Last year, Regina Moore, a 37-year-old pharmacist who lives in rural Oregon, became “financially independent” — she has enough money saved and invested that she no longer needs to work to support her family. But she’s not a multimillionaire, an heiress, or a tech employee who got lucky with stock options; instead, she and her spouse live frugally in order to set aside a major chunk of her income. (Her husband left his career a decade ago and became a stay-at-home dad when their son was born.)
Moore is what’s known as “Lean FIRE,” a subset of the FIRE (“financial independence, retire early”) community that focuses on saving enough to meet basic needs (a “lean” lifestyle) without additional income. Here, she talks about resisting peer pressure to splurge, how she paid off debt, and the new goals she’s making now that she’s reached the $1 million savings milestone.
What got you interested in pursuing early retirement? Was there a moment that catalyzed it?
On some level, I have always intended to have a work-optional lifestyle, but I didn’t think I would see it come to fruition as early as it has. Back in high school, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with my life. There was never a dream job that I wanted. Instead, I wanted to be able to pay my bills. My father is a pharmacist, so I saw that as an example of a well-paying job that was fairly flexible.
I’m from Nevada, and I started planning to become a pharmacist while I was still in high school. I took night classes and summer classes so that I could graduate early. I got scholarships to undergrad, and I had in-state tuition at a cheap school. I started pharmacy school when I was 19 and graduated with my doctorate in 2010, at 23. I was the youngest in my class. I just had a really singular focus — I wanted to get it done. I had no idea what life was going to look like afterwards, but I knew I’d have a degree that generally gets people pretty good jobs, and I’d figure out the rest from there.
What gave you that motivation? Did your upbringing around money have anything to do with it?
Sometimes I wish I still had that motivation! I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. My parents are divorced. My mother is low-income; she receives government assistance. My dad came from a military family. We shopped at thrift stores when I was a kid. Then I went to live with my grandparents when I was 13. The child-support money went to them, and they gave me a portion of it to buy my clothes, my bus pass, and some of my groceries. I figured out pretty quickly how to do my best to stretch my money and always have something saved. I always had a place to stay and food to eat, but I was much more on my own than a lot of kids at a young age, I think.
What did your life look like after you graduated?
I did have some student loans, about $30,000 in total, and I paid them off in my first year out of school. I worked two jobs, one managing a pharmacy and the other doing swing shifts at a hospital. I made the most money I’ve ever made in my life that year, about $180,000; most of that came from the pharmacy job, and the hospital shifts paid about $20,000. That income enabled me to become debt-free and start saving. I started investing in my 401(k) up to the match as soon as I was eligible, too.
All I did was work and commute to work. I didn’t have time to spend any money. I had some musician friends, so I would go see their shows and hang out with them occasionally, but I wasn’t really going to bars or things like that. I moved in with my now-husband, who I met in high school. We got married that year. We self-funded our wedding and honeymoon, and both were very low-cost.
My husband has always been frugal too. He experienced homelessness as a teenager and vowed to never let that ever happen again. He was blue-collar, not a high earner — I think the most he ever made was probably about $24 an hour — but he always saved. He had an emergency fund, and our priorities were very much aligned.
I think of your teens and 20s as a time where you’re very much influenced by the spending habits of your peers. How did you manage to inoculate yourself from that?
When I was graduating from pharmacy school, it was really common for my classmates to go out and buy an expensive car, like a Lexus. Given the profession, they were able to get loans pretty easily. Some were even buying houses. And I just wanted to do the opposite. I know this sounds weird, but I’m pretty anti-Establishment. I don’t go with the flow. If you try to pressure me, I’ll go the other way. My husband is similar. We both have an anti-consumerist streak.
That said, I did buy a PlayStation 3 right after I graduated. It was about $250. So that was what a splurge looked like for me, even though I was bringing home at least $10,000 a month between my two jobs.
How long did you make that kind of money, and why did you decide to start working less?
I worked two jobs until 2013, when we bought a house in Oregon and moved there. We wanted to live in a different state, and that’s when I started getting more active in the deeper personal-finance stuff. We were frugal already, but I didn’t have a lot of models for other people who were choosing to live that way. I began reading blogs about personal finance and started my own, too. That’s when I realized that living frugally can be a normal thing to do long-term, beyond just trying to pay off my debt and save for a house.
