There are probably many factors you have to adjust along the way to achieve it -- possible, but not without effort. If you live in a place with $700/mo rent, I

There are probably many factors you have to adjust along the way to achieve it -- possible, but not without effort. If you live in a place with $700/mo rent, I imagine you probably also live in an area that doesn't pay the kind of salaries San Francisco tech pays. So you might want to work in SF. But let's say you work in SF and get bay area SWE salaries; if you were to want to "retire" in SF and continue to live with $3-4k rent, that might be a hard point to reach after 10 years. If you work in SF/Bay and get bay area SWE salaries (or better yet, FAANG salaries) for 10 years, live modestly for most of it and not overspend, you can then probably afford to retire with $700/mo rent (or even buy a house with cash in an area that costs $200k~ a house) after 10 years by moving away from the bay to other states. The difference in salary and cost of living between different areas is often larger than you can imagine; and it's up to you to figure out how to adjust the knobs to make it work best to your advantage.