I wonder if there is an informal idiom to say that someone made so much money that became needless of any more money and retired themselves (meaning that from then on they work only for fun / pleasure and not for the sake of earning money)?
Example:
- He is really a clever guy. He entered to this market just three years ago; just focused on his job and payed no attention to anything else. As a sociable person he managed to connect to the market's most influential people and the big shots in his own field and after awhile he …………….. selling silk carpets and retired by the time he was 40.
I used to think that, "make a pile" is the only possible term here, but Cambridge Dictionary says that it means just: "to earn a large amount of money", which has no hint to getting needless of money (becoming very wealthy so that you don't need to try too much to earn any more money).
I wonder if there is any better idiom encompassing all the explained information?
Best Answer
The phrase set for life was the first that came to my mind. It doesn't necessarily imply making a lot of money, but with some additional words you can make some idiomatic phrases.
Another possibility is to strike it rich. This usually but not always means a person is set for life, but rather that they made a lot of money doing one thing or another.
By the Great Horn Spoon! uses this phrase a lot in the context of people migrating to mine gold. Example from the summary (likely many more in the book text):
How these two relate to other answers suggestions:
Anecdotally, make a pile is rarer than other suggestions here, even when spoken. The Ngram supports this notion, but make a pile's search results (18.5 million at time of writing on page 1) are greater than strike it rich's at 1.2 million. Then again, "make a pile" can refer to making a physical pile of objects, so it's hard to tell how many of these results are being used in the context this question is asking about, and paging to the end of either phrase's search results yields two more numbers (220 for "strike it rich" and 167 for "make a pile") which exclude similar results.
make it big does usually refer to money, but "making it" can refer to a more general notion of success, with "big" simply amplifying it
Here's sources for make a fortune versus make one's fortune. Making a fortune simply refer to making a lot of money. In context, this could be a smaller amount than needed to be set for life. On the other hand, "one's fortune" is all the money someone needs to be set for life.
independently wealthy is a little tricky, and it is in with financial independence. It suggests something similar to set for life, that one's needs do not depend on someone else's wealth. However, the exact implications are different. Set for life seems grander and might suggest more money. Being independently wealthy or financially independent means that you do not have to work for money. See Reddit's r/financialindepence for a starting point on the connotations of these two phrases.
Ngram viewer with a few of these phrases
It's possible none of these phrases have the exact connotations and usage you're looking for. But if you combine them together and give enough context, you can build your own idiomatic phrases. For example,
What this says is: