of our parents, and I’ll retire when we’ll be multi millionaires, hopefully in my late 50’s.
And we take on hobbies designed to reduce expenses. My wife does gardening with some help from me. We’ve reached the point where it saves us more money than it costs us. We plan to expand it when I retire. I do the number crunching and we now have solar combined with doing most of our driving in the EV. The low monthly power bill plus loan payment I took out to install solar and make other energy improvements to the house, is less than what I’d still be paying in power plus natural gas plus gasoline.
I encourage everyone to honor what you posted (investing in 401k, I say do it IRA too), and what the article says about rarely eating out. Combine that with FReeper distrust of government to be more self reliant on things we all need but the Dims over regulate like energy and food.
On your to do list add getting a wheat grinder and wheat berries for bread and bread varieties.
Grinding wheat flour for that days bread and your just picked garden produce is a real delight that helps bring it all together, you can taste the nutrition in that bread, and it impresses people.