Last year, Andrew got an email that should have been a dream come true. It was a job offer from a prestigious company in his field—the kind of logo he’d be proud to have on his LinkedIn profile. The salary was a significant jump, the title was impressive, and the projects were high-profile.
There was just one problem. During the final interview, the hiring manager—his potential future boss—had a reputation that preceded him.
He was known as a brilliant but notoriously difficult personality, someone who chewed through talent and celebrated a “work-is-your-life” culture.
But when the offer landed in his inbox, Andrew didn’t feel excitement or anxiety. He felt… nothing. He read it, archived it, and sent back a polite, one-sentence email declining the opportunity.
There was no agonizing, no pro-and-con list, no desperate call to his parents for advice.
What “F-You Money” Actually Is (and Isn’t) in 2025
The term “F-You Money” gets thrown around a lot, often conjuring images of Wall Street traders quitting in a blaze of glory or tech founders buying solid gold toilets.
But for our generation, in 2025, it has a much deeper and more practical meaning. It’s not about obscene luxury; it’s about securing absolute agency over your life. At its core, F-You Money is the amount of wealth that allows you to make significant life decisions without being constrained by financial necessity.
It’s a spectrum of financial security. It begins as a “rage quit” fund—enough liquid savings (typically 3-6 months of living expenses) to walk away from a toxic job or a bad situation without immediate panic.
From there, it grows into what the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) community calls your “FI Number”—the point at which your investments can generate enough passive income to cover your living expenses forever.
The most common way to calculate this number is by using the 4% Rule, a guideline derived from a famous financial study that suggests you can safely withdraw 4% of your portfolio’s value each year with a very low probability of running out of money.
The “Extreme” Path vs. The Crowded Road
Choose Your Path to Wealth!
“Extreme” vs. “Average” Financial Journeys
Andrew journey to that number wasn’t conventional. While my friends were following the standard script—get a job, buy a new car, upgrade the apartment, save a little on the side—I chose a different path. It was a path they often called “weird” or “extreme.” But this path got me to freedom in six years, not forty.
The difference between my approach and the average path isn’t subtle. It’s a chasm, and it’s best illustrated by the numbers.
These are the five “extreme” money moves that built that safety net for me, brick by brick.
Move 1: I Engineered a 70% Savings Rate (While My Friends Saved 5%)
Andrew remembers his first “real” budget after college. He sat down with a spreadsheet, plugged in his new salary, and mapped out his expenses. After rent, utilities, and a modest amount for food and fun, he saw what was left over.
The conventional advice would have been to save 10-15% of it. But he had just finished reading a blog post by Mr.
Money Mustache, a software engineer who retired at 30, and his core message was ringing in his ears: your savings rate is your speedometer to freedom. So, he did something that felt absurd.
He flipped the script. Instead of calculating what was left to save, he decided what he would live on. He allocated 30% of his take-home pay to his living expenses and designated the other 70% for savings and investments.
The Principle & The Proof – Why Your Savings Rate is Your Speedometer to Freedom
The single most important variable in determining how quickly you achieve financial independence is your savings rate. It’s more important than your investment returns, your salary, or finding the next “hot stock.”
The math is shockingly simple. If you save 10% of your income, it takes you 9 years of work to save for 1 year of living expenses. If you save 50%, you save for one year of expenses for every single year you work. And if you can push it to 75%, you save for a year of expenses in just four months.
My 70% savings rate felt extreme to my friends because it was so far outside the norm. In 2025, the average personal savings rate in the United States has been hovering below 5%.
At that rate, financial independence isn’t just a distant dream; it’s a mathematical impossibility for most. You are effectively treading water for your entire working life.
Your 2025 Action Plan – How to Reverse-Engineer Your Savings
Find Your Baseline: Before you can improve, you must measure. For 30 days, track every single dollar you spend. Use an app, a notebook, whatever it takes.
Adopt Zero-Based Budgeting: This is where you give every single dollar a job. The best tool for this, hands down, is YNAB (You Need A Budget).
YNAB’s philosophy forces you to be intentional with your money rather than passively tracking where it went. It has a learning curve, but mastering it is like gaining a financial superpower. It’s about control, not restriction.
Pay Yourself First, Aggressively: Stop thinking of savings as what’s “left over.” Frame it as your most important bill. The “Freedom Bill.” When you get paid, the very first transaction should be money moving to your savings and investment accounts. The rest is what you have left to live on.
Automate Everything: The human brain is wired for short-term gratification. Willpower is a finite resource. Remove it from the equation.
Set up automatic transfers from your checking account to your high-yield savings and brokerage accounts for the day after you get paid. As behavioral economists have shown, automation beats willpower every time.
Move 2: He Treated All Debt as a House Fire The Story – His “Gazelle Intensity” Phase
After graduating, Andrew had about $25,000 in student loans and a nagging $3,000 credit card balance from a few youthful indiscretions. His friends saw this as normal, a manageable monthly payment to be chipped away at for the next decade. He saw it as a five-alarm fire burning down his future.
He adopted what financial expert Dave Ramsey calls “gazelle intensity”—the focused, panicked energy of a gazelle running from a cheetah. For 14 months, he was obsessed. He picked up extra shifts at a weekend job.
He sold his gaming console, his expensive bike, and half his wardrobe on Facebook Marketplace. He ate a comical amount of rice and beans.
The Principle & The Proof – Debt is the Anchor to Your Old Life
In our society, debt is normalized. Car payments, student loans, and credit card balances are seen as a standard part of adult life.
This is a trap. As author JL Collins writes in The Simple Path to Wealth, debt is a “vicious, pernicious destroyer of wealth” and paying it off should be your absolute top priority.
But the cost of debt isn’t just financial. It’s a heavy psychological burden that creates constant, low-grade stress. This mental load consumes cognitive bandwidth, leading to decision fatigue.
It’s hard to find the energy to research investment options or negotiate a raise when you’re worried about making your next loan payment.
Your 2025 Action Plan – How to Become a Debt-Killing Machine
List and Confront: You cannot fight an enemy you cannot see. Open a spreadsheet and list every single debt you have: the creditor, the total balance, the minimum monthly payment, and the interest rate. This single act of radical honesty is the first step.
Choose Your Weapon: There are two primary strategies for debt payoff.
The Debt Snowball: You focus all extra payments on the smallest balance first, regardless of interest rate. Once it’s paid off, you roll that payment into the next smallest balance. This method is designed for psychological wins and motivation.
The Debt Avalanche: You focus all extra payments on the highest interest rate debt first. This method is mathematically optimal and will save you the most money in interest. Both work. Pick the one that you are most likely to stick with.
Use a Visual Planner: Gamify the process and give yourself a clear finish line. Simple, free web-based tools like Unbury.me can create a visual amortization schedule that shows you exactly when you’ll be debt-free.
For a more feature-rich experience with a motivating interface, the Debt Payoff Planner app is excellent. If you want deep customization and the ability to integrate with budgeting software like YNAB, Undebt.it is a powerful choice.
Unleash the Firehose: This is where the moves connect. All the money you freed up by engineering a high savings rate (Move 1) and all the extra income you’ll generate from side hustles (Move 3) gets aimed directly at your number one targeted debt.
Don’t just make extra payments; make massive, statement-shocking payments. Your goal is to extinguish the fire as quickly as possible.
Move 3: He Maximized His Income, Not His Lifestyle
Early in his career, Andrew noticed a pattern. His colleagues who stayed loyal to one company were rewarded with standard 3-5% annual raises, barely keeping pace with inflation.
Meanwhile, friends who switched companies every couple of years were seeing salary jumps of 20%, 30%, or even more. He decided to adopt the latter strategy. He treated himself as a free agent.
He worked hard, delivered results, and updated his resume every six months. Every two years, he strategically moved to a new role that offered a significant pay increase and new skills. In six years, he had three different employers, and his base salary more than doubled.
The Principle & The Proof – Offense is the Best Defense
Cutting your expenses is a powerful financial move, but it’s fundamentally a defensive strategy. There’s a floor to how much you can cut; you can’t reduce your spending to zero.
Maximizing your income, on the other hand, is pure offense, and its ceiling is virtually limitless. The path to F-You Money is fastest for those who play both offense and defense with equal intensity.
The data on side hustles is a testament to the power of playing offense. In 2025, the average millennial with a side hustle earns between $1,029 and $1,129 per month. That’s an extra $12,000 to $13,500 per year.
If invested, that sum alone, compounded over time, can build a formidable nest egg. Success stories from online financial independence communities frequently highlight that massive jumps in income, not just extreme frugality, were the primary accelerant to their goals.
Your 2025 Action Plan – How to Engineer Your Income Growth
Become a Perpetual Interviewer: Change your mindset from “job seeker” to “career manager.” Even if you love your current job, you should take at least one external interview every quarter.
