I’m writing this from my desk in Longmont, Colorado. I work full time. I like my house, and I like my life.
Meanwhile, a recent podcast guest Julie B. Rose spent the last few months in Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, and when we talked she was in the Philippines. She left her corporate job around 2021 with about $500,000 invested. That’s well short of a traditional FI number, and she isn’t trying to get there. She does a little work she enjoys, her investments keep growing, and she spends her time somewhere new.
That’s Barista FIRE. It’s one of the most misunderstood paths in the FI world, so I want to walk through what it is, how Julie’s numbers work, and what you’d need to figure out before trying it yourself.
What Barista FIRE Means
Traditional FIRE says you save until your investments can cover 100% of your spending, usually 25 times your annual expenses, and then you’re done working.
Barista FIRE says you save enough to cover a basic life, or enough that your portfolio can grow on its own, and then you earn the rest with work that’s flexible, part time, or just plain fun. The name comes from the idea of taking a part-time coffee shop job for the health insurance. In practice, most people do something closer to their own interests.
Julie calls her version “financial independence, recreational employment,” and I love it. She works as an independent contractor with a travel agency, designing trips and hosting small group trips. If a client wants something she’s not excited about, she passes it to another advisor. If she wants more free time, she takes fewer clients. She never has to take a job because the rent is due.
That flexibility is the whole point. Her paycheck isn’t keeping her afloat. It’s letting her portfolio sit there and grow.
The Math Behind Julie’s Barista FIRE
Here are her real numbers.
When she quit, Julie’s net worth was right around $500,000. When we recorded in March 2025, after a rough couple of months in the market, it was about $515,000. She checks it every couple of months and doesn’t lose sleep over the dips.
Her spending has crept up as she’s settled into nomad life. Her first year after quitting, she spent about $27,000. The next year was around $34,000 to $35,000. Last year was $40,000.
Under the 4% rule, $515,000 supports about $20,600 a year in spending. That’s half of what she spends, which is why she still works. Her income covers roughly 80% of her expenses, and she pulls the rest from her brokerage account. That means she’s withdrawing well under 2% of her portfolio a year, and the rest keeps compounding.
This is the part people miss about Barista FIRE. You can quit your full-time job with a smaller number because you aren’t asking your portfolio to carry the whole load. Every year your side income covers your bills is another year your investments grow untouched. Do that for a decade, and a $500,000 portfolio can turn into a full FI number without another dollar of contributions.
Your Job Is Less Secure Than You Think
Julie didn’t stumble into FI because she loved spreadsheets. She got there because she was laid off. Twice.
Her first job out of college was in a big-market TV newsroom, paying $33,000 a year. She celebrated by buying a $22,000 car and renting a $750 apartment. Then her first paycheck arrived, and she met FICA. The math didn’t work, so she picked up a second job opening the cafe at a fitness club at 5 a.m.
About 18 months in, during the Great Recession, the newsroom laid her off with two weeks of severance. She moved back in with her parents until a better job came through in Phoenix.
You’d think that would’ve been the wake-up call. It wasn’t. The new job paid more, so she went right back to buying new clothes every month and hosting dinner parties to show her friends she was moving up. (If you remember Pampered Chef and Lia Sophia parties, you know exactly what she means.)
It took a second layoff to make it stick. This time she was out of work for five months, but she had four months of severance. She used that time to backpack through Europe for a month with nothing but a carry-on. She walked everywhere and took buses, and somewhere along the way she realized she owned way too much stuff and was working for the wrong things.
The lesson here is pretty simple. Build a cushion before you need it. A paycheck can disappear with one meeting, and having no emergency fund turns a setback into a crisis.
Get Comfortable Letting Go of Stuff
When Julie got back from Europe, she taught herself about investing through the usual FI books and blogs. She cut her spending, kept raising her income with each job change, and got into side hustles.
Her biggest side hustle came from a breakup. She’d met someone in Europe and planned to move there, so she listed her three-bedroom Phoenix house on the vacation rental market. She booked a four-month rental. Then he dumped her.
So she moved into a backyard studio casita for about $800 a month and rented out her house during Phoenix’s busy winter tourist season, from roughly Christmas to Easter. She did that for three seasons, from 2018 through 2020. She also bartended at the Phoenix Open golf tournament, consigned her stuff, and walked dogs. Every extra dollar went into her investments.
Her friends were horrified. Strangers were sleeping in her bed! Using her brand new kitchen! Julie’s response: she changed the sheets, and she wasn’t taking the kitchen with her when she died.
She says that sense of detachment was worth more than the rental income. Anyone who wants to retire early, live with less, or move around needs to separate who they are from what they own. Once she stopped seeing her house as proof that she’d made it, selling it was easy. She sold it in mid-2020 at her asking price and never looked back. (She also didn’t miss explaining to vacation renters how to flush the toilet.)
