In my last post, I explored my relationship with work (bad) and burnout (even worse). I want to build a life where I have time to pursue my passions without worrying about financial security. But this comes with a big question: short of winning the lottery, how?

When I got my first glimmer of an answer, I was 24 and working in a call center for a software company that fostered the kind of micromanaging, toxic workplace so common since the 2008 crash. Company culture centered around an unspoken understanding that everyone should be grateful just to have a job, and lower rank employees shouldn’t expect “perks” like, you know, bonuses of any kind, enough vacation time, or competitive wages. It was the sort of place where everyone knew that discussing wages was a fireable offense—something nobody seemed to realize is actually super illegal.

I was miserable, and I spent a lot of time on Reddit seeking validation from other people’s miserable accounts of their equally miserable jobs. Through this fruitless, repetitive process, I happened upon a post (and eventually an entire subreddit) that presented a surprisingly straightforward idea: if you save up 25 times your yearly expenditure, you can invest that money and safely withdraw 4% per year pretty much indefinitely, leaving you … free. Free to do art, free to take a walk in the park whenever you darn well feel like it, free to travel just for the sake of discovering the world. 

The idea was called FIRE: financial independence/retire early. And I wanted to know how I could sign the heck up.

Show Me the Math

How much money does it take to FIRE? $5 million? $10 million? You’ve got to be wildly rich, right? Spoiler alert: it’s probably a lot less than you think.

Let’s take a look at an example FIRE breakdown for a hypothetical couple. We’ll say our pair make the median household income for Ohio, which is about $60,000. Let’s also say this couple have no kids (honestly just because I, being childfree, have no concept of how to budget for that), and they live in a part of Ohio with a low cost of living.

Our couple are currently putting 6% ($3,600) into their 401(k) each year, and their employer-sponsored health insurance, dental, vision, and life insurance amounts to $3,800. They’ve chosen the high deductible health insurance, so they’re also each putting in the max of $3,850 for their HSA, coming out to $7,700. After these deductions, plus $6,500 in taxes, our hypothetical family is left with about $38,400 in take-home pay.

Now let’s build out a budget and see how much is left over. To keep things simple, we’ll assume this couple has no debt. However, we’ll also assume they’re starting from ground zero on savings. As far as spending goes, they live a fairly modest life but aren’t going to frugality extremes.

Expenditure*	Cost per Month	Cost per Year
Rent**	$1,000	$12,000
Cell phone	$120	$1,440
Utilities	$336	$4032
Car/Renter’s insurance	$90	$1,080
Streaming	$17	$216
Groceries***	$600	$7200
TOTAL (Bare Necessities)	$2,163	$25,956
Left over after necessities	$1,036	$12,432

Assuming they can save $500 a month and use the other $500 for “everything else,” this couple would need about $800,000 invested to reach financial independence. Reducing spending–either discretionary or through better deals on necessities–could even reduce their FI number to between $750,000 or $775,000.

Don’t get me wrong: I fully recognize that this is still a lot of money. But it’s not the several millions we usually think of when imagining someone who lives off of passive income. Some people can reduce this number even more, opting to get to FI faster in exchange for a frugal retirement that might include a low-stress, part-time job (lean FIRE). Others set a higher goal so they can indulge in more luxury (fat FIRE). And some just step up their savings early on so that they can take a more relaxed approach to a fairly standard retirement (coast FIRE).

How Long Does it Take?

Plugging some numbers into the Networthify calculator indicates it will take 24 years for our hypothetical couple to reach FIRE. (This is simplified and doesn’t take into account raises over the years. It also doesn’t consider healthcare costs once employment ends–I’ll chalk that up to hoping medicare for all would pass before the retirement date. But I’ll say it’s a good enough guess.)

If you start all of this when you’re 20, that’s great. Early retirement in your mid 40s, what a dream! But if you’re starting later or being dragged on by debt, it’s admittedly discouraging. At my sad call center job, I was only 5-ish years into my working life and already floundering. The concept of waiting 20 years for a life raft was demoralizing.

Even still, I now understood that all I had to do to escape the slog was (somehow) save up enough to hit my FI number. At least now I was in the game.

The Fast Track to FIRE

If you want to FIRE fast, you have two options: increase income, or decrease expenditure. Preferably both.

Reducing expenses is arguably easier, so I started there with plans to pay down debt. I bundled our cell phones and found ways to save on other bills. We installed LED bulbs in every light fixture in our apartment. But there’s only so much weeding you can do before you get down to bare earth, and I was soon at an impasse. I had been poor as a teenager; I wasn’t interested in living that extreme frugality again.

If I couldn’t cut spending any more, the next step had to be increasing income. But how? First, a job change helped immensely, not only through a raise, but also a healthier work environment. Raises only come once a year, though, and I needed to maximize my savings as soon as possible. Job hopping would be too stressful, and getting a second job wouldn’t be feasible either, since the first one was already costing so much energy that I was struggling with basic life tasks. I needed another strategy.

I needed a sidehustle.