> My advice: find the best paying SWE job you can find. > At the same time minimize your expense. Some people frame this as first accumulating savings, then

> My advice: find the best paying SWE job you can find. > At the same time minimize your expense. Some people frame this as first accumulating savings, then quitting the job & depleting those savings to buy time while taking a holiday / switching to a new career. That's valid, but it glosses over that you can put your savings to work to generate income. Another perspective is the FIRE (financial independence / retire early) angle, where you accumulate savings and invest them, then when you pass the point where your passive income from investment returns exceeds your living expenses, you achieve "escape velocity" and no longer need to perform income-generating work. indefinitely. You need to accumulate investments worth roughly 25x your annual expenses to hit this point (assuming a 4% return on investment, net of inflation). One way to do this is to achieve an after-tax savings rate of 75% for about 8 years. Suppose after tax, for each $100 you earn, you consume at most $25 of it on annual living expenses, and invest the remaining $75 surplus in the stock market. If you can repeat this for 8 years, and you've been holding your annual living expenses to a sustainable level (not artificially low) then there's a very good chance you'll be financially independent and the "long period of rest" can be indefinite. A simple tool to visualise this and help build intuition around the relationship between savings rate and years to financial independence is https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement