How 2 couples cut housing costs to speed up their path to early retirement

There’s no one-size-fits-all path to early retirement.

Business Insider has spoken with dozens of people pursuing FIRE, or financial independence, retire early. Most know their numbers inside and out — annual spending, net worth, savings rate — but they use different strategies to reach their “FIRE number.”

For two couples, an unconventional approach to housing helped make that possible.

Josette Chang and Alexander Nathanson broke the “golden rule of mortgage payments” and paid off the mortgage on their New York City apartment years ahead of schedule. Even though they had a low 3.1% interest rate and what many personal finance experts would consider “good debt,” they decided to eliminate it for peace of mind.

By conventional personal finance standards, it was debt worth keeping: a low-rate loan that left room to invest elsewhere for potentially higher returns. But for Chang and Nathanson, returns weren’t everything.

“It was kind of a psychological weight we could get rid of,” Nathanson said.

Paying off the loan also significantly reduced their fixed costs, helping accelerate their path to financial independence. They still pay a co-op maintenance fee, but their largest monthly expense is gone.

“It’s not a free apartment,” he said, “but we’re like, we hacked into something.”

Chang left her finance job in 2024, while Nathanson, a physician, scaled back his hospital hours. He no longer works because he has to — the couple said they have enough in savings to sustain their lifestyle — but because he wants to.

For Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, homeownership was the dream for years, until Toronto home prices kept rising and they felt they might never be able to afford a place. Their frustration with the housing market pushed them to consider other options and ultimately led them to the FIRE community. They shifted their goal from homeownership to early retirement, and renting helped them get there.

“Buying a place means putting yourself into massive amounts of debt, which requires you to have a stable job for the next 25 to 30 years, and that kind of went away from our freedom values,” Leung said.

Instead, they stayed in a modest apartment for a decade.

“We didn’t upgrade our housing,” Shen said. “A lot of our friends were either buying houses or moving up to a two- or three-bedroom. We stayed in a one-bedroom on top of a townhouse, and our rent basically stayed the same for the 10 years that we lived there.”

Avoiding lifestyle creep as their incomes rose allowed them to save up to 70% of their earnings.

After hitting their FIRE number in 2015, Shen and Leung quit their jobs at 31 and 32 and began traveling the world. They’ve been living off their portfolio ever since. They’ve also earned income from their bestselling books, “Quit Like a Millionaire” and “Parent Like a Millionaire (Without Being One),” but said they do not rely on that money to sustain their lifestyle.

Though their strategies differed, both couples focused on housing to reduce one of the highest costs in any budget.

That’s a common strategy in the FIRE world: rather than obsessing over small discretionary purchases, many savers focus on trimming the “big three” expenses: housing, transportation, and food. Cutting those major recurring costs can free up far more money than skipping lattes or canceling a few subscriptions.

A common misconception about FIRE is that it requires deprivation, Shen said. “No, it’s about optimization, not minimization.”