Why (and how) I'm Retiring at Age 35

I distinctly remember the conversation almost 10 years ago, when I was a 26-year-old with a net worth of approximately -$10,000 dollars. My then girlfriend (now wife) Heather and I were sitting in my studio apartment in Midtown Atlanta discussing an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast featuring a guy that calls himself Mr. Money Mustache. Never heard of him? We hadn’t either. And they were talking about a thing called the “FIRE movement”, which kind of sounds like either an illness or a cult.

Mr. Money Mustache told Tim Ferriss about how he had retired from his normal corporate job in his 30’s. And he said that many others have done the same. No crazy investment schemes, no big startup exit. Just saving and investing aggressively, using the tools we all have access to, with a clear goal in mind.

As stupid as this may sound, a podcast episode completely changed our lives.

Did you ever get an idea in your head that you just could not shake? Like Shake It Off or Single Ladies or Take a Chance On Me, but the idea version? For the past decade, one of those ideas for me has been FIRE. Once you hear about it, you simply cannot un-hear it. Your brain will be fundamentally re-wired. You will question the conventional career path. You’ll redesign your goals. You may even change the entire trajectory of your life.

I know I sound like a crazy person. But I cannot overstate the degree to which adopting FIRE principles in your life has the potential to change it. And that all boils down to one concept: freedom.

Freedom is why I retired at 35. I was burned out, but I wasn’t utterly desperate to quit or about to keel over dead. I just desperately wanted to not miss any more precious moments with our young kids. I didn’t feel purpose in the work I was doing. And I had a strong, long-time desire to start my own thing.

But lots of people feel like they are missing time with their young kids, feel burnt out, and/or want to do their own thing. The (very fortunate and privileged) distinction for me is that Heather and I have spent the past decade following FIRE principles to increasingly give ourselves the freedom to choose. So once I got to a mental place where I wanted to end my corporate career (and then happened to get laid off in a re-org at exactly that moment), I had the freedom to just…stop.

Now, before you dismiss these ideas as being only for “other people” (as I did for most of my life), I want to emphasize that we are not unique or special. We don’t have “family money”. We didn’t win the lottery or bet on crypto. I got through college on Pell grants, scholarships, and over $30,000 in loans I had to pay back. Heather was making around $20,000 per year when I met her, about a quarter of what I was making. And our collective net worth when we met was around $35,000. And as a reminder, my net worth was negative at the time, so Heather was obviously wayyyyy ahead of me on the saving and investing path.

Of course, we’ve been insanely lucky and blessed. The market has been (with a few exceptions) on a pretty positive run the past 10 years. Heather and I both found success in our careers with good companies. We’ve been relatively healthy.

But our path to where we are now was doable by just about any middle class family, at least conceptually. Like pretty much everybody else, we spent a lot of our last 10 years working. But unlike most people, we made choices that allowed us to save a lot of what we earned, and we invested what we saved. That has left us in a position where we can now flip the Time vs. Money equation.

We can use the money that we saved to buy ourselves the single most valuable asset any of us have: time.

Freedom to choose, freedom to design our lives however we want, and in ways we genuinely never thought possible when we started. And that is thanks to the tactics and ideas of FIRE.

Let’s start with the basics.

That’s the high-level, conceptual version. Let’s make it real.

🚨Warning🚨 This requires a little bit of math. But I promise:

Okay, so as far is I’m concerned, you are financially independent when the money that your money is earning passively can pay for all of your expenses. Let’s illustrate that with a very simple example that uses nice round numbers:

I know what you’re thinking. Brandon, the world is messy! No one can guarantee 10% investment returns! What about inflation? And taxes? And healthcare? How am I supposed to save $1,000,000?!

Fair points! And it’s good to be skeptical. So now is a good time to talk about the 4% Rule.

Thankfully, people way smarter than I am have done a bunch of complicated math, looked at real-world data for the past 100+ years, and modeled endless scenarios, which they used to come up with a “safe withdrawal rate” for early retirement. ² As the name implies, your safe withdrawal rate is the amount that you could take out of your investment nest egg every year and feel very confident that you would never run out. And in most of those scenarios, you end up with much more than $0. ³

So how specifically does the 4% Rule relate to Financial Independence? Let’s run through some examples to illustrate.

Hopefully you’re also seeing why the 4% Rule is sometimes referred to as the 25x Rule. If you have $100,000 in annual expenses, your “FI Number” is $100,000 × 25 = $2,500,000.

And to me, that’s the most intuitive way to think about this. It allows you to start with the amount that you think you’ll spend each year in retirement, and then multiply that by 25x. That’s your “FI Number”! ⁴ What number should you use? This can admittedly get very complicated, since spending is not necessarily constant over time — having kids and the many, many costs that come with that; big medical expenses; caring for aging parents; taxes. There’s a lot that needs to be considered.

But it’s also worth reiterating that your FI Number assumes you will never earn another dollar in your life, which may or may not be realistic. And any dollar earned after you “retire” reduces how much your investments need to generate for you.

So for simplicity, it’s often easiest to just use this year’s expenses, take out any truly one-off stuff, apply the 4% / 25x Rule, and start working toward that number. There will be plenty of time to adjust assumptions as you go!

Okay, so now you know how to calculate your FI Number. It probably feels…kinda high? Very far away? Trust me, I’ve been there. But it is absolutely achievable. Along with countless others, I am living proof of that. So let’s walk through the steps you can follow, starting today, to get you on the path to FI. I’ll frame it as 1) Know Your Money, 2) Grow Your Money, and 3) Ride Off Into The Sunset With Your Money

The formula for reaching your FI Number is pretty simple, at least in theory: Spend less than you make, and invest the savings. Cool, but how?

Well first, you must understand what you spend. I cannot overemphasize how important this is — it's shockingly common for middle to upper class families to have zero clue what this number is. Your annual spending is a critical input in figuring out your FI Number. It's also the only way to understand your savings rate and build a real plan. And maybe most critically, you cannot control what you cannot measure.

Once you actually look at the numbers, I can promise you'll say "Wait, how the !@#$ did we spend that much on [X]?" And then hopefully, "We need to make some changes."

So what changes should you make? Start with one simple question: Is your spending aligned with your values? The point of the FI journey is not to be a penny pincher that deprives yourself of all earthly pleasures. Quite to the contrary, the magic of FI is that understanding what you spend — and getting comfortable with that amount — can bring significant peace, even if you don't plan to retire early.

Some people choose to save very little and maximize current happiness, others do everything they can to juice their savings rate in the short term, and some (like us) choose something in between, just trying to be intentional with where spending happens. The important word in every one of those situations is "choose." Your spending cannot be passive if you want to confidently pursue FI.

And the biggest threat to making that choice intentionally? In American culture, we are inundated with the message of MORE. As you make more money, you’re supposed to buy bigger, better, nicer things, right? This is a concept called lifestyle inflation — the subtle tendency to spend more as you earn more. Suddenly you need a bigger house, in a better neighborhood, driving a nicer car, eating at all the nicest restaurants.

I'm not implying any of those things are evil, nor that you need to live a pauper's life. But if you want to reach financial independence, you will need to shift your mindset away from the American default of lifestyle inflation being normal. When you get that raise or that bonus, think about whether there’s anything you truly NEED to improve your life. If not, consider keeping your spending the same, and instead saving the extra to buy your future self a little more freedom.

Simply put, finding ways to avoid lifestyle inflation is the single most important thing you can do to achieve financial independence.

Now you know how much you spend and save each month. And maybe you already have some money sitting in a savings account or your 401k. What should you do with it to reach FI? The short answer: Invest it!

I know investing can be scary. I did zero investing up until about 9 years ago. I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought investing was only for “smart, rich people”. But let me hit you with a fact that changed the way I think about the journey to Financial Independence. ⁵

The S&P 500 has averaged returns of ~10.5% per year for the past 100 years.

Obviously, investments are inherently risky. But history tells you that things generally go up and to the right. And you can carefully use that to your advantage in two ways:

Everything above still doesn’t solve for…how do I actually get started? The most important thing to know about investing is that it does not have to be complicated. We have never used a financial advisor, ⁶ and I spend about 10 minutes every month thinking about investing. That is extremely intentional.

And you know who agrees with me? Warren Freaking Buffett, the most successful investor of all time!

In fact, Warren Buffett put his money where his mouth was in 2007, when he bet $1,000,000 (to charity) that a simple, low-fee index fund could outperform a group of hedge funds over the next 10 years. A hedge fund manager took him up on the bet. The result? The hedge funds averaged returns of 2.2% per year, while the S&P 500 index fund averaged 7.1%. And this started right before the worst of the Great Recession.

So let’s talk about some very basic principles you can follow to get started on an FI approach to investing. ⁷

Don’t get fancy. You should look for funds with the following characteristics:

We want to directly capture those 10%+ average returns from the past 100 years that I discussed earlier. There are lots of funds that attempt to do just this, and are “passively” managed, meaning all they do is just try to track the S&P 500, the full stock market ratio, etc. And because they’re passively managed, they pass on very low expenses to fund owners like you. Speaking of…

Fund expenses subtly, silently kill returns, especially over the long-term. A 0.02% expense ratio means you’re charged $20/year on a $100,000 investment. So, basically nothing. If that expense ratio had instead been 1% (which is very common on any actively managed funds, the thing that many financial advisors put people in), then the expenses charged on that $100,000 are $1,000. That’s real money!

