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I'm doing well but my mom and step dad were both doing 6 figures in their early 30s (20 years ago that meant something). They may not have quite been there at 33, but I'm pretty sure by 35-36 my mom had started her new job and my step dad had gotten into the mortgage industry at the height of the re-finance craze (so he was doing 250-350K/yr for about 4-5 yrs there).
They bought their house right before the housing market exploded upward in the late 90s so they got a 4K square foot house in an upscale neighborhood in the northland for about $175K and because of those years my step dad had, they had it paid off in about 8 yrs. It's doubled in value and they've not had a mortgage payment in 10+ years.
I'm doing pretty damn well, but ultimately they just timed pretty much everything almost exactly right. My mom retired at 45, went back to school and took something of a 'hobby' job to pass the time in a field she loves. My step dad is in software now and still makes good money. They had the house paid off young, got both kids out of the house by 45 and bought a friggen 56 ft Carver because they didn't have any monthly payments on anything and no kids in the house.
Despite my best efforts they will probably kick my ass financially all the way to the end. The downshot was that they struggled quite a bit for my early years as a young family with 2 kids (and a mid-stream divorce didn't help), but right around the time I went off to school, things pretty well shot out of a cannon for them financially.
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"If there's a god, he's laughing at us.....and our football team..."
"When you look at something through rose colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags."
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