In June 2023, I turned in my notice. Not just my “I’m leaving the office” notice, but my “I’m leaving the workforce” notice.
I was 39 years old.
The plan was to work until the end of the summer, but after a request from my boss, and a little negotiating to work remotely from a different state, I stayed on for an extra six months. By January 2024, I received my last paycheck. (That’s wild considering I started working at the age of 14. Shout Out to Summer Youth Employment Programs in NYC)
I haven’t received a paycheck or a W-2 since then. Even now, it still feels surreal to say out loud. Not because I didn’t believe it was possible, but because I didn’t think retiring before 65 was something people like me did. Unless you had a pension. And people my age rarely had jobs with pensions anymore. Or maybe early retirement was something reserved for people with higher incomes, better timing, or access to information I didn’t have.
That wasn’t our story.
We didn’t sell a company or inherit money, and we didn’t take big risks that paid off overnight.
What we did was much simpler than that.
We learned what financial independence actually meant, we created a plan, and then we followed it. Not perfectly, but consistently enough that over time, it worked.
We weren’t guessing anymore. We had a plan.
Before FIRE: We Were Doing Some Things Right, But Without a Plan
My husband and I got married in the Spring of 2015.
At that point, we were already contributing to our workplace retirement accounts. We had a 401(k) or Thrift Savings Plan, and we were doing what most people would consider responsible. We were saving, contributing, and thinking about the future in a general sense. And we had access to employer matching! Free money! SCORE!
Little did we know it wasn’t “free” money. It was actually part of our compensation packages… but hey, it felt like free money.
But I digress, back to the numbers.
By the time we celebrated our one-year anniversary, we had about $126,000 in workplace retirement accounts.
Looking back, that matters more than I realized at the time. We weren’t starting from zero. We had been planting seeds, even if we didn’t fully understand what those seeds could grow into.
But if I’m being honest, we didn’t have a clear direction.
We weren’t asking questions like, “How much do we actually need?” or “What would it take to make work optional?”
We were following the default path. Save a little. Invest a little. Retire someday.
There wasn’t a roadmap. There was just a habit. And that mattered.
We were on track to retiring in 30 years or so. You know, the traditional path.
Discovering FIRE and Realizing There Was Another Way
Around the time we got married, I came across the idea of financial independence and early retirement from an article.
It was all about how a couple from Seattle had retired in their 30s to travel the world. I read the article and emailed it to my then-fiancé about a month before we got married. I asked him if he thought we could do that.
He never replied to the email.
But we did end up talking about it over text.
Even then, we didn’t change everything overnight.
After all, we were planning the rest of our lives.
The wedding came, married life began, and a change in management shook up what had felt like my dream work environment. After a few incredibly difficult weeks, I thought back to that article and spent an entire weekend Googling phrases like “how to build wealth”, “how to retire early,” and “what is financial independence and how do you get it.”
It sounded like a disease you wanted to have in the same way I wanted glasses in kindergarten and I too wanted a cast in elementary school so all my friends could sign.
But all things lead to FIRE, Financial Independence Retire Early. It was a community, a movement, maybe even a cult of people who were building wealth and quitting their jobs because they could. I wanted in.
At first, it felt almost too simple. The idea that you could build enough wealth to cover your expenses and then choose whether or not to work challenged everything I had been taught about money.
But the more I learned, the more it made sense.
It wasn’t about extreme frugality or giving up your life. It was about understanding a few key things:
How much you spend
How much you invest
And how those investments grow over time
For the first time, I saw a path. Not a vague “someday” plan, but something you could actually map out. It was then I understood that retirement wasn’t an age, it was a number. And once you reached this number, it was freedom. It was your freedom number.
2016 to 2017: From Passive Saving to Intentional Investing
Before this point, investing had been something we did because we were told to do it.
After that eventful weekend in 2016, it became something we did with purpose.
We started looking at our income differently. Instead of asking what we could spend, we started asking what we could invest. The math was simple. Take your income, subtract your expenses and BOOM whatever was leftover was yours to save and invest.
The thing was, there wasn’t much leftover.
I was the natural spender in the couple, and I really had to go from being a shopper to an intentional and mindful shopper. When this happened it changed the way I looked at my money. I could either buy this thing… or I could use that money to buy one less day of work in the future.
This was when things started changing for me. Slowly we increased the contributions we made to our workplace retirement accounts.
And then we learned about the different types of accounts available to us and how they each played a role. Workplace retirement accounts, Roth IRAs, HSAs, taxable brokerage accounts. It stopped being one account and started becoming an early retirement system.
In 2017, we went all in on that system.
We maxed out our workplace retirement accounts for the first time. We contributed to our Roth IRAs. We funded our HSA.
Altogether, we invested about $53,750 that year.
At the same time, the market had a strong year. Major indexes like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ Composite saw significant growth, and we benefited from that simply by being invested.
By the end of the year, our portfolio had increased by over $90,000.
When we zoomed out and looked at a little over a year, our investments had grown by about $125,000.
That was the first time it really clicked for me.
This wasn’t just a good idea. It was actually working.
Not in a theoretical way, but in a tangible, “I can see this working in real life” kind of way.
2018: Building Momentum
By May 2018, our total investments had reached about $313,000.
What stands out to me about this phase is not that we were doing anything drastically different, but that we stayed consistent.
We kept investing. We kept learning. We kept refining what we were doing.
There wasn’t a single moment where everything changed. It was a series of small, repeatable decisions that started to compound.