Fill More Than One Bucket
On the show, Scott and I have been talking a lot about The Middle Class Trap, which we’ve rebranded into The Deferral Dilemma. You do everything right and become a millionaire on paper, but all your money is in home equity and your traditional retirement accounts like a 401(k). You want to retire early but can’t easily access your funds.
Julie avoided that by spreading her savings around. For three or four years, she maxed out her 401(k) and grabbed her employer’s match. She maxed out her Roth IRA. Everything else went into a taxable brokerage account. She mostly bought broad index funds, with a few individual stocks like Costco and Microsoft mixed in, which she’s since cleaned up.
That gives her money she can reach at different times. The brokerage account is available whenever she needs it. Roth IRA contributions can come out tax and penalty free. Her 401(k) can wait until she’s older, and it’s still growing.
During her first year and a half of sabbatical, when she had almost no earned income, Julie also did a Roth conversion. Moving money from a pretax account into a Roth during a low-income year means you pay tax at a low rate now, and that money grows tax free from then on. It’s one of the best perks of a low-income year. It also raises your income on paper, which matters for the next topic.
Cost of Living vs. Standard of Living
Julie spends about $40,000 a year traveling the world. Back in 2019 and 2020, when she was still in Phoenix and watching her spending carefully, she spent $50,000 to $55,000.
Her money mostly goes to flights, places to stay, and food. She isn’t roughing it. She drinks beer and wine, eats out, and gets coffee from a local cafe instead of Starbucks. She’s just intentional, because every dollar spent on one thing can’t be spent on another.
She put it better than I can: her cost of living is lower, but her standard of living isn’t.
When people say they can’t afford to travel, Julie flips it around. She thinks a lot of people can’t afford to live in the US. Given what I’ve watched prices do lately, I’m not sure she’s wrong.
The Healthcare Question
Healthcare is usually the first objection I hear about early retirement, and it’s even bigger for someone living abroad. Julie has settled on a three-part setup, and she says it costs her about $40 a month all in.
First, she has an ACA plan. Her income is low, so her premium is tiny. She uses it during the four to six weeks a year she spends back in the US for checkups and prescriptions.
Second, she carries travel medical insurance. That covers emergencies abroad and can get her evacuated back to the US if something serious happens.
Third, she pays out of pocket for routine care overseas. In many countries, care is a fraction of US prices. She has friends who’ve gotten care in Mexico from English-speaking doctors, many trained in the US, who actually sat down and talked with them instead of rushing them out the door.
Julie is clear that this works for her because she’s relatively young and healthy. If you have ongoing health conditions, your setup will look different.
I’d add a caution for anyone planning around ACA subsidies. The enhanced tax credits that had lowered ACA costs for most enrollees expired at the start of 2026, so premiums are higher than they were a few years ago. Low-income enrollees still get help, but if your income bounces around like Julie’s, be careful. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act also removed the repayment caps that used to protect lower-income filers from paying back large amounts of excess advance premium tax credits. If you underestimate your income, including income from a Roth conversion, you could owe a lot back at tax time. Our Healthcare Projection Calculator at biggerpocketsmoney.com/healthcarecosts/ assumes no subsidies on purpose, so it’s a good place to stress test your plan.
Do You Need a FI Number?
I asked Julie if she’s working toward a FI number. She isn’t.
She tries to make smart decisions, but she doesn’t spend her energy spinning up worst-case scenarios. She’s been the person who obsessed over every possible outcome, and she’s much happier now. In 10 years, she’ll look at her numbers again and decide whether anything needs to change.
I’m a planner, so part of me wants to hand her a spreadsheet. But think about her situation. She enjoys her work. Her portfolio grows nearly untouched. She can earn more anytime she wants by saying yes to a few more clients. She already has the life a FI number is supposed to buy.
You Don’t Have to Go Nomad
Full-time travel isn’t on my bucket list. There are places I want to see, and New Zealand and Australia are high on the list, but I want to come home afterward. I like my bed.
Julie gets that. She hosts mini sabbatical group trips for people who want a taste of long-term travel while they’re still working. She also points out that we can’t all quit at once, because somebody has to do the work.
Barista FIRE doesn’t require living out of a backpack in the Philippines. It can mean leaving a stressful job for a part-time one you love, consulting a few months a year, or turning a hobby into a small income stream. The structure is the same: save enough that your portfolio can grow without you, and earn enough to cover the gap doing something you’d almost do for free.
Julie writes about all of this, including her spending reports and her romantic misadventures, at juliedevivre.com. It’s a play on joie de vivre, and it fits.
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