- My story starts back when I was 24,
I had to move back home with my parents
'cause I had $2.26 in my bank account.
And I went to a July 4th picnic with my parents,
and during this 4th of July picnic,
all anyone talked about was retirement.
- One way of looking at retirement
is as a path toward financial freedom.
One rule of thumb
has been to save 10 to 15% of your income
so you can retire comfortably at the age of 65.
- And I was like, "Gosh,
I'm so far away from that, and I'm so broke,"
and that's when I started just looking at the numbers
and I was like, "Oh, okay, so if I'm making $52,000 a year
and saving 5% of my income,
I'm never gonna retire.
I'm never gonna have enough money.
But how do I even know
how much money I'm gonna need?"
And that sent me down the rabbit hole
into building a completely new life,
and choosing to live differently than both
my friends and my family.
Meet Grant Sabatier.
- Let's roll, man.
I'm like a freight train.
- He retired at 30 with a net worth of $1,000,000,
but five years before that,
he was in a very different place financially.
- Early on in my life,
you know, I became an achiever.
You know, I worked extremely hard,
and did everything that I thought
I was supposed to do.
You know, studied hard, went to a great college
and then after I graduated,
I thought that all of this
would lead to just,
you know, unlimited opportunity.
But, you know, I hit that reality check,
which, you know, life is not school.
And this is the thing—
when I asked my parents about this,
my dad just said, "You know, welcome to the real world."
- After bouncing between jobs,
Grant was eventually laid off during the 2008 Recession,
and ended up back at his childhood home.
- You know, the grind, the nine to six.
It just started to grate on me and really kill me.
This idea that I'd have to do this forever.
So I mean, I was completely broke
at my parents’ house with nothing.
And in August 2010,
I just Googled, ‘Best money books,'
and the first Google result was 'Your Money or Your Life'
by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin,
and I was like, "This is it."
I learned just the simple math
around financial independence
that if you save up enough money,
then the interest on that money,
whether it's invested in stocks or in bonds or in real estate,
covers your living expenses and more.
And so that you don't have to work.
You can choose to work, but you don't have to.
And I set two very seemingly
impossible goals at that moment.
Number one: To save $1,000,000
as quickly as possible.
And number two:
I wanted to retire as quickly as possible.
- This led Grant down a path
that eventually introduced him
to a growing financial movement known as FIRE.
- So FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early.
And I like to say that
FIRE is really just about living life on your own terms,
so it's like a choose your own adventure
where your life likely looks different than my life.
And the trade-offs that I'm willing to make
are likely different than the trade-offs
that you're willing to make.
- Some of those trade-offs come in the form of
your expenses, your choices of what
to spend your money on.
- So the most important thing when you're starting
or you're interested in this idea of FIRE,
is to first look at your life.
What do you love? What do you not love?
How would having more money change your life?
And so I always encourage people, pull out
your credit card statement or your bank statement,
and just go line by line
and look at how you spend your money
and ask yourself, "Was this worth it?
Did this make me happy?"
Then you start being able to spend money
on those things that make you happy
and make your life better.
And it's so easy to cut out those things that don't.
- One of the core concepts of FIRE
is what's known as the ‘FI number,'
which is the amount of money
you need saved to cover your projected living expenses
for the rest of your life.
- The simple math is that you need 25 times
your expected annual expenses,
you know, so for me, when I first calculated this,
you know, I was living on about $40,000 a year.
I bumped that up. Okay, if I can live on $50,000 a year,
25 times 50, you know, is 1.25 million.
- Everyone's FI number is different,
but the basic principles behind FIRE are the same.
Spend less while saving and investing more.
Grant decided to aggressively cut his costs
and take on multiple jobs.
- So when I got this $52,000 job,
the first job after leaving my parents' house,
you know, I'd already bought into the idea
of financial independence, right?
So the trade-off was super clear to me,
so I started saving 50% of my income immediately.
That's why I got such a crappy apartment
and a crappy car,
'cause I was making 50 grand and I was like,
"Okay, you need to keep your expenses
as low as possible."
But I also realized that I needed to find other ways
to build new skill sets and make more money.
And so my first side hustle
was building websites for lawyers in Chicago.
I started running Facebook ad campaigns,
working with my friend's moving company,
watching my neighbor's cat,
repairing mopeds.
I flipped a couple of Volkswagen campers.
So I was doing anything that I could
to make money to invest.
That was when it easily went over 80%.
And from leaving my parents' house
at the end of August 2010,
it took me five years and three months
to have over $1,000,000 saved.
- Grant accomplished something extraordinary,
going from having no job
to becoming a millionaire in five years.
He successfully retired early.
But the aggressive way he achieved FIRE
has left him with some mixed feelings.
- You know, I was blowing past these goals—
when I'd saved $100,000,
I should have just stopped and celebrated a little bit,
and looked around, you know, at my life
and just been grateful for it
and maybe taken a little time off.
I didn't do any of that.
I was just, you know, crazy the whole entire time.
So I would have gone a little slower.
I would have, you know, taken a little more time.
I would have been more appreciative
and grateful along the journey.
And I probably wouldn't have made so many trade-offs.
Time is more valuable than money.
And that's based on this simple idea,
which Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
didn't create this idea.
I mean, this is something that Ben Franklin wrote about
and Thoreau wrote about.
You know, all of these ideas,
like in the financial independence movement,
they're just being reborn at this moment.
You know, they've been around, especially
in the United States, for over 250 years.
It's just the internet accelerating the adoption
and the spread of ideas that have existed forever.
- Financial independence
can mean different things to different people.
Some define it as financial peace.
Others view it as the wealth necessary
to live comfortably without working.
In American culture, retirement has traditionally
been the 'season of life' to experience this freedom.
But a new generation of thinkers
are reimagining retirement
not as the only time to experience
financial independence, but as an enduring lifestyle.
The idea isn't new,
but at its root is a choice to think differently about
a resource less replenishable than money:
time.
- At the end of the day, time is so limited
we don't know how long we're gonna be here.
Why wait to live the life that you want?
So, how ultimately do you build a life
you love today, while still investing
in this uncertain future for yourself and the world?