I saw that recent "retired at 25 - will respond to questions" post and figured I'd try to make something more,,, idk not fake lol.

My backstory

Through College

I grew up poor. It has positives and negatives, obviously, but one of the big positives is getting a lot of grants for college I went to University of Washington. I was very academically focused from a young age, so I got some decent scholarships too, although some of those were also aimed at poor people. Couple this with the fact that I shared a room in a house that me and my friends would always fill (which we did for years, so the owner loved us and didn't raise rent on us as much as he could have. I was paying $285/month for my half of the room at first) and I came out of college with no debt.

I also worked through college. Minimum wage on campus for a while, later a bit more than minimum wage tutoring kids in math, and later I was a TA in computer science classes.

I believe every success story has luck involved and one such instance for me was getting a laptop in a random drawing at my high school grad night. Otherwise I wouldn't have had a laptop and definitely would not have excelled in computer science like I did. To me, though, a much more significant piece of luck, or, if not luck, then I don't know where to attribute this, is my altitude for math at a young age. My mom (single mom and, frankly, not a very good one) was very bad at it. It just feels very lucky to me.

The last two years of college were fairly grueling by some people's standards. I took heavy course loads, sometimes made up entirely of math and Cs courses, sometimes only CS and physics. For those two years, I basically lived in the computer labs and gave up most hobbies.

I graduated with degrees in math and computer science.

After college and expenses

"So you work in tech and just make a lot of money? Cool story bro." That's part of the story, but that alone would not get me retired this early. A big part of the story is also my low spend. For 2021 and 2022, I spent about 30k each year for everything. For 2023, I'm on track to be at about 30k as well (if I spend the same amount in the second half as I did in the first). Here are some things that, I think, contribute to my low spend:

• I live outside of the city and live with my girlfriend. My half of the mortgage is about 1300/month. House was about 480k. I was very lucky to have bought in 2020. Owning a house was not part of my FIRE strategy, but I always looked and said I'd buy one if I found a good enough investment.
• I do basically all work on my house myself. I do some pretty substantial work, but it's cheap if you're good at learning things yourself and find cheap materials (see lower bullet point on buying things used)
• I have never owned a car. I take public transportation and an electric scooter (the high speed ones are very dangerous and I do not recommend this to people)
• I'm never having kids. I like kids, but not enough to want to be responsible for one for 18 years.
• Travel is not something I do much. I believe this is the single most expensive luxury category that I see and it's extremely common. I did some traveling in 2016 and am just not that into it. I'll probably do it occasionally, but I find the value-per-dollar ratio pretty low for me. I know this is an extremely uncommon stance.
• I basically never go to restaurants. I honestly don't like them. I go to one maybe 4 times per year when people convince me to. Value-per-dollar ratio on this is negative to me, lol. Another very uncommon stance.
• I "Only buy used and everything I own is rented." The vast majority of things I buy, if I can save a little money on them, I will find a decent deal on a used one. This is a skill to not run into scams or buy something broken, also to recognize a good deal. The "cost" of something I think of as the difference between buy and sell price, since I sell a lot of things. For example, I bought a Nintendo Switch in 2018 for around 300. I wasn't using it much in 2020 and there was a lot of demand due to supply issues, so I sold it for 400. Later I wanted to play a Switch game, so I bought another. I finished the game and sold it again for a small profit. This year I bought one for $110. I don't expect to profit most of the time, but I don't see my possessions as permanently mine (even if you own them for as long as possible, most things will deteriorate eventually).
• My hobbies are all cheap and deep. For example, I love competitive gaming. For a couple games I play (Street Fighter and Smash Bros Melee), I go to meetups/tournaments at least weekly. It's super fulfilling to get better, but also has a fantastic community. Extremely high value-to-dollar ratio, since costs are near-zero outside of owning a controller (and probably having the game at home to practice). I would not choose, for example, sailing as a hobby. The cost is just too high.

Work

I'm honestly a pretty bad software engineer. I simply do not care at all about some corporation's profits and refuse to put too many hours into work. I definitely min-maxed on ability to interview, because my ability to get work done is not impressive. I've never received a promotion in my ~8 years of being a software engineer and am still technically at the entry-level position.

Income

My first job I made 100k, but I had to move to the bay area and was paying 2500/month in rent. I honestly wasn't saving much at the time and didn't know anything about investing or FIRE.

2018 I moved somewhere cheaper, got a much higher paying job, and around this time I finally learned about investing. Income was over 200k.

2019: About 214k 2020: around 234k and I was dumping everything into VTI, which turned out to be very profitable in a matter of months. 2021: 342k 2022: 4-year cliff. 256k 2023: Will be ~244k.

Income fluctuates a decent amount because so much of it is equity. I have auto-sale set up, and immediately turn it into VTI.

Net worth

My net-worth on Mint (excluding anything with my house) just crossed my FIRE number: 1.337M (lol). It is almost entirely VTI, and then I've been putting everything into treasuries to have some kind of bond tent. I plan to take all of my PTO in January and officially quit in March after maxing 401k for the year and having a particular set of stocks vest.

Income post-retirement

I ~may do some things to generate some income. I might make a very large project of converting the space above my detached garage into something that can be Airbnb'd. I feel accomplished when I do projects on my house, so I feel like this may be worth the time, effort, and money.

Feel free to ask questions, roast me, lmk if this is helpful or worthless!