How To Retire In 10 Years (Starting With $0)

What's up, Graham? It's guys here. So, this is a really interesting topic: how to retire in 10 years starting with zero dollars. This is something where, at the core, the concept is incredibly simple. In fact, it's so basic that I could probably summarize everything that you need to know about achieving financial independence in the next 15 minutes. Don't believe me? Well, just watch the video to see for yourself.

But as easy as that could be, you also have to ask yourself: if it's so simple, then why isn't everyone doing it? And why is it nearly impossible for 99.99% of the population? Well, that, unfortunately, is what we're going to be discussing because the reality is most people have no idea where to start, and they don't have the resources available to them to stick with it long enough to actually make it work.

So, let's break through the notion that retirement is something that's only available in your 60s and 70s, go over the exact blueprint that's given me complete financial independence in my 20s, and how you could replicate a similar strategy even if you're starting over today with zero dollars.

Step number one is to smash the like button for the YouTube algorithm. Okay, it's not going to help you retire, but if you appreciate the information, it does help out the channel tremendously, so thank you guys so much. Now, with that said, let's begin.

All right, number one: when it comes to increasing your net worth and being able to retire, contrary to popular belief, it makes no difference how much money you make. Of course, you might be thinking, "But Graham, you're an idiot! Of course money matters because if I made 10 million dollars right now, I'd be able to retire!"

But what most people don't realize is that when it comes to financial independence, it only matters how much of that income you get to save. At the end of the day, I can't tell you how many people I've seen making $250,000 a year living paycheck to paycheck with nothing to show for it because they spent it all on an expensive beachfront rental, a leased Ferrari, and a twenty-thousand-dollar vacation so that they could show off on Instagram.

On the other hand, I've also seen people making $80,000 a year who are able to save half of their income after taxes to the point where, over time, they're worth more than the other person making $750,000 a year. If you want to know the secret about how I was able to get to the point of being able to retire in my 20s, it was because I lived like I was broke.

No matter how much money I would make in a year, I spent the exact same amount consistently. I don't care if I made nothing in a month or a hundred thousand dollars in a month; my spending didn't change. I wear five-dollar shirts from H&M, I buy used cars that don't depreciate in value, and I bought a duplex so that I could live in one side and rent out the other to cover my cost.

I make food at home instead of going out to eat, and I always get my free stock down below in the description when you sign up for Public using the code GRAHAM, because that is worth all the way up to a thousand dollars. Okay, I guess this might be extreme, and it's not for everybody, but the reality is if this is going to work, you have to pay close attention to your spending and not so much your income.

And that is the first rule of being able to retire in 10 years: saving. What most people don't know is that based on your current income and expenses, you could calculate how long it's going to take you to retire based on your current savings rate in less than a minute.

For example, if you spend a hundred percent of your income, you're never going to be able to retire because you're always left over with nothing. However, if you save 25% of your income, you'll be able to retire in 32 years and maintain the current standard of living. If you save 50% of your income, you'll be able to retire in 17 years. If you save 70% of your income, you'll be able to retire in eight and a half years. You get the idea; the higher the percentage of income that you save, the faster you could reach financial independence and the faster you could do whatever you want.

Now, when it comes to myself, even before I found out about early retirement and financial independence, I was naturally a saver and a very frugal person. I never saw the point of wasting money or buying things you don't need, and instead, I prefer the mobility of having my money invested in the event I would ever need it.

There's a saying out there that's kind of basic, and I heard it a while ago, but it's so true: the rich stay rich by living like they're poor, and the poor stay poor by living like they're rich. That's basically the approach that I took, and after three and a half years, I was able to save up enough money to buy my first rental property for sixty thousand dollars.

And that was the exact moment it clicked! All of a sudden, my savings had a tangible benefit, and that made me realize that if I could do it once, I could repeat those same steps and eventually make enough money to cover all of my living expenses. And so, I did.

Although, speaking of your expenses, that leads us to next: cutting back for the sake of saving more money and moving up your retirement timeline. Especially in the next 10 years, you must do anything possible to save more money and live below your means. Remember: for every five percent of extra income that you save, you'll be able to retire up to several years earlier, so every little bit counts.

Most people hear this and think of cutting back as an episode of Extreme Cheapskates or think that I want them to sell their car, bike to work, live in the middle of nowhere, and grow your own food to live off the grid. And yeah, that's certainly gonna help. But I'm in the mindset that you don't need to go to such wild extremes to save money, and there are plenty of ways to cut back without staying inside and never leaving the house.