But it’s actually MUCH worse than it sounds. Because that $1,000/year is not compounding over time. Let’s say you start with $1,000,000, and it earns 10% each year.

So yeah, please check those expense ratios. They matter over the long run. Like a lot.

Transaction fees are just costs that financial companies charge to buy and sell stocks, bonds, ETF’s, whatever. Like expense ratios, money for fees is money that doesn’t end up invested, and thus doesn’t end up compounding over time. Transaction fees used to be a normal part of investing. Thankfully, over the past decade or so, companies like Robinhood and WeBull have forced traditional financial companies to significantly reduce or limit fees, even on individual stock purchases / sales.

Pretty much every financial company will have several funds that meet the criteria I laid out above, and they’ll often waive transaction fees on their “in house” funds. In our case, we’re primary with Schwab. So $SCHB ( ▼ 0.14% ) is where almost all of our money goes, since it has a ridiculously low 0.03% expense ratio and does a great job tracking the entire US stock market, which has meant an average 15% annual return the past 10 years.

Not sure which one is best for wherever your money is sitting? This is a great use case for AI. Try the following prompt:

“My brokerage account is with [enter financial firm here]. What are 2-3 mutual funds or ETF's that have the lowest possible expense ratios and trading fees and track the entire US stock market or S&P 500 index?”

I’ve only talked about stocks so far, and for most people that are trying to build toward their FI Number, that’s the tried and true approach. But your risk tolerance may be lower. Or you may be very close to retirement and (very legitimately) want to move to something safer. Or you may (totally hypothetically) be freaked out about the state of the United States and its stock market. Just know that there’s no one way to do this, and stage of life / FI Journey matters a lot. This kind of thing is definitely worth thinking deeply about and customizing for yourself.

You can agree or disagree on the United States’ (quite ridiculous) tax policies. But they exist, and they are VERY biased toward giving you ways to legally avoid / reduce taxes with investment income. And that difference in taxes can have a massive impact on how quickly you are able to reach FI.

I’ll save the deep dive for another post, but let’s just cover the basics of taxes for investments. First, metaphor time! Or is it a simile? Not gonna look it up.

Individual stocks (like $AAPL ( ▼ 0.8% )) and funds (like $SCHB ( ▼ 0.14% )) are what I’m going to call the “flowers”. Those flowers can grow in many different kinds of “flower pots”, things like a 401(k), an HSA, a Roth IRA, or a regular brokerage account. And depending on which pot a flower is in, the exact same growth in the value of an investment will be taxed differently. Let’s talk about some of the big ones:

We’re starting here because you can think of this as the “default.” Every other “pot” you put your investments in will reduce your taxes in some way relative to this one, often with reduced flexibility that the government imposes in exchange for giving you a tax break. You put money in a brokerage account after it’s already been taxed in your paycheck. Then, any time you sell something, it gets taxed. If you owned it less than a year, it’s taxed like regular income. If you owned it more than a year, it’s taxed at either 0%, 15%, or 20%, but mostly likely 15%.

These accounts are great because they’re flexible. But the other “pots” give you major tax savings. My general guidance is this: Max out all the other ones first, then invest everything else here, with the caveat that as you get closer to retirement, you may choose to add more here to take advantage of the flexibility while giving up some tax savings.

Now we get into all the weird and crazy ways that the government has set up to encourage long-term investing by allowing you to legally dodge taxes. Let’s start with 401(k)’s and 403(b)’s. They’re the same thing, but 401(k)’s are for employees at for-profit companies, and 403(b)’s are for people that work at non-profits and some government jobs. Just for simplicity, I’m gonna use 401(k) here, but everything applies to both.

401(k)’s allow you to deduct money before taxes from your paycheck, up to a maximum of $24,500 per person for 2026. If both you and your spouse max out your 401(k)’s this year and you make a combined $250,000, you would reduce your tax bill by almost $11,000. $11,000!! And you can buy and sell investments in your 401(k) to your heart’s content without any taxes hitting.

You’re only taxed when you withdraw money, and it’s taxed as regular income. The idea is that once you retire, you’re more likely to be in a lower tax bracket than when you were earning that money originally. But even if you’re not, you gave your untaxed money a chance to compound on itself for literal decades.

