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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

By keeping their major expenses low — especially housing and transportation — Shen and Leung’s net worth has grown to about $2.9 million in the decade after leaving their day jobs to run their site, Millennial Revolution, and write books.

Other parents agree that with an early-enough start on investing, different versions of financial independence can be possible by the time a person is raising a family. Erin Moriarity started saving and investing in her teens, and was “aggressively chasing FIRE” as a young adult “through very traditional behaviors: working, budgeting, and saving and investing,” she told MarketWatch. By age 30, she had built a seven-figure net worth.

More on this: A college grad earning $62K can have $1 million in just 10 years, podcasters say. Experts think it’s actually a solid plan.

Now, at age 38 with a toddler, Moriarity no longer wants to retire early — she owns a business that services dental practices and hosts the “Erin Talks Money” YouTube channel. She said a comfortable life in Naperville, Ill., costs about $120,000 annually, but the financial independence she earned by building wealth before having a child offers her rare freedom as a parent. In three years, her husband will also be eligible to retire with benefits from the military, giving him the flexibility to be a stay-at-home parent or train for a new career if he chooses.

“The whole point is that you get to try something that you’ve always wanted to try, and your entire survival is not hinging on it,” Moriarity said.

For many parents, FIRE “isn’t really about retiring at 40. It’s about buying the flexibility to prioritize your family over your boss and clients,” and “building enough financial independence so work becomes optional and family becomes the priority,” said Dogen of Financial Samurai.

He said the most important factors in being able to stay financially independent with a family are minimizing your housing costs — for instance, by moving to a lower-cost part of your city or renting out part of your home to generate income — deciding whether your public-school district meets your needs (private school “can easily move a family’s FIRE number by $1 million to $2 million,” he noted), and being careful not to overspend on enrichment programs and activities for your children “out of guilt or social comparison.”

However, parents who want to “help secure their children’s financial future,” in addition to their own financial futures, will find saving enough for both to be “extremely difficult,” Dogen added.

Scott Trench, co-host of the “BiggerPockets Money” podcast and author of “Set For Life,” also cautioned that while many people on the path to FIRE aim to max out their retirement accounts, it is important that they also contribute to an after-tax brokerage account that can be easily accessed at any age. Trench became financially independent by age 27 and now has two children.

“My advice is to, for a period of two to five years, deprioritize the 401(k) and instead build after-tax liquidity. Then, once that builds to about $250,000 to $500,000 or so, resume maxing the 401(k) for the rest of the career,” Trench told MarketWatch.

Parents will “feel the flexibility and freedom that after-tax wealth enables” if, for instance, they wish to start a business or have one spouse work less or retire, he said. From a tax perspective, because withdrawals on the brokerage account are taxed as capital gains and not ordinary income, the household “may even come out ahead from a long-term tax perspective,” he noted.

Whether they are traveling the world, pursuing a new creative interest or simply free to pick up their children from school, parents with some degree of financial independence are able to exercise greater control over their family’s time.

“We’re living life more intentionally than before,” Hill said. “This feels right.”

Last Monday, Hill and his wife had coffee after dropping their kids off at school and then went for a three-mile run together. They had lunch, and meal-prepped for the week. In the afternoon, they carpooled their children and friends to a wrestling match at 3:30 p.m., and “enjoyed watching our son compete without nervously checking our phones for work emails,” Hill said. In the evening, they made and ate dinner together as a family, watched Netflix with the kids, and went to sleep.

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