Five years ago, in October 2020, a 30-year-old woman known online only as “Purple” walked away from her six-figure marketing career with exactly $500,000 in index funds and a one-way ticket to freedom. She had no side hustle planned, no rental properties, no inheritance on the horizon—just a simple spreadsheet, a frugal-but-happy lifestyle, and complete faith in the stock market. Today, that same portfolio has crossed the $1,000,000 mark, and she has never returned to paid work. Her story is one of the cleanest, most replicable examples of how early retirement and passive wealth-building can coexist.
Purple’s journey began like many in the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) community. Introduced to the concept in 2012 by her partner, she initially laughed it off. By 2015, however, she was all in. Over the next five years she combined aggressive saving, strategic job-hopping, and a cross-country move from expensive Manhattan to far-cheaper Seattle. Each salary jump (she changed jobs six times) added roughly $20,000–$30,000 to her income, while the lower cost of living cut her annual expenses nearly in half. By the time she pulled the plug at age 30, she had saved half a million dollars in under a decade on salaries that never exceeded $115,000.
Her spending in retirement has remained remarkably consistent. She originally budgeted $20,000 per year (in 2020 dollars) and built in an 11% buffer for inflation and unexpected joys. In practice, her actual spending has hovered between $18,000 and $23,000 annually, even while traveling the world full-time as a slow-traveling digital nomad. In 2024 she spent $21,499—still almost $10,000 below her cumulative five-year budget. She tracks every dollar with YNAB, but the system is now second nature; she simply spends on what brings her joy (good food at home, occasional flights, cozy Airbnbs) and feels zero deprivation saying no to $250 restaurant splurges or daily takeout coffee.
The real magic, however, happened in her investment account. Purple invested 100% of her savings in a single low-cost fund: Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX). No individual stocks, no options trading, no crypto, no timing the market—just broad-market exposure and the discipline to do nothing for years at a time. She based her withdrawal plan on the classic 4% rule, ran hundreds of historical simulations on cFIREsim, and confirmed that her $500,000 nest egg had a near-100% success rate over even the longest retirement horizons.
What she—and probably most people—did not expect was how quickly the market would reward that patience. Starting from $500,000 in late 2020, her portfolio followed this trajectory:
- End of 2020: $620,767
- End of 2021: $755,790
- End of 2022: $607,757 (the brutal bear market year)
- End of 2023: $731,790
- End of 2024: $882,223
- October 2025: $1,001,757
In other words, she more than doubled her money in five years with zero additional contributions and zero active management. The compound annual growth rate came in around 15%, driven largely by the historic bull market that began in late 2020 and continued (with one sharp but brief interruption) through 2025.