2019 to 2020: When We Stopped Guessing and Got Strategic
I remember the feeling of reaching a half-million-dollar portfolio. It was then that it really sunk in that we would reach financial independence and retire early. In some ways, up to that point, there was a part of me that hoped everything would work out and I knew we would be better off than had we not started investing aggressively. But something changed. There was a shift from simply thinking reaching FI was possible to, “Oh wow… financial independence is inevitable.”
As we moved into 2019 and 2020, our approach became more intentional.
We weren’t just investing regularly. We were thinking about how to optimize where our money was going.
- In 2020, we set a goal to invest about $80,000 in one year. Here’s that breakdown:
$39,000 in 401k/TSP/403b Contributions ($19,500 x 2) - $14,000 in employer retirement contributions
- $7,000 HSA ($5k from employer + $2k from us)
- $12,000 Roth IRA contributions ($6,000 x 2)
- $8,000 to our taxable brokerage accounts
We were using every available tool. And we weren’t doing it because we had to. We were doing it because we understood how each piece contributed to the bigger picture.
At the same time, something else happened that we didn’t plan for, and it changed our spending overnight.
The Pandemic and an Unexpected Shift in Spending
When the world shut down in 2020, our day-to-day life changed in ways we couldn’t have predicted.
We weren’t commuting. We weren’t traveling. We weren’t spending in the same way we had before.
Without trying to, our expenses dropped, and we also received additional income through stimulus checks.
Because while our spending decreased, we continued investing. Even though that year felt like life came to a crashing halt, we didn’t pause. We stayed consistent, even in uncertainty.
When the markets dropped, we saw it as an opportunity to invest a little more without timing the market or jeopardizing our emergency cash cushion.
By June 2020, our portfolio had grown to about $565,000.
By December 2020, it had reached around $755,000.
Looking back, that period accelerated things in a way we couldn’t have planned.
2021: Crossing the $1 Million Mark
In July 2021, we crossed $1 million invested.
There wasn’t a big celebration. It was quieter than I expected.
More of a realization than a milestone.
We had spent years contributing, learning, and staying consistent, and this was the result.
By the end of 2021, our portfolio was just over $1.03 million.
At that point, financial independence didn’t feel like a distant idea anymore. It felt real.
2022: When the Market Drops and the Plan Gets Tested
Then came 2022.
The market dropped, and our portfolio went from just over $1 million to about $890,000 by the end of the year.
On paper, that’s a loss of over $100,000.
If you’ve never experienced that before, it can feel unsettling.
But by this point, we understood something important.
The market doesn’t move in a straight line.
Growth includes downturns. Volatility is part of the process.
So we didn’t change the plan.
We didn’t pull out of the market. We didn’t panic.
We stayed invested.
2023 to 2024: Making the Decision
By 2023, we had enough clarity to make a decision. The market had bounced back and I had been pondering a question “Why am I still working?” That question was harder to ignore than I expected.
For the first time, work became optional.
I truly did enjoy the work that I did and it felt rewarding in so many ways. But we had achieved what we had set out to do… we had reached FI. And I had found one of the ways I wanted to spend more of my free time… coaching. Financial coaching. Helping other first-gen women become the first millionaires in their family.
In June 2023, I turned in my notice. By January 2024, I received my last paycheck.
What Life Looks Like Now
As of April 2026, our portfolio is about $1.7 million.
That part still surprises people.
Not the number itself, but the fact that it continued to grow after we stepped away from full-time work.
That’s the part most people don’t see when they think about financial independence.
It’s not about your money stopping. It’s about your money continuing to do what it was designed to do.
What Actually Made the Difference
When I look back on everything, there isn’t one single thing that made this work.
It was a combination of decisions that built on each other over time.
We got clear on what we were working toward.
We invested consistently, even when it felt uncertain.
We used the tools available to us instead of overcomplicating the process.
We adjusted when life changed, but we didn’t abandon the plan.
Most importantly, we gave it time.
At that point, we were saving and investing about $5,500 a month.
So how were we able to invest that much?
We kept our expenses low and prioritized investing over lifestyle inflation.
That gap between what we earned and what we spent is what made everything else possible.
Our annual spending was around $40,000 to $45,000 a year.
Based on that, we set a goal of about $1.2M.
From the time we got intentional in 2016, it took us about seven years to reach that point.
Did We Spend Money on Fun?
Yes.
While we were on our FIRE journey, in just one year we traveled to Punta Cana, Puerto Rico, spent two weeks in California, had a trip to Tulum planned, and planned a trip to Hawaii.
We travel hack. We use points and miles. We get creative.
One of the challenges with travel hacking is that since our monthly spend is relatively low, we have to be strategic about how we earn points.
For context, we are a dual-income household with no kids. We live in a high cost of living area, but our housing costs are below average for our city. We had uninterrupted employment during the pandemic.
We consistently saved and invested more than we spent each month.
If You’re Wondering If This Is Possible for You
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I make good money, but I don’t feel like I’m getting ahead,” you’re not alone.
That’s exactly where I started. Because I know what it feels like to be doing everything right and still feel unsure if it’s working.
What changed wasn’t just what we were doing. It was how we were thinking about it.
Once we understood that there was a path, we were able to follow it.
Not perfectly. Not quickly. But consistently enough that over time, it worked.
Final Thought
By the time I got my last paycheck, the goal wasn’t just to stop working.
It was to build a life where I didn’t have to.
And what I’ve seen since then is that the plan doesn’t stop working just because you stop working.
I got my last paycheck… and nothing actually changed.
The income stopped. The plan didn’t. And that’s the whole point.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I want this for myself, but I don’t know where to start”… this is exactly the work I do with my clients.