And yes, this money is theoretically “locked up” until retirement age, but that’s actually not true! I’ll save the details for another post, but there’s a thing called a “Roth Conversion” that lets you unlock this money if you need it during early retirement. So…please don’t let fear of locking up your money stop you from the insane tax savings of maxing your 401(k) if you’re able.

Last thing: most employers also do a “match” where they will kick in a certain amount of money per paycheck to your 401(k) as long as you contribute some minimum amount. Do the matching amount if nothing else, because this is literally extra compensation they’re giving you, which you forfeit if you don’t contribute to your 401(k).

Roth IRA’s are kinda weird. They operate just like a brokerage account (you likely will open one with the same institution), but they differ in two important ways:

Oh, and if you ever need to access money that you put into your Roth IRA before formal retirement age, you can! The contributions you make can be pulled out at any time in the future. You’ll only pay a penalty for pulling out investment gains. So you should feel especially confident about contributing to a Roth.

Lastly, I’ll mention that there are Roth 401(k)’s that are the same as Roth IRA’s but with higher limits, and they must be provided by your employer. On the flipside, there are also non-Roth IRA’s, which are just like regular 401(k)’s, but with lower limits, and they are not provided by an employer. Oh, and if you have a 401(k), you probably can’t contribute to a regular IRA, but you can probably contribute to a Roth IRA. Oh, and in case you missed it earlier, read my footnote about how you get penalized for contributing to a Roth if you make too much money, except you can just do one extra step and completely legally avoid that penalty. Isn’t tax policy fun?

There are many more types of investment “pots”, but the last one I’ll talk about here is an HSA. These are only available with certain types of health insurance plans, but if you have access to one, they are a tax avoidance cheat code. You can contribute up to $4,400 for just yourself or $8,750 for family coverage, and just like a 401(k), this contribution reduces your taxable income. AND employers will often kick in extra money to your HSA for free (to encourage you to do the high-deductible plan that comes with an HSA, which is cheaper for them).

Once money is in an HSA, you’re allowed to invest it in the stock market, which is pretty wild. Like a 401(k) or IRA, you can buy and sell freely without any taxable events happening. And you can submit reimbursements for qualified medical expenses to pull money out of your HSA, and it’s not taxed at that point either. If you’re keeping score at home, you might be asking…so wait, when DOES this money get taxed? And the answer is (drum roll please) never! HSA’s are “triple tax advantaged”. They reduce your taxable income, you can buy and sell investments within the HSA without getting taxed, and then when you pull the money out it’s not taxed. The loophole of all loopholes! ⁹

And here’s the craziest part. Once you turn 65, you can just straight up withdraw money from your HSA, regardless of whether it’s for medical expenses. In this case, it is taxed as regular income, but effectively this just becomes an additional 401(k). So yeah, HSA’s, they’re awesome. Use one if you can!

Whenever you have money to invest, just invest it. Don’t try to perfectly time the market. There are “experts” who do this all day and have whole teams or even entire companies just focused on trying to time the market. And I have receipts! Just 8% of actively managed funds have outperformed a basic S&P 500 index over the past 20 years. Some of that underperformance is because of the high fees they charge (see my rant on that above), but most of it is just that picking winners and losers is hard, and timing when you buy and sell on those winners and losers is even harder. If they’re not successful, then you (and I) definitely will not be. Don’t over-think it.

Our approach is to invest any savings we have as soon as reasonable. This obviously relies on having a solid emergency fund, or being comfortable with needing to sell some investments if something comes up, which is our approach. Either way, just keep buying. Don’t sell unless you need to. Watch things grow (in the long term).

Lifestyle inflation is the American way, largely because we’ve been told that’s the path to happiness. I’m not going to get too philosophical here. But I hope if you’ve read this far, your takeaway is simply that something better than retiring at 65 is possible, and you have more agency in that decision than you previously thought.

And yes, that does take sacrifice, or at least occasional mildly uncomfortable tradeoffs. For us, that meant…

Reaching financial independence is not the easy path. But does any of that strike you as a major sacrifice? For us, it mostly didn’t feel like it. Especially because those decision were in pursuit of a clear goal — reaching a point in our 30s when we could choose not to work for someone else. And now more than ever, with young kids, medical challenges, a crazy world, that flexibility is an incredible gift that our past selves bought for our current selves. We’re extremely thankful and fortunate.

I know that was a lot, and I got pretty in the weeds at times. But there’s so much more I could talk about (seriously, this was 10,000+ words at one point before I edited it down to ~5,000), so please let me know any topics you’d like me to dig deeper on.

And if you want to have a one-on-one chat about your financial situation, I love helping people out. As a reminder, I’m not a licensed financial advisor. But I love teaching and discussing this stuff. I’d love to chat.

Thanks for reading!

— Brandon