If you want to do the same and / or if you are interested in working in Switzerland in IT, just shoot me a mail (see HN profile).
Do you think Zurich offers any net advantages over NYC or the Bay when it comes to aggressive savings? It seems like salaries are about the same and living costs are higher (at least based on the few times I've visited).
Zurich is not particularly on the border, but I have to go there anyway for various reasons once in a while and usually I come back with a suitcase full of food.
Also dentists in Germany are bound to fixed prices for certain things like checkups (a checkup in Germany costs like 23 Euro), so that is also massively cheaper and justifies the ride.
You don't have the possibility to win on this geographic arbitrage in NYC or the Bay area. Although there "crazy" salaries (>200k USD / year) are probably more common than here.
You do this the same way you would buy Google, Apple, Tesla, etc.
In fact, all your frugal living and saving is critically offset by the potential revenues lost due to a failure to invest.
Even a very rosy scenario of 8% compound interest pretax over said 5 years wouldn't change the 5 years to something dramatically smaller.
Besides, not everyone is psychologically equipped to handle market swings -- particularly what we've seen in 2016 so far.
According to the graphic in the article, he has a net income of 6200 CHF/mo. He says he saves 80%, that's 5000 CHF/mo, or 60k CHF annually. The graphic says he's 27. I assume he started work at 22. At a constant salary, he will have saved 300k thus far, and will save another 300k in the next five years.
So in five years, he will have accumulated 600k savings in cash. That's not sufficient for early retirement -- not even for MMM, who retired on 600k cash + 200k house. I suppose he could make it happen if he bought an extremely cheap apartment and lived more frugally than MMM, but that does not strike me as having a satisfactory quality of life.
Regarding your second point:
While it is true that investing over the span of 5 years does not significantly change his cash stack, investing matters looking forward: he definitely needs to invest if he plans to retire early on mid six-figure sum.
Regarding looking forward, one could theoretically just buy an annuity (I don't actually recommend this), or live in a country with a deflationary economy. "Investing" in the most commonly cited way, isn't the only way to provide cash flow from a nest egg and protect against inflation.
I myself run a very conventional asset allocation for my own portfolio. Generally speaking, what you say is prudent advice and is good wisdom. But that doesn't mean that there are other, particular, ways to go about designing one's financial life (sort of like edge cases), and his choices shouldn't automatically be considered nonstarters.