when i was young my mom would give me a small allowance and i would actually keep almost all of it it was an allowance of two hong kong dollars which is the equivalent of about 25 cents here so out of the two dollars i would actually only spend maybe 1 out of 10 times and the rest i would keep amassing a tiny little fortune for a little kid i'm francis i'm age 42. i achieved fire at the age of 37 with 1.2 million dollars in fremont california i'm typically labeled as an extremely frugal person although i don't think of it that way one time i tried going without a cell phone by using like this weird wi-max dongle thing that goes with an ipod touch i think it's important to push a little bit too hard get a little bit too uncomfortable realize that whatever money saving thing does not really work it's not for me a lot of people just buy things that just spoil things that expire and all those gets tossed out so if you can imagine not tossing anything out this is a huge savings i see it as a way to get the fire faster once you get there faster you can let off a little bit and be a little bit less frugal afterwards when i decided to quit my job one of the criteria was that i was able to pay off my house because this gives me the financial stability and know that and and so i can know that i won't be kicked out of my house if i cannot afford the payment the way i save for retirement is just to save everything i spend as little as possible and the remainder i just put it in my savings account i max out all my retirement account my 401k and right now since i'm self-employed i contribute to an sep ira one of the things that helps me greatly in achieving fire faster is to have a lot of credit cards i have 24 currently active credit cards and i churn them i turn credit cards i churn investment accounts i churn savings accounts as well in order to turn these credit cards you need a really high credit score currently i have a credit score of 835. growing up my dad was a chef and my mom is a seamstress so we were in sort of lower middle class type we didn't make that much money i lived most of my life in california no one told me about any kind of money-saving habits or anything but i do remember my sister gave me a finance book that had all these different things about about credit cards about you know saving for retirement and things like that i didn't know you know you can do all these things and i was really into that and from there i just started building my knowledge in finance and just got better and better at it i already have worked as an engineer for about 10 years or so and i was starting to get disgruntled whatever i built was not making it to the market so i felt like i was wasting my time my main motivation for retiring early is mainly to reclaim my own time and to be my own boss really and just be able to do what i want to do at any time that i want to the channel grew because initially i uploaded a lot of different videos a lot of diy videos not just finance related and eventually the finance videos caught on those were pretty popular and then eventually i made more and more money from it enough that it surprised even me that it can actually replace my actual engineering income but i did not want to quit my job at that time because if you only make just enough then there's a lot of risk to it if i were to just live on that money alone i could live for a really really long time probably 20 30 years or so but it's not gonna last me forever having the youtube income actually allows me to extend this a bit because i can pay for my living expenses i can earn more invest more and eventually i was able to increase this 1.2 million that i started off with when i retired to about 2 million today at the time that i quit my engineering job i was making around 60 000 on youtube alone so what i did was actually to aim for making about three times as much as that so there's some room to play with some margin of error here i just wake up whenever i wake up i don't have an alarm clock anymore sometimes i might wake up at 6am sometimes i might wake up at noon but currently i am back into full-time mode typically i work on a two-day schedule the first day i would think about ideas the second day i would record and edit in my retired mode i cut down my hours to about 25 of 40 hours so maybe like eight hours i might have free trials for certain subscription service like streaming services i might have free trials for going to the movie theaters or i might just keep them for a very short time i also enjoy going to the driving range flying my drone or going backpacking or camping with friends quitting my job gave me enormous amount of opportunities because afterwards i was able to travel the world i actually have several things that are really great with fire one of them is not having to commute anymore and another one is just to be able to do what you want and complete all your to-do lists and have the time to do your entire bucket list i completed all of those and i think it's well worth it i don't think most people want to retire early i think what most people want is a sabbatical of sorts they're just disgruntled with their careers and they just want to take a really really long time off you