I think people over estimate how difficult achieving fire is, when it’s the first thing you tackle in ur adult life. If you guide yourself by making more money and keeping your expenses low you’re gonna be on a good path. Continue to live like your in college, don’t inflate your lifestyle as you start to earn more. You’ll be on a good path if you can pull it off. Just gotta be mindful what career path you take. Consider living at home longer before you move out, that’s probably been the biggest advantage I’ve had.

Focus on maximizing your Return on investment. Realistically the only way your going to out perform the market is by using leverage. A rental property with a mortgage can see 15 % returns in the right zip codes. For stocks, look into hedgefundies excellent adventure. Index funds, levered or not, are the way to go. In my opinion a rental property with a mortgage, and the HFEA portfolio are the best ways to beat the market without taking imprudent risk (high sharpe ratio). This will speed up your timeline dramatically. As for living off the funds, I think real estate is the answer. You can own a rental that produces 8% cash returns and stays steady with inflation on its own. Meaning you can live off of 6% instead of just 4%. Seriously that speeds up the equation so much. It’s all math, get jiggy with excel or python.

Me: I earn just over six digits. I’ve been aggressively investing my whole career. Sure, it’s been a huge bull run the whole time I’ve been saving, but I’ve done very well investing (thank you TSLA). My current net worth is $510,000. I’m on track to hit a million in 6 years at my average ROI (14%). Theoretically I could retire at 30 or wait till 35-40 and chubby fire pending market conditions.

I hate my job, but I bit my tongue and held my nose and hung in there for the money. I’ll be changing jobs once my current assignment ends and even tho I’ll be earning less, I’ll be happy. Then I just gotta find a way to support myself in a way that I enjoy for 5-10 years. Not looking to be rich, just free. Cheers on your adventure! Seriously this has been one of the greatest joys of my life. It feels so good to see trees you planted start to blossom and snowball. Enjoy the path to fire for what it’s worth. It makes you think deeply about how you want to spend your time and maximizing value per dollar spent. I turn 25 in two weeks, I wanted to post here before I’m too old to participate. Enjoy your new community