We could have easily gone the other way, though. When we were looking to buy property, we were under contract to buy a house that kept creeping up in cost. At first, it was supposed to be about $475,000, and then some issues came up and it was getting closer to $600,000, which was the maximum that we were approved to finance. Finally we pulled out because of multiple red flags, and we felt so much relief that it made us realize we didn’t want to spend anywhere near that much. It was a reset, to dodge a bullet like that. We had gotten caught up in that trap that a lot of people get stuck in, where you’re living at the upper limit of your means, and we never want to be there. So we wound up buying a property that was less than half that amount, which made us much more comfortable.
I also took a pay cut when we moved. Wages are lower here in Oregon, and I was working less, and there’s state income tax, unlike Nevada. My gross wages were still about $115,000 a year, but I also became the sole earner. We decided that my husband would stop working when we moved. There were no jobs here that matched his expertise or experience, and we knew that my income alone would more than cover our living expenses. We bought multiple acres, so he maintains the property and works on things. We have a greenhouse and we grow some of our own food.
When did you start to take the work-optional path seriously?
I had my son when I was 29. By that point, I was actively learning more about FIRE and what it would take to save an amount where I wouldn’t have to work anymore. But it didn’t seem like it would happen anytime soon; I was thinking maybe I’d be 45 or 50. Then, after having a baby, I took three months of unpaid leave, and I realized that didn’t really set us back. Our finances look fine. Everybody says having a baby is super expensive, but we had insurance and it didn’t seem as expensive to me. We put his crib in our bedroom, and we just didn’t need a lot of stuff. When I went back to work, my husband was a stay-at-home dad, so we didn’t have direct child-care expenses. There were no significant changes in our budget. And I wanted to spend more time with my baby. So I started learning about specific investment strategies. Instead of just putting money in a savings account, I prioritized higher-risk index funds that had the potential to grow faster.
Then, when my son was 2, I had some job transitions. I left the position where I was working 30 hours a week, intending to go to a part-time position, but then some changes happened in the industry and my hours were cut dramatically. So I was employed, but I wasn’t getting any hours, and I was starting to get concerned.
Shortly thereafter, my son was diagnosed with cancer. Obviously, the job and money stuff kind of goes out the window in that situation. We moved to Portland for the better part of the year for his treatment. Our home was too far away to commute back and forth, so we slept at the Ronald McDonald House and spent the rest of our time at the hospital. At the time, I was just glad to have savings and hoped I didn’t drain all of it. I worked a few days a month, which gave us some funds. But that was it.
There was a real dip in my income in 2019 and 2020; I was making about a third of what I normally did. But as it turned out, we did okay through that period, money-wise. Between meals at Ronald McDonald House, we didn’t have many grocery expenses. We didn’t need to drive anywhere; we could ride the tram to the hospital. We had health insurance; we hit our maximum out-of-pocket spending, which was about $12,000, but beyond that, almost everything was covered. So we actually came out on the other side of cancer treatment and without seeing any major financial damage. The markets also started to pick up at that time, and the amount that I had invested started to compound faster and really pay off. All the returns were getting reinvested, so my savings really started to snowball.
How much did you have saved at that point? Can you explain how your financial calculations worked?
I’m what’s known as “lean FIRE” — in calculating my financial independence numbers, I’ve never aimed to be able to afford everything I could want. My goal for financial independence has always been to afford minimum expenses — housing, food, health care, and transportation — without having to work. Many other people in the FIRE community set higher targets for themselves.
By 2019, our minimum expenses were about $35,000 a year. And in January of that year, my net worth was about $400,000, not including our home, which was paid off. That was mostly investment and retirement accounts and probably a year’s worth of emergency funds. I had been making around $100,000 annually, and aiming to have a net worth of $1 million for my FIRE number. Following the 4 percent rule, $1 million would put me at an annual budget of about $40,000 a year to start out, for our household.
Then, after my son recovered, I had no intention of working full-time again. At first, it was because I wanted to be able to attend to his needs and go to doctor’s appointments and things like that. Then the pandemic started, and because he’s high-risk, I realized I needed to put more effort into controlling my own income streams. So I pivoted toward an online business, a personal-finance community called Woven that offers financial education and other programming to paying supporters. It started off as a Facebook group, Women’s Personal Finance, which now has over 82,000 members. Having that community has also been really helpful in pursuing the financial independence path.
What does your relationship to work look like now?
I haven’t worked full-time in years. I certainly don’t make as much money as I used to, but I’ve still made enough to save. The online business has made some money and will hopefully continue to do so. Now, I aim to do pharmacist work one to two days a month, just to keep myself up to date. But it’s not always consistent. I didn’t do pharmacy work at all from November until May because we were traveling. But then I worked eight shifts because people were on vacations or had emergencies and needed coverage.