For example, the biggest expense we all have is housing, which can sometimes consume up to half of your income. However, there's a much better option that would allow you to cut back or even save on this entirely, and that's what's known as house hacking. This is when you buy a multi-family property like a duplex, Triplex, or four-plex, and then you move in one side to rent out the others. You can also buy a single-family home with a guest house or maybe a basement that you could rent out to lower your cost of living.

Now, typically, when done right, the other units will cover the entire cost of owning the building, and all of a sudden, you got a free place to stay! Now, in order to do this, you do have to save up a 10 to 20 percent down payment, but you could leverage that payment for pretty much free housing for the rest of your life. Plus, even if you don't have the down payment right now, no worries!

You could also cut down on your cost of living by rent hacking, where you rent a house and then sublease out the bedrooms to cover your cost. Even though you're not going to own the place, you could still save the difference and apply that money towards some of the next steps that we're about to discuss.

In terms of everything else, though, the other ways to save money are pretty straightforward. Instead of driving around a newer car that depreciates like a rock, drive a reliable used car that isn't going to go down much in value. If you're interested in travel, learn to utilize credit card sign-up bonuses as a way to cover your cost of flights and hotels. Make food at home instead of going out. If you want to go shopping, wait for the item you want to go on sale. No one knows the difference between a five-dollar shirt and a fifty-dollar shirt. In fact, to this day, I've still worn the same shirt for the last five years, and, uh, this one just gets better with age.

All right, it probably needs to be replaced, but, uh, I'm still wearing it. On top of that, there is one more way that you could save money: anytime you see something that you want to buy, just wait a week to buy it. I found, at least for myself, 95% of the time, the desire to own something goes away after about a day or two. So, just by waiting it out, you'll be able to better understand the purchases that will actually make a long-standing difference.

After that, third, if you want to retire in 10 years, you absolutely have to stay away from high-interest rate debt. This is the kryptonite of financial independence, and it goes hand in hand with cutting back and saving. But most people don't realize just how much high-interest rate credit card, medical debt, and student loans hold you back.

For example, you'll need to make 15 to 20 percent of your money every single year just to break even on most unsecured debt, which realistically is not going to happen. If anything, debt like this pulls you further and further away from your goal. So, in order to retire, high-interest rate debt like this cannot exist in your entire financial ecosystem.

For myself, I make sure to never carry a credit card balance. I never finance anything I cannot afford, and I stay away from any debt that's not a low-interest fixed-rate tax-deductible loan on either a car or a mortgage that's under four percent. To me, the only acceptable debt is something that makes you more money by not paying it off, like having a three percent mortgage on a rental property that makes nine percent or taking out a two percent car loan when inflation is seven and a half percent.

In those situations, taking on debt could actually accelerate your path to financial independence, but unless that debt is attached to an asset that's making you money, it's probably best to stay away. And fourth, besides cutting back and saving, which is ultimately the foundation of financial independence, if you want to retire in 10 years, you're also going to have to invest.

This is another very simple one in practice, and even though hour-long stock analysis exists on YouTube going over every detail imaginable, for most people, the optimal way to invest is to simply: one, take advantage of your 401k, Roth IRA, and HSA accounts because those save you money in taxes; two, invest consistently long-term—just take a set percent, manage your paycheck, and throw it into the investments no matter what; three, do not try to time the market. Regardless of what the price is trading at, invest in a low-fee or free index fund that covers the entire market. Vanguard, Schwab, and Fidelity all offer really competitive rates, so take advantage of it; and five, just wait. Let the markets do their thing, and long-term prices tend to trend up.

However, in terms of how long this is going to take you and how to accelerate that timeline, here's where things get slightly more difficult. If you're starting out with zero dollars and your goal is to retire in 10 years, then you're either going to have to make a lot of money or spend very little money—pick one.

For example, if you're making seventy thousand dollars a year, you could theoretically retire in 10 years if you live off twenty-one thousand dollars and consistently invest the difference. That'll allow you to live indefinitely with the same lifestyle after those 10 years. And, of course, you could always pick up a side job to make even more money, or you don't even have to stop working if you don't want to. But you would never be obligated or need to work as long as you kept spending the same amount of money.

As you can see, without making any more money, your ability to retire in 10 years is entirely dependent on your ability to save 65 percent of your income for an entire decade. And if you could do that, then voila, mission accomplished!

