Find more satisfaction in giving, rather than chasing happiness through a high-consumption lifestyle.

Long before our net worth grew to well over $6 million, my wife and I made it a practice to donate 20% of our gross personal income to charity. (Not to random charities with high expense ratios, or to prosperity preachers who suggest that helping them get rich will make you rich.)

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‘We’re living the simple life’: I was a fisherman and my wife was a nurse. We retired with $6 million. Here’s how we did it.

My wife was a registered nurse, and I, as a commercial fisherman, worked for years while we saved and lived on only slightly more than what crew-share employees earned.

I have to admit that when I was younger, my philosophy was simply to make sure we covered the 20% in donations and then lived fairly well beyond that. Over time, this evolved into a belief that the more you have, the more responsibility you carry.

With that in mind — unless there is some kind of crisis — it probably makes little sense, given our lifestyle, to obsess over retirement accounts, savings accounts, stock portfolios and private property, or holding company accounts relative to our fairly simple living expenses.

So I suppose this is just advice from a fairly average high-school graduate — echoing what many financial books also say. Here’s our financial mantra:

But I can say that being able to give — and participate in humanitarian causes, education and healthcare — feels deeply rewarding. Even religious causes, which many believe have consequences far beyond this short life on Earth, are worth thoughtful consideration.

I don’t claim to have everything in life figured out, but we’re living the simple life. In the end: Keep life — and investing — simple.

Retired Happy

Related: My brother has led a life of chaos and financial ruin. What is my moral obligation?

Your secret sauce involved a plate full of fish.

You embarked on a career that you found fulfilling, I expect, and also one that brought in a healthy income. As a commercial fisherman and a nurse, you and your wife were able to set yourselves up for a generous and bountiful retirement. It’s a success story of taking everything — every boat and every round on the hospital ward — one day at a time.

It seems simple enough, right? But investing and saving in a slow and steady manner requires human qualities that are not always easy to sustain: patience, stamina and the ability to maintain a work/life balance and to resist the call of wild consumerism. And, like this hearty fellow who invested in Nvidia NVDA several years ago, you may even have had a dash of good fortune.

Your decision to effectively tithe 20% of your income, rather than the traditional 10% — “tithe” comes from an old English word for “tenth” — was supercharged by your superspendthrift ways and ensured that you and your wife were neither self-absorbed nor self-aggrandizing while amassing a considerable fortune in the eyes of most would-be retirees.

What does that tell me? It says that not only did you and your wife — who had one of the most important jobs in the world, along with schoolteachers, and one of the most underpaid and underappreciated — live simply by, say, driving an old car without comparing and despairing about what your neighbors had. You also stayed humble.

It’s not easy to resist choosing a lifestyle to which you would like to become accustomed, especially when friends and family might be telling you about their house purchase or spectacular kitchen extension or latest vacation to the Far East. Finance and psychology are familiar bedfellows. Each constantly impacts the other.

When there was a market correction, did you sell? When there was a pandemic, did you go crazy trying to pick individual stocks that you thought would soar — like Peloton — only to see them plummet just as fast? If you faced challenges in your business or burned out in your career, did you throw in the towel or step back, breathe and ask what your body was telling you?

I suspect that as God made you, he matched you, and your wife and your good self have been occupying that emotional middle ground. You have avoided great depths of despair and panic, and even greater heights of self-congratulation and ecstasy. Impulsivity and ego, after all, are the enemies of sound financial management. That’s my way of saying, good for you.

I’m reminded of the couple whose neighbors recommended an adviser. They started saving early, paying off their mortgage and driving a secondhand car, while their neighbors bought the fanciest new automobile on the market and lived high on the hog. They retired early, and their now resentful neighbors are no longer their friends.

Let’s say you have $3 million in your retirement account. At age 73, the factor for calculating your required minimum distributions is 26.5, which means you must withdraw about 3.77% of the account balance, pretty close to the 4% suggested by most advisers. (This factor comes from the IRS Uniform Lifetime Table, and while the percentages are similar, RMDs and the 4% rule serve different purposes — mandatory withdrawals versus sustainable income.)

So with $3 million in pretax retirement accounts (post-tax accounts are not subject to RMDs — specifically, Roth IRAs and Roth 401(k)s are also no longer subject to RMDs — your first RMD would be about $113,000. In other words, while the hard work usually ends in retirement, you still need to manage those funds you accumulated.

You say you don’t obsess about your retirement accounts, and that’s smart when it comes to peaks and valleys in the market, but you also want to manage your distributions so you don’t get hit right between the eyes with taxes. The window between when you retire and when you start taking your RMDs, typically at age 73, is also a good time for Roth conversions, because income is often temporarily lower at that time.

Case in point: Falling over Medicare’s income-related monthly adjustment amount (IRMAA) thresholds (which are tiered rather than being a single cliff) could lead to a significant increase in your Part B and Part D premiums. Additionally, you may face the 3.8% net investment income tax on investment income, along with higher state taxes and increased tax rates after one spouse dies. You also want enough savings or Social Security income to dip into if the market tanks, because you don’t want to be forced into taking higher distributions during a down market.

Your story, outlook and philosophy can be applied to someone with $6,000 or $60,000 or $600,000. The trick, if you could call it that, is to find your lane and then spend and save in accordance with the life that makes you happy. For some people, it’s a modest home with a mortgage that’s paid off in early middle age, and a job that brings them satisfaction.

Take this woman, who has maintained a correspondence with the Moneyist for nearly a decade. In September 2018, she wrote to ask how she should invest a windfall of over $150,000. It was life-changing. She didn’t have a degree, worked for $15 an hour and also had a part-time job paying $10 an hour, and said she’d never earn more than $30,000 a year.

She paid off her car and bought a tiny home, which she owns free and clear. She deposited $70,000 in a high-yield savings account. She topped up her retirement portfolio and invested $10,000 between very safe dividend stocks and exchange-traded funds. She also spent $7,000 on dental work in Mexico. Financial security means different things to different people.

You educated yourself about investing. That is key. You want your money to make money when you are either ready to stop work, or your body tells you the time has come to hang up your boots and fishing line, or in the case of your wife, her white sneakers and scrubs. Tech investors did well these past 15 years, especially those who focused on the group of stocks known as the “Magnificent Seven.” People who start investing in their 20s are likely to succeed as well.

Related: My in-laws, 95, are leaving us $250K. What’s the smart way to invest this money?

More columns from Quentin Fottrell:

‘I’m a big fan of DIY investing’: I’m 64 and moving to the U.S. I have $2.6 million, but no Social Security. Will I be OK?

 ‘I didn’t ask a man to rear-end my car’: Social Security is replacing my disability benefits. Will the fund run out of money?

‘I’m simply exhausted’: I’m 55 and have $1.3 million for retirement. Can I retire next year?

The S&P 500 just flashed a bearish sign — but more damage is being done beneath the market’s surface

Dow falls nearly 800 points after Powell makes one thing clear: There’s no rush to rescue the market

‘Selling will be a very difficult process’: My mom, 93, owns a timeshare in Florida. How can I disclaim this inheritance?