When he graduated from college in 2002, Jeremy Schneider noticed that his peers were already trying to find ways to retire before turning 65. Taking a cue from them, Schneider started his own firm even if it meant rejecting a $74,000-a-year salary job with Microsoft.
Now, at 41, he is retiring early with $3 million, and has a net worth of $4.4 million.
Speaking to CBC Make it about his journey, Schneider said, “I would see these young people just a few years older than me who were making millions with tech startups I definitely heard of selling an internet company for a lot of money and being financially set.”
The FIRE movement -- short for financial independence, retire early -- had not really gained popularity at the time, but Schneider decided to bet on himself.
He had interned with Microsoft as a software developer and was offered a $74,000-a-year job, but Schneider opted to started his own company instead. “I preferred to start my own company where if I worked 10 times harder, maybe I would get 10 or 100 times more money,” he told the publication.
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Schneider ended up doing exactly that and in 2004, he founded RentLinx, an advertising network for rental properties. For the next eight years, Schneider kept his salary at $36,000 per year, even as the company continued to grow. “For basically the entire time I was running my company, I was as frugal as possible. I wasn’t even really budgeting because I had no money to budget,” he said.
Schneider still managed to contribute $5,000 to $6,000 per year to his retirement account and by the time he was 32, he had about $120,000 in his account, a mix of contributions and investment gains.
In 2015, Schneider finally fulfilled his goal of selling a company when a competitor offered to buy his business for over $5 million. Since he owned about 70 company per cent of the firm at the time, his take after deducting taxes was about $2 million.
For the next two years, Schneider worked for the company that acquired his, and earned a six-figure salary but he noticed that the profits in his portfolio, composed almost entirely of index funds, were more than his salary. “My $2 million had grown to $3 million just from the growth of the market. It dawned on me that I don’t need to work anymore,” he told CNBC Make It.
So in 2017 he retired and after two years worth of vacations and video games, he made his debut on Instagram offering financial advice. With the feedback he received, Schneider developed a turned it into a video course which he began selling for $79, and within a week, he had made $110,000.
“It took me four years of my first company to make $110,000. So this might actually be a real business," he recollected thinking at that time.
According to CNBC Make It, the video course business, The Personal Finance Club, brought in about $1 million in sales since October 2020. Schneider brings in $70,000 per year, along with bonuses and profit sharing.
For Schneider, working despite having financial independence beats laying on a beach somewhere.
“I don’t really see retirement as the goal. I think financial independence is the goal. I want to be able to direct my time as I see fit and do the things that I feel passionate about," he told the publication.
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