This keeps your skills sharp, your network active, and gives you an undeniable, real-time benchmark of your market value. Knowledge is leverage.
Monetize Your Skills: Everyone has a marketable skill. Are you hyper-organized? You can be a virtual assistant. Are you great at social media? You can be a social media manager.
Do you have a way with words? You can be a freelance writer. Take that skill and package it as a service. Use platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to land your first few clients and build a portfolio.
Explore High-Value Side Hustles for 2025: Focus on services that are in high demand and offer good hourly rates. In 2025, these include virtual assistance, social media management for creators and small businesses, online tutoring, and graphic design.
These hustles often require minimal startup costs and can be done from anywhere.
Create an “Inflation-Proof” Rule: This is the most critical step. Make a binding, personal rule: 100% of all future raises, bonuses, and side hustle income is to be invested automatically.
This is the only foolproof way to prevent “lifestyle creep”—the natural tendency to increase your spending as your income grows. This single rule turns your income growth into a direct pipeline to your F-You Money fund.
Move 4: He Lived a Life of Radical Frugality (That He Actually Enjoyed)
Andrew’s biggest expenses, like everyone’s, were housing and transportation. So that’s where he made his most radical cuts. Instead of renting a trendy one-bedroom apartment downtown, he bought a modest duplex in a less-fashionable but safe neighborhood.
He lived in the small upstairs unit and rented out the larger downstairs unit. The rent from his tenant covered his entire mortgage, plus taxes and insurance. His housing cost was effectively zero.
This strategy, known as “house-hacking,” was the single most powerful financial move he ever made. Next was his car. His friends were leasing new SUVs and sedans, locking themselves into $500 monthly payments. He bought a 10-year-old, mechanically sound Ford Focus for $2,000 cash.
It wasn’t pretty, but it was reliable, cheap to insure, and got great gas mileage. By avoiding a car payment, he was freeing up $6,000 a year to invest.
These weren’t small tweaks; they were huge, strategic decisions that eliminated the two largest drains on a typical person’s income. His friends saw a guy living in a small apartment and driving a beater car. He saw a man whose freedom was accelerating at an incredible rate.
The Principle & The Proof – The Art of Intentional Spending
Radical frugality isn’t about deprivation, suffering, or reusing tea bags. It’s about intentional spending. It’s about ruthlessly cutting costs on the things that don’t bring you genuine, lasting joy so you can free up resources for the things that do.
It’s a direct application of Vicki Robin’s philosophy of viewing money as “life energy”. How many hours of your life are you willing to trade for that new car? For most people, the answer is far less than they are currently paying.
The proof of this strategy’s power lies in its focus. By attacking the “Big Three”—housing, transportation, and food—you can achieve massive savings without micromanaging every tiny purchase.
A single decision to live with a roommate or drive an old car can have a greater financial impact than a lifetime of clipping coupons. Real-life examples from early retirees consistently show that keeping housing costs exceptionally low is a cornerstone of a high savings rate.
Your 2025 Action Plan – How to Cut the Fat, Not the Fun
Attack the “Big Three”: Don’t sweat the lattes; focus on the lions. Brainstorm one “radical” but achievable change you could make in each of the three biggest spending categories:
Housing: Could you get a roommate? Move to a lower-cost-of-living area? Try house-hacking?
Transportation: Could you go car-free and use public transit or a bike? Could you sell your expensive car and buy a reliable $5,000 used car with cash?
Food: Could you commit to cooking 90% of your meals at home? Master five delicious, cheap, and healthy recipes that you can make in bulk.
Implement the 30-Day Rule: For any non-essential purchase over $100, do not buy it on impulse. Write it down on a list and wait 30 days. At the end of the 30 days, if you still genuinely want and need it, you can consider buying it. More often than not, the impulse will have vanished.
Track Your Fulfillment: Use a modern budgeting app like Monarch Money, which excels at tracking and categorizing past spending, to conduct a “spending audit”.
For one month, go through your discretionary spending and rate each purchase on a scale of 1-5 for the fulfillment it brought you.
Negotiate Everything: Once a year, schedule a “bill drill.” Call your cell phone, internet, and insurance providers. Be polite, state that you are shopping for better rates, and ask the retention department what they can do for you.
This one hour of calls can easily save you $50-$100 per month with zero change to your lifestyle.
