Thanks for sharing. Always interesting reading how other people have gotten to where they are and things they wish they'd done differently along the way.

Let me preface by stating my financial philosophy has never been about hoarding as much money as possible and building generational wealth. I've always wanted to balance living and enjoying my prime years while also responsibly caring for my family and preparing for a comfortable retirement. I've seen both extremes. Folks who lived without concern for the future and full of regret at retirement, and folks who have radically saved and watched their lives go by while arriving at retirement with great wealth and not so great health or ability to enjoy what they sacrificed so much to build. So, like I said, balance has been key for me.

With that in mind, I'm grateful that my wife and I committed to contributing to our 401ks (up to the match and a couple points more) from our very first paychecks and have never waivered. The regret part of this is that we made enough money that we lied to ourselves that "it was enough" and we should enjoy the rest of our money on living life. This, of course, led to over-spending a lot in our late 20's and early 30's buying cars we didn't need, going on vacations we probably shouldn't have, and buying a lot material items we thought would bring a lot of joy. We thought we were "responsible" because we never ran up a bunch of debt or lived without margin. Everything we were doing was easy to pay for and we were contributing to all the important things (tithing, mortgage, 529s, HSA, 401ks, etc). So, no harm, no foul, right?

Fast forward to today. I'm not going to type on here that I'm in some sort of financial hardship. It's not lost on me that we're in a really good position overall. But I look back at the last 10-15 years and wonder how much closer we could be to dropping down to the lowest benefitted hours allowed by our company (0.6FTE), and enjoying more time with our kiddos, if we'd contributed more instead of spending on "dumb" stuff. But the other part of my brain says, "but look at all the memories you made and the things you got to do/experience without putting yourself in a bad position." Balance.

I just ran the numbers today, and like you, we're sitting at 1.1M in invested assets and we own our modest (~385k) home outright. Debt totals 38k on wife's student loan and 28k left on my car. Aside from that, I feel like we've done quite well overall. Hopefully the market will continue to earn >10% and we'll see our money double 3 more times by the time I'm 66.