Gen Z Are Ditching Their Day Jobs For An Early Retirement — Here’s How

Earlier this year, a sound bite of Kim Kardashian exclaiming, “ It seems like nobody wants to work these days ,” went viral. And if you’ve spent any time on TikTok lately, you’ll know young people want out.

Tung is part of a booming online community called FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), championing quitting work well before your twilight years. The approach, which has been around since the ’90s but has made a recent revival on social media, relies on aggressive saving, über-strict budgeting, and methods for diversifying your revenue streams and creating a passive income, such as flipping clothes, investing shrewdly in crypto and the stock market, and signing up for medical trials. Scroll through hashtags such as #retirebefore30 and #earlyretirement and you’ll find bright young things offering their financial advice so that – like them – you can ditch your day job.

Melbourne-based schoolteacher Olivia Fitzpatrick first heard about the FIRE movement while listening to a podcast. “It was a big light-bulb moment for me, to find out you could retire earlier than 65,” the 28-year-old says. Since joining the movement, she cemented herself on the property ladder at 25 and expects to retire in her thirties .

For Fitzpatrick, it’s the idea of financial independence that keeps her motivated. “It’s not necessarily to retire early, sit around and watch Netflix,” she explains. “It’s more about the freedom of your own time and the financial ability to choose if you are working, when you’re working, and what you do for work.”

Olivia Fitzpatrick shares her money hacks to financial freedom.

Award-winning financial adviser and host of the She’s on the Money podcast Victoria Devine explains that you only need to look at the effect of “the great resignation”, the death of the #girlboss era and end of side-hustle culture to see why young people are planning an early exit strategy. “I think we’ve worked out that it’s a bit ‘hamster on a wheel’ to go to work nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, and then retire at the age of 65,” she says. “We’ve seen past generations do that and not be happy. Now we live in a world where that doesn’t have to be our reality.”

While the benchmark of a sustainable, passive income differs depending on your lifestyle, the generally held advice is that you need a net worth of 25 times your annual cost of living to be able to live off your savings.

According to Devine, if you are looking to retire early, you need to work backwards. So firstly, you must figure out how much money you want to live off each year. “For example, to achieve $120,000 in passive income each year [for 20 years], you would be working towards a portfolio of $2.4 million,” Devine explains. “Then it’s about working out how quickly you can achieve that within the parameters of your income. And that’s going to be very different for someone who earns $60,000 compared with someone who earns $180,000.”

Devine believes smart investing is the key to financial freedom. “It’s not about saving up a whole heap of money to then start spending it,” she says. “You need to invest a whole heap of money so that your hard-earned cash is making money, so you don’t have to work a full-time job.”

Tay (@taybeepboop) lived in a closet to pay off $20,000 USD in a year of student loans.

Like many things that sound too good to be true, there’s a catch. For many FIRE followers, the cost of financial freedom means sacrificing a comfortable lifestyle to live strictly below their means. “There’s one person [I’ve come across] who’s currently living in a share house with 12 people earning like $100,000, eating beans and rice and not going out,” says Devine. “They’re living a socially reclusive life.”

It’s important to consider what you’ll lose if you tap out of the corporate world prematurely. “People report having lost motivation and a sense of connection with the world,” Devine says. “Work is a really social thing, and having a routine is actually really healthy for us.”

Tung admits she constantly feels the need to justify her new lifestyle. “There was a period of time when I questioned: who am I now that I don’t have a job title?” And Tung is not alone. In a FIRE community group on Facebook, one user recently posted, “I feel so lost right now. I spent so many years working and saving that I do not know what to do with myself. Part […]

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