Move 5: He Made His Investing “Boring” on Purpose
When Andrew first started investing, the noise was deafening. Friends were talking about crypto, meme stocks, and day trading. The financial news was a constant barrage of “hot tips” and predictions about the next big thing.
It was tempting to jump in, to try and outsmart the market and get rich quick. He made a conscious, deliberate choice to do the exact opposite. He decided to make his investment strategy as boring as humanly possible.
He opened a brokerage account, set up an automatic transfer for 70% of his paycheck, and directed it to buy just two things: a total U.S. stock market index fund and a total international stock market index fund. Then, he did the hardest part: nothing.
The Principle & The Proof – The Simple Path is the Surest Path
This entire strategy is a direct application of the philosophy of JL Collins’ groundbreaking book, The Simple Path to Wealth. His core thesis is elegantly simple: for the vast majority of individual investors, the best path to wealth is to consistently buy and hold a low-cost, broad-market index fund.
The proof is overwhelming. Over any significant time horizon, the stock market as a whole has always gone up. While it experiences terrifying crashes, it always recovers and reaches new highs.
Furthermore, study after study has shown that the vast majority of professional, actively managed mutual funds—run by highly paid experts—fail to beat their simple, passive index fund benchmarks over the long term.
As Collins argues, complex investments primarily exist to profit those who create and sell them, not those who buy them.
Your 2025 Action Plan – The “Set It and Forget It” Wealth Machine
Choose Your Brokerage: The barrier to entry for investing is now zero. Open an account with a low-cost, beginner-friendly brokerage. The top two choices for most people are Fidelity and Charles Schwab.
Both offer $0 account minimums, commission-free trading of stocks and ETFs, and the ability to buy fractional shares, which means you can get started with as little as $1. Both also have excellent educational resources for beginners.
Select Your “Boring” Fund: Don’t overcomplicate this. Your goal is to own a tiny piece of every major company. You can achieve this with a single fund.
Option A (The Collins Special): A Total U.S. Stock Market Index Fund ETF. The ticker symbol is VTI (from Vanguard) or SCHB (from Schwab).
Option B (Even Simpler): A Target-Date Index Fund. These funds (e.g., “Fidelity Freedom Index 2065 Fund”) automatically adjust their mix of stocks and bonds to become more conservative as you approach your target retirement date. It is a complete, diversified portfolio in a single fund.
Automate Your Investments: This is non-negotiable. Inside your brokerage account, set up a recurring, automatic investment for the day after every payday. This is dollar-cost averaging in its purest form.
You will automatically buy more shares when prices are low and fewer shares when prices are high. It removes emotion and timing from the equation.
Take the “Do Nothing” Pledge: The hardest part of this strategy is having the conviction to do nothing. When the market inevitably crashes, you must not sell. You must remember that you are a long-term investor, not a trader.
Frame these downturns not as a crisis, but as an opportunity: “the market is on sale.” Your automated investments will be buying up shares at a discount. This mindset is the key to long-term success.
Part 3: Life on the Other Side
The Real Payoff: Buying Back Your Time
So, what is life actually like with F-You Money at 28? It’s probably not what you think. I didn’t buy a Lamborghini or a Rolex. My life doesn’t look dramatically different on the outside. But on the inside, everything has changed.
The real payoff is the deafening silence of financial anxiety. It’s the complete and total death of the “Sunday scaries.” It’s the ability to wake up on a Monday morning and decide that the day is better spent on a long hike, reading a book in a coffee shop, or working on a passion project that may never make a dime.
Your Freedom Isn’t Extreme—It’s Essential
Your Freedom Isn’t Extreme—It’s Essential Looking back, his friends called his moves “extreme.” But he’s come to realize that his path wasn’t the extreme one.
What’s truly extreme is accepting a system where you trade the best five days of your week, for 50 years of your life, for a job you may not love, just to afford a lifestyle that doesn’t make you truly happy.
What’s extreme is normalizing a state of constant, low-grade financial stress and carrying thousands of dollars in high-interest debt as a fact of life. What’s extreme is having no control over your time, your most valuable asset.
His path wasn’t extreme; it was rational. It was an intentional choice in a system that often encourages irrational behavior. It was about aligning his actions with the simple, unyielding mathematics of wealth and freedom.
You don’t have to do all five of these things at once. But what if you picked just one? What if, for the next 90 days, you treated your debt like a house fire? What if you engineered a 25% savings rate?
What if you made your first “boring” investment of $100? Start with one move. Prove to yourself what’s possible. Your freedom is waiting.