These parents retired in their 30s and 40s while raising young kids. Here's how they pulled it off.

By Venessa Wong

 'FIRE' can be a realistic goal for parents stressed by the financial and mental burden of raising children - if they start early enough 

 A new generation of money-minded parents is urging young people who want to start families to map a path to early financial independence so they can prioritize their families. 

 Andy Hill was working 50-hour weeks, and regularly traveling for his job. Despite earning a household income of $130,000, his and his wife's net worth was negative due to student loans, a car loan and an underwater mortgage. The newlyweds decided they needed a change before having kids. 

 "We wanted to have more time with our future family and not work as much," he told MarketWatch. 

 With that decision, Hill and his wife went through the difficult transition of cutting their spending to save and invest about 50% of their income over the next decade - even after they had two children. In 10 years, their investable assets had grown to about $500,000, and their net worth had increased to $1 million - a point at which they determined they could stop saving for retirement and both work three days a week to support their day-to-day expenses in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. 

 "That offers us four days to just go back to living life, have more time with each other, and spend more time with our kids," now ages 14 and 11, he said. 

 Hill was following a typical playbook for "FIRE," an acronym for the "financial independence, retire early" movement. As the concept gained traction among high-income workers who closely follow their personal finances, it had largely been written off as impossible for those with the costly responsibility of supporting kids - especially if they intended to help pay for college. 

 Yet the benefits of early financial independence are obvious to American parents, who are more stressed than other adults, due in part to financial strain and time demands, a U.S. Surgeon General report found. Many families struggle to afford basic needs like housing, child care, health insurance, groceries and utilities. Lack of support, both structurally and culturally, for families has been a factor leading adults to delay having children or to have fewer kids than they want. Such issues can be - at least in some cases - mitigated by having wealth. 

 A new generation of money-minded parents is now urging young people who want to start families to map out a path to early financial independence, so they can avoid the trap that a preponderance of people with kids end up in: having too little time and money. They argue that some degree of FIRE is achievable for many parents - if they start investing early enough to let decades of compounding work in their families' favor. 

 Andy Hill and his wife saved 50% of their income. When their net worth reached $1 million, they quit their full-time jobs to spend more time with their kids. 

 Already, people have started investing at younger ages as personal-finance education becomes more common in the U.S. (30 states now require it.) And more Americans are seeking paths outside of their jobs to achieve their goals, as incomes fail to keep up with the cost of living. 

 Related: Teens turn to investing to build a new path to the American dream. 'My goal is to live comfortably.' 

 "The first five to 10 years of your career are disproportionately powerful. If a household can maintain a 40% to 60% savings rate before kids arrive, compounding does a lot of the heavy lifting later," Sam Dogen, founder of the blog Financial Samurai and author of "Millionaire Milestones," told MarketWatch. Dogen quit his finance job at age 34 with $3 million and then had two children. 

 While raising kids has its costs, financial planner and author Jackie Cummings Koski noted that some DINKs - a term for households with "dual income, no kids" - tend to spend "way more" than households with two children. Cummings Koski, a single parent who herself retired with a $1.2 million portfolio at age 49 after aggressively investing for 15 years, supported herself and her teen daughter on about $40,000 to $45,000 during that time and saved the other 30% to 40% of her income. "The broad statement that you can't reach FIRE with kids is just not true," she said. 

 Jackie Cummings Koski started saving 30% to 40% of her income as a single parent when her daughter was a teen. She retired early with $1.2 million. 

 Pulling back on spendable income means families have a smaller margin of error if things go wrong, and may compromise the level of financial support parents can offer college-bound or adult children. But "there are some valuable traits of the FIRE movement that can help positively shape a young person's thinking about money and personal finance," Cummings Koski said. "Upon reflection, I wish I would have [retired earlier] or slowed down while [my daughter] was still younger." 

