My personal savings are completely shot, but today I just hit $200k in retirement savings.

I don't have anyone else in my life I can really share this with, so I want to share here. 34 years old. I started my 20s earning under $20k, and by the time I was 30, I was only making $45k. I saved what I could during that time — always 10% to retirement in a company 401k for a while when I had a job offering one. It didn't amount to a ton, but it was something. When I was 31, I got a job making $75k, which very quickly became $100k in a MCOL area, thanks to remote work (marketing).

I do not expect this job to last forever. Like a lot of millennials, I saw my parents get fired from their cushy middle-class paper-pusher jobs in 2008. As soon as I got this salary bump, I began maxing out my 401k and maxing Roth IRA contributions for the last three years. I'm not particularly amazing at my job, just got a lucky break. When I lose this one — and I guarantee that will happen someday, because the economy and the people making decisions about it do not care about people like us — I'll likely be back to the $60-70k range unless I get insanely lucky again.

This year I bought a house (my second, first was with a partner, since divorced). First house was $175k, second house was $200k. I only put 5% down on the new house at 6.35%, hoping to use my savings of about $30k as a buffer. The most recent house after my divorce turned out to have several problems ranging from tiny to massive. The floors were unsalvageable (we're talking a non-zero amount of blood on the carpets that were easily 10 years old anyway). $15k for new laminate floors, $5k for a new sewer line and some sewer work, several thousand more for electric and plumbing issues. The house isn't perfect by any stretch, but I love it.

After my entire emergency fund went into the house, today I have $1,000 in savings. I spent several months living paycheck to paycheck again, always catching up to last month's repair bills. I finally have a little breathing room, but I know with an older house I could wake up any day and be in trouble. It was scary to feel like I used to when I could barely make ends meet, but I didn't go into credit card debt and I didn't reduce my retirement contributions.

Unsurprisingly for finance-savvy people on this sub, those small contributions from age 22-26 make up an oversized chunk of my $200k total today, about $45k. I maxed my Roth IRA the last three years with $18.5k cash, which is now at about $25k. My 401k with my current company holds the other $130k, with 10% contributions the first year and max contributions the last three years.

Currently, my Roth IRA cash contributions are my six-month emergency fund ($19k) because I simply don't have any liquid cash left after this house. But I remain very glad that I bought it. It's a nice place, despite its many needs, and I'm really happy to live in an area where I can afford a home.

I know some people don't want to buy a house until they can put down 20%. I know some people would freak out at having $1k in immediately accessible savings while owning a home. It's a house of cards, like all our lives here. None of us can afford to have anything too major go wrong for too long. I know my luck with this good job/good health isn't going to last forever, but when I found out I would be making more money than anyone in my family ever had, I went as hard as possible on retirement savings. Even if everything goes tits up, that $200k projects to $1.6MM by the time I'm 65. Probably not enough for a luxurious retirement by that point (about $750k in today's dollars), but the longer I can keep contributing, the more comfortable I'll feel.

I don't think I'm qualified to give out advice or anything — get a job making more money than you're worth isn't really a strategy. But if you ever get a little breathing room like I did, I completely recommend putting every red cent you're allowed into tax-advantaged retirement vehicles. I cannot express what a relief it is to know that even if I stop saving today, I won't be (completely) destitute in old age.

That's my story anyway. Now my plan is to be aggressive about rebuilding my savings until I have six months of emergency fund in actual cash on hand. After that, I'll probably continue saving an additional $10k in case of emergency home repairs and another $10k to replace my cheap car when it gives out, hopefully a long way down the road. I'm in a good place if not a perfect place, and like everyone else here, I appreciate just how fragile financial stability can be.