But assuming that you don't want to live off the bare minimum and you want to live a middle-class lifestyle after 10 years, then the truth is you're likely not going to get there by working a traditional job unless that job is paying you a ton of money. Now, if you are making a lot of money, then congratulations! Then it just comes down to you living frugally, saving 65% for 10 years, and you're done.

Although for everyone else out there who wants a shot at retiring in 10 years and making a lot of money, my advice is to work a career that pays you based on results and not on your time. The biggest problem that I see with getting paid with your time is that there's only 24 hours in a day. So eventually, you're going to hit a ceiling in terms of how many hours you're able to work and how much money you're able to make.

On the other hand, if you get paid on results, not on your time, then hypothetically, you should be able to find ways to streamline that to make more money without working any harder. I'll take myself as an example: I started working as a real estate agent. How many hours I worked was totally irrelevant. I only got paid when I sold a house, and that gave me way more leverage to make more money because I could focus only on the houses that I could sell the fastest and the best area to make the most money.

Even here on YouTube, it's the exact same. Work for me to make a video that reaches 10 subscribers versus a video that reaches a million subscribers. The work really doesn't change. Now I'm making significantly more without necessarily increasing my workload. It's really essential to work in a career that you could leverage what you do to make more money without spending more time.

The second one of the ideas that really stuck out to me in the book "The Millionaire Fastlane" was just this: think like a creator, not like a consumer. Instead of watching YouTube videos, go and make YouTube videos. Instead of buying t-shirts online, go and make t-shirts online. Instead of not subscribing, you should try subscribing! You get the idea—you need to begin creating value and building something, not consuming it. Except for this YouTube channel, that's the exception.

And since everybody likes specifics with real numbers, here you go: if you're 20 years old and you want to spend 50,000 dollars a year in retirement by the age of 30, then you will need one million six hundred and fifty thousand dollars invested. That works out to you needing to invest ninety-three thousand dollars a year and average an eight percent return on your money in order to hit that goal.

If you could find a way to average a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar income before taxes and live off twenty-two thousand dollars a year throughout your twenties, you could retire in ten years. Now, some investments might help speed this up depending on how involved you want to be, like with real estate. If you're able to save fifty thousand dollars, you could use that towards buying and renovating a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar home. If you find the right deal, a strategic renovation could increase that property's value to three hundred thousand dollars and within a year you've doubled your initial investment, giving you a great property now to rent out.

If you're able to do that every 18 to 24 months, you could hit that retirement goal fairly quickly. If this seems far-fetched to do on an eighty thousand dollar income, this is literally the example of Mike Rosehart, who I had on my channel a few years ago. He's a prime example of someone who grew to a million-dollar portfolio while working a day job without a crazy income. He just lived extremely frugally, saved everything, learned to do the work himself, and by the age of 25, he had a net worth of a million dollars.

But fine, what about everyone else who doesn't make about fifty thousand dollars a year? Because, let's be real, if you're already saving as much as you can and you have no discretionary income left over, then the only focus is that you have to increase your income at minimum by learning a new skill, shopping yourself around the job market, or taking on a side hustle.

At the end of the day, retiring in 10 years is all about the numbers. And even though your spending tends to be the easiest to control and point you in the right direction, your income is the speed at which you hit that target. So, by lowering your spending while increasing your income, you could work backwards to a target retirement date in 10 years without being any more complicated than that.

I know some of this might be like, "Duh, Graham, tell me something that I don't know," but this is the truth: you must make enough money to be able to save 65% to 90% of your income for an entire decade. And at the core, that's how you're going to be able to retire in 10 years.

I was able to do this through a combination of living very frugally, slowly increasing my income over a hundred thousand dollars a year, and never increasing my cost of living until I had enough money invested to be able to sustain it for the rest of my life. I understand that it's not for everybody, and the idea of retirement sounds miserable to some people, but for me, that just means I have the choice to pursue the work projects and passions that I'm the most excited about—not that I'm going to stop working entirely to then just relax all day and do nothing.

To me, that's what early retirement is all about: if that's making more money, great! If it's spending all day on YouTube, that's fine too. But at least the choice is yours, and after 10 years of continuous non-stop work, I could say it's absolutely worth it.

So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching! Also, feel free to add me on my second channel, "The Graham Stephan Show." I post there every single day I'm not posting here. So if you want to see a brand new video from me every single day, make sure to add yourself to that. Thank you guys so much for watching, and until next time!