“Who says you have to have a 6-figure salary to retire? If you’re just staring out, making 40K/year after taxes, have low expenses, you could easily retire in 12 years at 36 (pretty close to our ages when we retired), just by doing the following:
- Pay off your student debt! At 5% interest, it doesn’t make sense to invest while carrying this debt. (Plus with your savings rate, you could murder that debt in less than 2 years!)
- Get a promotion or work on a couple of side hustles to increase your salary by $20,000/year (since you love writing, freelance writing is one route you can take, once you develop your writing portfolio)