A millennial lived on $15,000 a year to retire early. She opens up about the challenges and her new approach to FIRE: ‘There are going to be expensive seasons’

• Amberly Grant’s FIRE goal shifted due to increased expenses and family responsibilities.
• Grant initially saved 75% of her income, inspired by the financial independence movement.
• She’s still pursuing early retirement but, in the meantime, is happy with ‘coast FIRE.’

After years of earning $15,000 a year traveling and working odd jobs in her early 20s, Amberly Grant was used to a low cost of living.

While she wasn’t able to save any of her low five-figure income, she never accumulated debt — meaning, she got accustomed to spending about $15,000 annually, or $1,250 a month.

By the time Grant landed her first full-time position as a project coordinator, her savings habits were so ingrained that she managed to save about 75% of her $52,000 salary, she told Business Insider: “Finally getting enough money where I could start putting something away was really motivating to me, so I just saved as much as I could.”

She also had her eye on the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement. In her mid-20s, she came across the Mr. Money Mustache blog, which introduced her to the concept of “buying freedom,” and she joined a few FI Facebook groups.

Grant figured that if she continued investing most of her income in index funds, she could retire by 40.

That goal has since shifted. Now, at 36, her life looks a lot different than it did when she was 29 and paying $400 a month to rent a room in a three-bedroom home: Grant supports her two kids and husband, who couldn’t work for a couple of years due to visa issues and is a stay-at-home dad. She also pays for her dad’s housing.

She earns more than she ever has — six figures as a senior project manager for a financial and accounting software company — but her expenses are much higher. Life circumstances have “pushed my goal out,” she said.

Grappling with guilt during ‘expensive seasons’ and coming to terms with a different FIRE goal

An unexpected challenge of pursuing FIRE has been the emotional toll she’s experienced after setting a big, clear goal and having to push the timeline.

“For me, right now, how much I spend is quite high. I feel guilty and bad about it,” she said. “Because I’ve been so rigid with my spending and my idealism regarding my FIRE goals, I think it makes these times harder emotionally than they should be. I feel like a failure, but I’m not a failure; I’m just living life, and that’s OK.”

Having been a member of FIRE communities for more than a decade, and even building her own through weekly FinTalks and her podcast, Grant has found that she’s not the only one in this community who is hard on herself.

“I find a lot of people in the FIRE industry can be very rigid in regards to what they spend, and they pretend that life is linear,” she said. For her, life has proven to be anything but linear. “I’ve taken on other people in my life, so it’s not just me working my job, and I can easily save 75%.”

She’s learning to accept what she calls “expensive seasons,” she said. “There are going to be expensive seasons and not-so-expensive seasons.”

For her, 2024 is an expensive season for various reasons, including housing, which is a cost she’s historically managed to keep low by either living with roommates or renting out a portion of her home.

“We now have a family home. It doesn’t make money. It actually is quite expensive. And that took me probably eight months to be OK with,” she said. “I felt really silly having a space of my own because it costs so much and I wasn’t optimizing it by renting out rooms or something like that. So that was really challenging for me to move from the space of constant optimization to actually just enjoying what I have in my life.”

She still aspires to hit FIRE in the next decade or so. In the meantime, she’s learning to be happy with what she’s already achieved after years of smart savings and investing habits.

Despite her higher cost of living, Grant still saves about 40% of her gross income and says she’s considered “coast FIRE,” which means that she never has to contribute another dollar to her retirement accounts; the current amount will grow and compound enough over time that, by age 60, it’ll be enough to sustain her lifestyle in retirement.

She technically only has to work to cover her expenses, but she’s still contributing to her nest egg because she wants the option of walking away from work before age 60.

“For me — and this has been since I was really young — it’s really come down to, I want financial independence, and I want to be able to use my money to help others in the end,” she said. “Right now, I help my dad. I’m in an expensive part of life right now, but I wouldn’t be able to get through this expensive part of life if I didn’t do all the work I did beforehand to be frugal, to be mindful, to be conscientious with my money, and to make sacrifices so that I can get to a really good spot now at 36.”