 For Andy Hill, financial independence meant growing his and his wife's invested assets to $500,000 by age 40, and becoming debt free. Following a strategy known as "coast FIRE" - a version of a financial-independence strategy in which you invest aggressively early on in order to stop saving, and then "coast" in a less demanding job until you hit retirement age - they estimated those assets would compound to $2 million by retirement age without any additional contributions. They paid off their mortgage, set aside enough money in 529 accounts to partially fund their children's college educations, and left their corporate jobs. 

 Read more: How the U.S. economy became so hostile to parents - and who benefits 

 Hill, now age 44, details his strategies for parents in his new book, "Own Your Time," and on his podcast, "Marriage Kids and Money." Shifting to part-time work - Hill as a content creator and financial coach, and his wife as a newly trained esthetician - led their household income to fall 33%, from $180,000 to $120,000. This covers their living expenses, taxes and short-term savings for things like vacations. This year, a significant share is also going to $1,400 monthly premiums for health insurance, up from $600 in previous years after the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. 

 Their spending is not so different from the typical married couple with kids in the U.S., who had an average income of $168,000 and spent an average $114,000, according to 2024 federal data. Thanks to a strong stock market, Hill's household net worth, including home equity, has shot up to more than $2 million. 

 Related: They raced to retire decades early - but soaring health-insurance costs are wrecking their plans 

 Other financially independent parents are sharing similar stories in books, blogs and podcasts to provide an alternative to the high-cost, high-stress reality most families find themselves in. 

 The median financial assets of couples with children in the U.S. were $62,500 in 2022, according to the most recent data from the Federal Reserve - well below the numbers needed for meaningful financial independence. 

 While FIRE is not a realistic goal for lower-income families who cannot save at the high rates required to accumulate wealth quickly - and requires a lot of things to go according to plan - the self-made wealthy argue that with a clear plan and a willingness to diverge from mainstream expectations, many parents can create a freer, more enjoyable family life than they might think is possible. 

 'Kids are definitely not cheap, but they're not as expensive as North American society makes them out to be.'Kristy Shen, author and parent 

 Canadian couple Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung were earning a combined $160,000 from their engineering jobs when they retired in their early 30s with a $1 million portfolio in 2015. For years, they lived nomadically, spending time in some high-cost countries that they offset with time in low-cost countries. While many would assume such a lifestyle to be incompatible with having a baby, they carried on after their son was born in 2023, using credit-card points and free home exchanges. 

 Defying the shocking estimates of how much it costs to raise a child in the U.S. to age 18 - more than $300,000, according to the USDA - Shen and Leung stayed retired after having a baby by opting out of many costs associated with having a family, which they discuss in their new book, "Parent Like a Millionaire." They have kept their annual expenses with a child to about $65,000 to $70,000. For Shen, who grew up poor in rural China, this buys a more-than-comfortable lifestyle. 

 Retired couple Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung have kept their annual expenses with a child to about $65,000 to $70,000, which has allowed their net worth to grow to nearly $3 million. 

 Parents often get roped into expenses that add little value to their lives because they see it all as being part of giving their child "the best," Shen told MarketWatch. This is only made worse by the fact that "everything in North America is so expensive." 

 One of the most impactful decisions she and her husband made was to continue renting a one-bedroom apartment while their child is small - and holding off on renting a larger space - rather than using their money to buy a home, as many new parents do. "The longer you can live in your current home and only upgrade the space as your child grows, the more money you save and can invest in a portfolio that pays for your living expenses," they wrote in their book. 

 Shen and Leung live in areas with public transit, so they do not have to buy and maintain a car. 

 And they buy their baby stuff secondhand, as these goods depreciate faster than clothing, cars and electronics, they note. Shen bought a used bassinet - which retails for $300 new - for $30, for example. 

 Their spending on their son in his first year was less than one-third of the USDA's $17,500 estimated annual cost. "Kids are definitely not cheap, but they're not as expensive as North American society makes them out to be," Shen said. 

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