Amberly Grant knew she wanted to be a millionaire from a young age. Little did she know then that she would be there almost in her mid-thirties.
Growing up as the daughter of an artist and babysitter in Ottawa, Canada, it was not hard for Grant to guess that money was tight. “My mom always said, ‘I don’t even have a penny,'” Grant recalled. His father’s favorite financial refrain, meanwhile, was that “he will work until the day he dies.”
For Grant, now 34 and living in Denver, her parents’ financial attitudes had a major impact.
“I don’t want to have a life where I’m constantly worried about whether my car is going to break down so we have to take the bus. I didn’t want that stress,” she recalled thinking.
Amberly Grant has built a net worth of $835,000.
Tomas Frank
These days, Grant earns $145,000 a year, plus a performance bonus of up to 20%, as a senior project manager at a tech company, and earns an additional $78,000 in annual income from two local rental properties in Denver.
Because her real estate portfolio is enough to fund Grant’s lifestyle, she considers herself financially independent, meaning she could quit her job and retire early if she wanted to. However, Grant has no plans to do so yet.
In total, between his properties and his retirement savings, Grant has a net worth of around $835,000. Here’s how she did it.
Make a habit of saving
Grant worked about 20 hours a week in restaurants and bakeries while in high school, and by age 19 had saved about $6,000. A friend of his father’s gave him an old car that the dealership wouldn’t take back, and Grant spent $1,800 to fix it before driving to Los Angeles.
She got a job as a waitress in Hermosa Beach, a job that brought in about $20,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Grant needed to live on. His rent was only $250 a month – the proceeds of sharing a 3-bedroom apartment with six other people.
I’ve always worked with people, and they made as much money as I did, but they never saved as much as I did.
Grant was even able to put money aside for the future. “I’ve always worked with people, and they made as much money as I did, but they never saved as much as I did,” she says.
Saving consistently wasn’t about seeing a big amount in your bank account just yet. Instead, it meant the freedom to follow life wherever it led: “I would take time off and go travel and live abroad.”
From 18 to 25, Amberly Grant used her savings to travel regularly.
Courtesy of Amberley Grant
From age 19 to 25, Grant bounced between Los Angeles, New York, Thailand, Australia and Tucson, Arizona, before finally settling in Denver. In each new place, she would find a low-paying job, live low, and bank enough money to pick up and move on to the next adventure.
During that time, she earned between $13,000 and $20,000 a year, she says.
Increase your income and boost your savings
Determined to start making more money, Grant enrolled at Community College of Denver at age 25. She paid no tuition through government grants and financial aid. From there, she transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder. Again, she paid no tuition.
“I couldn’t imagine coming away with 40,000 in college debt, so I again applied for about 20 different scholarships,” she says. “I came out of all my studies without any debt.”
Grant graduated in 2017 with a degree in Business Management Strategy and Entrepreneurship. She moved around a few jobs before finding her first “real” money-making job at age 29. She earned $52,000 a year, but was able to accumulate her savings due to her low cost of living. She shared a three-bedroom house with two roommates for $400 a month.
Amberly Grant is a follower of the FIRE movement, short for “financial independence, early retirement”.
Tomas Frank
By February 2019, Grant’s salary had risen to $65,000, and she and her then-boyfriend decided to buy a house and move in together. To make the 20% down payment on the duplex, they contributed $25,000 each, with his mother donating $50,000.
The relationship fell apart. A year later, Grant was forced to buy them back for $80,000.
Fortunately, just at the time of the purchase, a competing company wanted Grant, then project coordinator, to take on the role of project manager. The new gig came with a salary of $115,000 a year. She also supplemented her income by renting out the downstairs apartment of the house.
She was able to repay her ex and her mother in cash.
Find financial independence through real estate
In college, Grant’s professors weren’t the only ones teaching him about money. She also discovered Mr. Money Mustachea blog by Pete Adeney, figurehead of the FIRE movement, which is short for financial independence, is taking early retirement.
“I sat there in the community college playroom and read every article that Pete wrote, and I realized, ‘Oh, my God, these are my people,'” Grant said.
Amberly Grant regularly hosts conferences on a wide range of money-related topics.
Tomas Frank
Grant particularly admired many FIRE members’ approach to real estate investing: buying additional properties so rental income can lower their cost of living and provide a diversified source of income.
Grant bought a second home in 2021, another duplex, financing the down payment with a combination of cash savings and a home equity line of credit from his first property. She repaid the loan within a year.
These days, Grant rents the upper floors of the two duplexes to long-term tenants, with the income from those tenants covering the mortgage payments on both properties. She lists the lowest units on Airbnb, bringing in about $6,500 a month in profit.
Looking forward to early retirement
For now, Grant’s salary and real estate income are more than enough to support her. and her partner’s monthly budget, which includes the mortgage payment for a home the couple recently purchased in Denver. Even though his partner, a Canadian, is waiting for a US visa and currently cannot work, they still manage to hide almost 70% of Grant’s income.
Theoretically, Grant’s real estate income alone is enough to cover his living expenses, rendering his job pointless. But the expenses have been constantly changing lately: she and her partner welcomed a baby in the fall.
Having a savings cushion has given Grant peace of mind as a new mom. “I was able to spend and, really, get everything we needed for our child,” she says.
Grant plans to stay in her full-time job for at least three to five more years — enough time for her to grow her retirement savings from $240,000 to around $750,000, she says.
Amberly Grant and her boyfriend recently welcomed their first child.
Tomas Frank
She then hopes to retire and withdraw about 4% per year from her savings, which would give her an annual income of $30,000. Add the $78,000 in annual rental income and Grant arrives at a figure she’d be comfortable living without the 9 to 5.
Grant doesn’t know exactly what that lifestyle will look like. She hopes to spend time living abroad, including a sailing stint around the Greek islands – a plan for when her child, and any others they have, are old enough to swim.
Most of the time, his dreams are open, and that’s sort of been the goal all along.
“I love going to meet friends overseas and go to different places, learn the culture, eat different foods, learn a language, and we want to expose our kids to that,” she says. “So that’s something that FIRE will give us, that we can have the flexibility to be wherever we want.”
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