First, like the others mentioned, I would work on getting friends. If you want an idea on where to start with that (assuming you don't want to be friends with

First, like the others mentioned, I would work on getting friends. If you want an idea on where to start with that (assuming you don't want to be friends with anyone from work): From what I understand, Meetup.com is a great way to do this. Develop a hobby that has minimal costs, and then find a group that meets for the purpose of that hobby. --- To answer your question: Considering you want to achieve financial independence quickly, it's good that you don't own much stuff, otherwise your stuff would own you. I recently discovered the blog Early Retirement Extreme. There is a post [0] which gives the simple equation which must be true if you want to become financially independent: "your annual expenses < 3% of your invested savings" Assuming you keep the same living costs before and after becoming financially independent, you will need to solve this equation: living costs = SWR * ( income - living costs ) * ( ( (1 + ROR) ^ number of working years ) - 1 ) / ROR where SWR = Safe Withdraw Rate and ROR = Rate Of Return. SWR of 3% is taken from [0]. Assuming you can get 10% on your investments and can live on 25k a year, let's enter some numbers and solve for working years: 25k = 0.03 * (56k - 25k) * ( ( (1 + 0.10) ^ X ) - 1 ) / 0.10 X = 13.7 years Assuming 10% again, and working for 15 years, let's see how much you could have to live on: X = 0.03 * (56k - 25k) * ( ( (1 + 0.10) ^ 15 ) - 1 ) / 0.10 X = 29.5k So if you worked for an extra 1.3 years, you could bump up your living expenses from 25k to 29.5k, a jump of $4500 a year. EDIT: I forgot to include the 10k you have already saved up. I would probably leave that out of the investments and keep in an emergency fund (keep it in your savings, and future savings would go straight to your investment account). --- [0] http://earlyretirementextreme.com/can-i-retire-young.html http://earlyretirementextreme.com/can-i-retire-young.html