How has this affected your income?
I’ve grossed less than $100,000 per year since 2018. From 2016 to 2023, I averaged about $80,000 annually for a family of three, as the sole income for the household. Between my work as a pharmacist, my online businesses, and a few odd jobs — I was an administrator for a brewery for a while — we’ve still been able to save every year so far.
What did it feel like when you finally reached your savings goal?
I hit my FIRE number — $1 million in savings and investments — in December of 2023. Honestly, I’m really surprised it happened so quickly. But between contributing about $20,000 each year to my accounts and the growth of those investments, the numbers added up. The markets have performed really well. Still, it doesn’t quite feel real. It was a little anticlimactic. I was like, Cool, I hit the number on paper. Now what’s next?
I want more potential to be able to travel, maybe live somewhere else for three or four months a year, which I couldn’t really consider with my previous jobs. So I’m continuing to adjust my outlook. My worst-case scenario is covered. My investments have continued to rise, and I’ve never tapped any of those accounts. I’ve been living off of my mostly self-employed income. I can leave a high-paying job, and I may not be able to pay for all the things I want, but I can support my family and not go into debt.
What does your budget look like — what do you spend money on, and what don’t you spend on?
These days, most of our expenses go to health care. That’s like 20–25 percent of our annual spending. The rest is groceries and utilities, and some home-improvement stuff. We’re starting to travel more. When I had been working more regularly, there wasn’t a lot of time for vacations.
We live about 30 or 40 minutes from the main grocery store, so we don’t make shopping trips for one or two items because that’s $15 round trip in gas. We have a spare refrigerator and an extra freezer in our garage. We buy things on sale and in bulk. We only go shopping once a month because it makes us plan better.
I used to get my hair cut on occasion, like two or three times a year, for $50. Now I cut my own hair. I haven’t worn makeup since I was a teenager. I still buy most clothes at thrift stores. For my professional wardrobe, I have a couple of good pairs of pants and some shirts. We don’t really go out to eat. I think a lot of people spend a lot of money in restaurants and to be with their friends, but we’ve tried to actively avoid that where possible. For fun, I really like to garden and cook. I don’t want to sound like a creepy tradwife, but I find that stuff really fulfilling. It’s meditative and forces me to get off the phone and the internet. I’m pretty introverted.
How do you talk about this stuff with your friends or co-workers? Do they know you’ve saved so much and don’t need to work?
I talk about personal finance online, but I don’t talk about it in person. I have a few close friends who are aware of things, but it’s probably under ten people. We give the appearance of not necessarily having a lot of money. And most people are aware that I still work a day or so a month as a pharmacist. They’re aware I have an online business, but most of them don’t know what that means. They don’t ask, and I don’t think they really care.
When frugality and money topics do come up, though, I try to be clear in how I word things. I don’t say, “I can’t afford to eat out.” Instead, I say, “We don’t prioritize spending our money eating out,” or “It’s not in the budget.” I don’t want people to think we’re suffering. I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t go out to eat because I’m poor.
People tend to freak out and be very judgmental of other people’s financial choices, especially online. What made you decide to be so open?
A lot of people with lower incomes than me are still spending more than I do. And I don’t hold it against them at all, especially because there aren’t a lot of examples out there of people living well beneath their means very intentionally. In the financial space, there’s a lot of people out there who talk about having a lot of wealth. They are very comfortable and have brand-new clothes, take luxury trips, drive nice cars. And that’s okay! But it’s just not realistic for most people. There are a lot fewer people like me, in this lower-wealth level of financial independence, who talk about it openly. I encourage anybody who’s comfortable sharing that stuff to be more transparent and talk about their lifestyle so people understand what financial independence can look like at different levels. Then people can actually figure out realistic and relatable ways to plug that into their own lives.
Average people, when they hear about my financial situation, often don’t understand that most of the money is not readily available to me, because it’s in investment and retirement accounts. It’s not just sitting there, ready to spend. It’s out of sight. I certainly don’t feel like a millionaire, whatever that’s supposed to feel like.
Overall, I’m trying to push back on the American consumerist dream. Because if you’re subscribing to that, you’ll never have enough. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, or how much you’ve saved. You’re always going to feel like there’s a next level. You’re on the wheel forever. We’re in a constant growth mind-set, and that’s not sustainable for individuals. It’s not sustainable for the climate. And I think the more people that can pull out of that a little bit, the more likely we’re going to have more people who can realize financial empowerment.
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