Money Lessons From Self-Made Millionaires Who Retired In Their 30s

All right, this is exciting. Oh my gosh, okay. I got it. I got my thing. I retired early at age 29. I left my job at 40 years old. I retired early at the age of 31. I left my job at 32 years old because I wanted to spend more time with my husband. I realized that there's a lot more to life than work. In the U.S., we typically think of retirement as something like maybe 65, maybe 70 years old. In reality, retirement is just a number that you reach. My net worth is currently at $900,000, over $5 million. $1.2 million. What is our number? $1.6 million. Is it? Oh my gosh, I'm like blushing. I'm the middle of five kids and a single mom living in a homeless shelter. Many times, having no car, using a lot of public transportation, sometimes not having enough to eat, living off food stamps. I wanted to get out of poverty. That was a big goal for me. I think the biggest financial struggle that I personally went through was going to college. I didn't have any help from family. I was a waitress for part of my college career. I was working full-time while also being a full-time student. My dad was a teacher. My mom was a nurse. We didn't have a lot of extra money. My parents prioritized our education, and that meant that we had to cut costs elsewhere. My parents did not feel like they got a great financial education from their parents. My dad was very open and, hey, son, you've got to learn about compound interest. You've got to learn about investments. You've got to learn about these things. So back then, I was 22 and I started my job. I definitely was not focusing on retirement or savings, so I did spend a majority of my paycheck. Didn't have a lot of savings outside of the 401k investing. In fact, I really didn't want to tell a lot of my friends what I was reading because I was a little embarrassed it was, you know, not the comic books or not the other things that they were reading. I started working non-profit because I really cared about my community, and I wanted to give back to my community. Quickly realized that working a non-profit, you're literally one paycheck, maybe two paychecks away from being on the street too. I thought, well, let me go into sales. I was a logistics manager for 10 years. I worked in marketing before retiring. I spent my career as a physics teacher. I worked corporate finance. I just didn't want to do that same thing over and over again. I never really could unplug. Having to meet new sales goals every month and just pushing myself, pushing myself every month to just survive. I never hated any of my jobs, but I'm like, do I really want to do this every day, eight hours a day for the next 40 years? And the answer to that would be like, definitely not. No, that wasn't the thing for me. I remember one particular day that was very crushing. I was away on travel for work. My wife was going through some struggles on her own, and I realized that I wasn't able to be there for her, and that really hurt. And when I came home, I really decided that it was time to make a change. I found out about the FIRE movement, and it really changed my life. FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early, and it's essentially getting yourself to a position financially where work becomes optional. It doesn't mean that you will never do any work ever again. It's a math equation. Whatever you spend in a year, you need 25 times that amount invested, then you can reliably pull 4% of that portfolio's original value out of it every year, and you'll never run out of money. And it just comes down to, what does your life cost, and how do you support that with your passive income that no longer is dependent on your job? The most impactful decisions early on were just saving and investing as much as I possibly could. Starting out, I was maxing out my 401k and maxing out my Roth IRA because I could. Low housing expenses is number one. Number two, we've always shared one used car between us. Even now, we only own one vehicle. The other piece is, has been willing to work, and work a lot. I worked at two to three jobs at any given time. Number three, just cooking at home, avoiding dining out. And number four, just delaying. If you want to have kids, or have pets, or any dependents of any kind, just delaying that a little bit further down the line in life. I went to an inexpensive church-sponsored Brigham Young University school. That was very critical, so no debt when I graduated and had been working all through college at various jobs. It wasn't until later that I really found out about brokerage account investing and how powerful just simple index fund investing is. So instead of trying to pick the hot stock, you just pick an index fund that essentially tracks an index with the market. And for most within the FIRE community, that's VTSAX, or the Total Stock Market Index. And for others, it's the S&P 500. And that's the one that I primarily do. Sometimes those early years were hard because it was like, man, I only make a few grand this month, but I'm putting $500 away or $1,000 away this month. I was investing and saving 30% of my income and putting that towards my future, which was extremely important and really set me up for that path on FIRE. We chose a slightly different path. We did real estate or house hacking specifically. We eliminate our biggest expense, which was housing. And it really depends on how comfortable they are with living with roommates or basements or making sacrifices to maximize your return. We purchased a fourplex in August 2017 for $630,000. We rented out the other units and were able to save up that $18,000 for that second one. It's like a savings account for number two without having to change your job or ask for raises or reduce your other expenses. We wanted to enjoy life. We didn't want to just minimize everything and try to straight buy. Eating like ramen noodles every night or something. We didn't want to do that. We did cut back on a lot of things. Jeff ended up selling his beautiful sports car, and he ended up using a lot of public transportation. And I would drive him to and from work sometimes too. I was willing to live in one house with seven other dudes sharing one bathroom. I was fine with that. But there are certain things that like feminine things that you just want to do, want to have. Did you have any challenges at all along the way? I would say that very first one. Everything that could go wrong with the place went wrong in that place. Okay, we have eight people living in the basement unit with no lease, paying the old owner cash, mold issues, cockroaches, bed bugs. The faucet was broken off. I was working so hard in my job, but I was worried that I wasn't really enjoying myself and my life