Mario!
He can jump, he can dance,
and he can successfully avoid conviction for war crimes.
It seems like the only thing he can’t do is settle down and just enjoy life for a bit.
Mario has been cleaning up messes in the Mushroom Kingdom and beyond since 1981.
That makes him almost 40 years old.
Most 40-year-olds I know are paying off a mortgage, buying a Peloton,
and desperately trying not to become their parents.
But Mario is still out there,
grinding at the same job,
and also, every other job.
Doesn’t Mario deserve some time off?
Doesn’t he get a chance to kick up his heels?
Enjoy a tropical drink while visiting the ol’ timeshare?
And more specifically, hasn’t he made enough coins to let him coast for the rest of his life?
That’s why I’m here to give him a little financial advice…
*ding!*
And figure out when Mario can retire.
*chalk board wheeling in*
Thank you both.
Why should Mario retire?
You might say “Mario loves his job,
and when you love what you do, you never work a day in your life,”
but that's bullshit.
I love what I do, and let me tell you something…
I’ve worked some days.
*threatening bass noise*
I personally can’t wait to retire.
As soon as I hit 50, I'm gonna be out there on the beach,
pina colada in one hand, sci-fi novel in the other,
soaking up mother nature's cosmic rays.
But Mario has a history of risk-taking behavior, and
it's possible he's planning to live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful, beautiful corpse.
That said, he’s made it out of every scrape so far,
and ground pounding at age 86 is hard on the hips.
Mario needs a backup plan.
Now, I’m not here to tell Mario how to live his life
*ding*
but I can take a look at his finances
and figure out when he’ll have enough money to finally hand Peach his resignation letter.
Foolish ol’ me thought that I could just google “how much money do you need to retire”
and there'd be a link that says “a million bucks,”
but no.
Turns out that everyone needs a different amount to retire based on what you’re used to.
If you’re making millions every year, you’re gonna need a lot more to retire,
because how else are you gonna support your dipshit failson’s bad business ideas?
But with all of the retirement calculators online, I was getting a little overwhelmed,
so I decided to reach out to a qualified financial advisor.
- Hi, my name’s Nate Choe, I’m a certified financial planner with Northwestern Mutual,
and I basically help people answer questions about money.
- That’s exactly what I need you to do today.
This call is not about me, um, I feel like I’m in a great spot right now in terms of my finances,
but I have some worries about my good friend, Mario.
I was looking online to see if there was, like, just a number of money you need in order to retire,
and it turns out that that’s not a thing that exists.
How do I figure out how much money you need to retire?
- Yeah, yeah, um, there are a lot of different things that you’d need to know.
At the most basic level, you need to know how many years you’re going to spend in retirement.
So basically, when you’re gonna retire, and at what age you’re going to die.
- So I have know, I have to be able to, uh,
to just discern when I’m willing to croak, is what you’re saying.
- Exactly, yes, you have to calculate a death at some point.
- Alright. What if I’m never gonna die.
- *chuckling* Then you’re never going to be able to retire.
And then you’ll need to know how much money you’re going to spend every single month…
- Okay…
- And then Nate listed off a bunch of other very important pieces of retirement info
and I paid close attention.
- Got it, okay.
I figure out how much money he’s gonna need per month, and then I’ll work backward from that,
based on how much money he can accrue, and then that will be how I can figure out when he can retire?
- That work backwards model is actually what we do in the industry,
but we have to offset what he has against inflation as well.
- Is there a minimum amount of money per month that you suggest people have for retirement?
- Yeah, typically, what we’re talking about, like, the average American,
it’s going to be about three thousand dollars a month, of today’s dollars.
- I feel like Mario is a very humble man,
and so I don’t think he’s going to need more than 3k a month, um,
just to make it easier for me.
So now that I’ve got a basic gist of the information I need to calculate Mario’s retirement age,
it’s time to collect the information.
Let’s start with something easygoing
and figure out when Mario's gonna die.
To keep things simple, we’ll assume that Mario was born the year he first made a game appearance.
This might not be perfectly accurate, but it would make him almost 39 years old,
and that feels pretty right for a strangely smooth-skinned mustachioed man.
Though current male life expectancy is around 80 years old,
I personally can’t come to grips with the fact that Mario is halfway through his life,
so I’ll be generous and say he’ll die at 90.
He’s spry.
In order to retire, Mario is going to need a monthly budget of at least three thousand US dollars,
but he uses coins.
Tons and tons of people have tried to figure out, how much a coin would be worth in US dollars,
but most of them have been thinking about coins as a solid gold object.
Judging by the amount of coins you need to purchase simple objects in the Mushroom Kingdom,
it seems like coins are not really worth that much.
Using Super Mario RPG as our guideline for a coin’s purchasing power,
the cheapest items are a mushroom and able juice: 4 coins a pop.
Shirt and pants are the cheapest nonconsumable items at 7 coins each.
I wanted to compare these with the most expensive items in Super Mario RPG,
but I don’t think I can figure out the real world price of a fire bomb
without getting put on a watch list.
After doing some heavy research, I settled on a conversion rate of 1 coin to 8 US Dollars.
Given our 3k figure for retirement,
that just means Mario needs 375 coins a month, right?
WRONG.
Super Mario RPG came out in 1996, and we haven’t accounted for inflation.
That’s why we gotta compare these prices to similar items Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga,
which came out seven years later.
I built my Mushroom Price Index on these six items, and just from a cursory glance,
it’s obvious that the prices have gone up.
But to figure out by how much, we gotta head back to algebra two.
The pert equation!
It's something I learned about a very long time ago,
and I’m pretty sure it’s used to figure out compounding interest.
Basically, I gotta plug in some prices and do some natural logs and
whatever else the internet tells me to do,
and it will leave me with an annual inflation rate for that item.
Then I just gotta average out the rates and it’ll leave me with a workable annual inflation rate
for the Mushroom Kingdom as a whole.
So I’ll just go ahead and do that math in my head real quick.
*thinking music*
Thank you, Clayton.
Now, rounding that number up, that’s an average annual inflation rate of about 15% per year.
Which is… really high.
The US Federal Reserve tries to keep inflation at a healthy 2%,
whereas the Mushroom Kingdom Federal Reserve doesn’t exist
due to aggressive lobbying by Wario.
In order to understand this a bit better, I googled Mario hyperinflation,
and I got some exciting search results
that were ultimately unhelpful.
But from what I gather, this means that if Mario spends 100 coins to buy a shirt this year,
next year, he'll have to spend a little more than 115 for the same shirt.
If inflation stayed the same from when Superstar Saga came out in 2003,
we can assume that by 2020, a simple mushroom is going to cost 128 coins.
A pair of entry level pants will cost 2049 coins.
So that original 1-to-8 conversion rate doesn’t really make sense anymore.
Using those same 2020 price comparisons,
the conversion rate is more like 36 coins to 1 US Dollar.
If Mario retired today, he would need 108,000 coins per month.
*MAMMA MIA!*
But let’s remember that Mario has been doing this for a long time. He’s definitely got a little something...
... away. So I talked to Nate about his job and ways he might be saving money.
- He has a bit of a strange job. He’s technically a plumber, I guess, in title?
- Is he part of, like, the plumber’s union? Does he have a pension?
- So I, I, I would be willing to bet he doesn’t have a pension just because, uh,
I think he might be the only plumber?
He’s not being employed by anyone, necessarily. He’s just doing it and then finding his payment along the way.
- Okay, so it sounds like he’s almost, like, a freelancer.
If he’s not getting W-2 income he can’t save into things like 401ks or Roth IRAs.
- Now, when you say Roth IRA, what is that?
- It’s a way to save for retirement.
Um,
you know, as a young person you should definitely be doing one, trying to max it out every single year.
It’s crucial for, for retirement.
- When…
But when you say crucial, do you…
do you mean optional?
So, maybe Mario doesn’t have a Rough IRA or a 4-in-1 Cake or whatever,
but no one has those. I don’t, and I’m well on my way to that beach chair in Boca!
And the fact is that Mario can get a lot of coins in his games.
How else could he spend so much on go-karting and tennis?
In the most recent Mario games, the coin counter can only go up to 9,999,
which is the maximum amount you can store in a mattress.
So let’s assume that Mario has been saving 10,000 coins every year since the release of Mario Odyssey.
We can assume that since he’s not in a union, he isn’t getting any raises to offset inflation.
So to finally figure out when Mario can retire, we need to know much money he’ll need every year before his death.
For example, if he lives to 90 years old, he’ll need 2.7 billion coins.
Which is the cost of living for just one year.
But we have to remember that he's been saving 10,000 coins for 54 years,
which means that he would have 540 thousand coins saved up… Which is…
point zero two percent
of what he needs to retire for just one year before his death.
And actually, if the monthly cost of living is already 108 thousand coins,
he's gonna be unbelievably deep in debt…
Which is actually what Nate told me, via text.
Mario can never retire.
You know what, that’s bonkers though, because there's...
there’s no way that, you know, inflation's gonna stay that high for that long.
In fact, in later Mario and Luigi RPGs, the prices are the same or lower.
So let’s just assume that from here on out the inflation rate stays a healthy 2%.
And you know what, let’s assume that Mario can save more than 10,000 coins a month.
In New Super Mario Bros. 2, the counter maxes out at one less than 10 million coins.
Granted, this is an outlier, and a ridiculous one at that,
but so is spending 2.7 billion coins just to survive at age 90.
There’s no way you could spend that much on Werther’s Originals.
So let’s say he's saving 10 million coins a year since age 31,
which, might I point out, is over a quarter of a million US Dollars.
Now if we just add up the cost of living of each year leading up to 90,
we can see that Mario will have saved enough money to chill out on his boat at age…
77.
Which is...
is just one year below the average American male life expectancy…
*I'M-A TIRED!*
Okay, you know what,
just for fun, let's just throw some random numbers in here, just to... just for...
just to see, you know, just wheaa- just for fun!
Let’s say Mario is starting to save money at, ppffff, I don’t know, my age, 26.
The inflation rate can stay the same, 2%,
and let's just say that the coin ratio is actually just 1-to-1 with US dollars,
so just he needs 3,000 coins today in order to retire.
And, and you know what, let’s, let's say he can save….
uhhh, psshhh, 10% of an average video producer’s salary in New York City.
Something completely random like that.
Assuming Mario lives to the ripe old age of 90,
we can just plug these figures into the equation
and figure out that Mario will be kickin' back on the white sands,
boombox blastin' Jimmy Buffett at the youthful retirement age of...
88?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Nononono... That can’t be right…
Because if Mario can’t retire,
then that would mean that I wo-
*uncomfortable silence*
Will you excuse me for a moment…
*tropical music playing in the background*
*Another day in paradise!*
*The sun is shining bright!*
*People laugh and people smile, 'cause everything feels alright!*
In order to understand this a little better, I googled Mario hyperinfla- *laughing* I just,
I'm sorry, I'm just accepting this now. I'm just accepting what I'm saying.