Hey Daniel Vassallo, nice article! Makes me want to stop freelancing and get a tech-industry job if salaries are that high. I am struggling to make $10,000 annually as a freelance technical writer despite having the skills to get a junior engineering job at a major tech firm.

If your lifestyle still included spending $75K annually (your first year’s salary), then you were able to save 85% of $511K, sufficient to hit financial independence in four years.

Since you were working 8 years, how much lifestyle inflation did you have that there is now any risk of running out of savings?

My question is that you can retire early (i.e. become financially independent) after 4 years with an 85% savings rate — so how could you possibly be in a situation where you might “run out of savings”?

All the more so because if you aren’t working at Amazon, you can move out of a high cost-of-living area. Even without expatriating, $75K annually is huge, more than most physical therapists make (after 7 years of post-secondary education and usually $130K-$200K student loan debt).