now. We didn't really know how much things cost. We didn't know like the steps to go through an eviction. Like we had to find a property manager for a lease. We had to go through all these extra like learning curve moments where it was such a big hurdle mentally. And it was just an overwhelming amount of effort and time invested and mental stress, I would say, just to get over that hurdle. I think the thing that turned out to be harder about retiring early is your sense of identity. It's who you really are. You have a lot more time to think about those things. And, you know, for most people, your job is a big part of your identity. Working does bring a sense of fulfillment and purpose. It's not just the money, but it's the interaction. It's the leadership. It's watching and enjoying other people grow. I do miss my coworkers. I miss spending time with them. And I miss the adventures that we would have and the laughs that we would share. It's a lot easier to like see your friends every day at work. Now I have to like, okay, when are you free? When can you get like a sitter for the kids? And like, you know, it's a whole coordinated thing. You at least get that face time with them that I do feel like it's a little harder to coordinate nowadays with most people still working. If today you had to start over again, what are the things that you would do differently? We would probably get a divorce. We would actually be able to reach financial independence quicker. And then we would both buy a house once a year separately and then remarry. So we would actually make it a lot faster. One of the mistakes that we made really early on was trusting the wrong people. With our investment choices. That is, we went to the bank and spoke to an investment advisor there who we later learned was motivated only by making a commission on the investments that they sold to us. And so rather than giving us unbiased advice, they gave us slanted advice and sold us into a mutual fund that we had no business being in at age 22 at the time. Had very high fees on it. Luckily, we undid that mistake pretty quickly. If I were to go back and do it again, I probably would invest a lot more heavily in my brokerage account versus my traditional retirement accounts. I always have regrets of maybe not saving more because I've seen what that has turned into 15 and 20 years later now in my life. But you live and you learn and you try to make the best decisions you can at the time. That's something I'm trying to spread awareness on because most people only know about investing for retirement. They don't know about investing for early retirement or just financial independence. Just start on this finance stuff early. I would definitely advise them to talk about their non-negotiables, to talk about what they are willing to sacrifice. Being honest with themselves and each other is super important. I think it's really important to have a really good plan of what you're going to retire to. And maybe that isn't working at all. Maybe it is hobbies, volunteering, other things that you've always wanted to do, traveling. Maybe it does include starting up a small business, internet business or something you can do from your house or wherever you are in the world. But I think having that plan in place is really important. You think you're going to have all these friends and people are going to be just as available as you are. And most of the time, at least if you're in your 30s, that's not the case. Everybody still is kind of plugging away. I retired at 33 and decided to go back to work to stay busy and engaged. I'm a goer, a doer, and I work and function much better in that environment than I do in an environment where my calendar is completely clear. I don't long for the day anymore at all that I can go say that I'm retired again. I also didn't want my kids to think that this was what life was. The crazy thing about reaching early retirement is you find that you're still making money, just doing little things for fun here and there. We decided to start a company with a business partner. It's a college tutoring company. And that's now bringing in this whole new wave of money toward us. For me, the time and energy that I have now to focus on what matters most to me is worth it all. We're still bringing in, you know, between a few different side hustles, over $100,000 a year combined. We own nine properties and 16 units total. We're collecting about $14,000 per month or $168,000 per year. Right now, my 401k and Roth IRA is around $500,000. It's going to continue to grow and compound on its own. So that's a very freeing feeling. We live in a paid off house. Our spending is a little higher than it used to be. It's probably in like a $30,000 to $40,000 a year range. So that's still good for our investments to support on their own. Our houses are our children, our kids. Sometimes they act up and we got to discipline them. But overall, it's been a fun journey. What does the future hold for you now? One of the great things about having the time that we have now in early retirement is choosing what new adventure we're going to be on. Now we're able to have a lot more time to focus on travel and getting out and exploring the world, both internationally as well as within the U.S. We're probably traveling about three to six months every year. Nowadays, we were in Australia for three months. We were in Iceland for a month. We go to Canada a bunch in our camper van. We want to see all of the national parks and we want to go to all seven continents. We still take time to set other goals like learning a new language together or starting a business or, you know, whatever it may be. And that keeps us going, keeps us having fun and doing something new and interesting and challenging every day. When you don't have anything on your calendar, you can wake up at any time you want. You can do whatever you want. We can go on a bike ride. We can take a nap. We can watch the Tour de France. I'm happy to be outside the matrix and just enjoy this other life. The world becomes the oyster in the sense of trying to figure out what you want to do and at what time you're going to do it. Not a day goes by that we don't go take an hour-long walk on the beach. So one of my favorite purposes is getting our story out or telling them about our story, telling them that it's possible. I don't have a real estate background. I don't come from, you know, wealth. I don't come from that mindset where you can retire early or where you're a landlord or just anything like that. And the fact that what I wanted was a better life for myself and I was able to earn that, then it's awesome. At the end of the day, worst case scenario, I go back to working a traditional job, but that's not what I plan on doing.