>>1402097You can almost get there just by working 2x minimum wage part-time jobs (~60 total hours a week) in a state where the minimum wage is above the national, starting at 18, and just minding your spending. At $10 an hour that'd be $28,800 before taxes in a year, most places you can live off under a grand a month (sorry big-city-fags where studio apartments are over a grand).
Personally I managed it by 25, but I've also been working since I was 14.
>start doing general farm-hand labor for $6/hr at 14 under the table around 30 hours a week (minimum wage was $4.95 at the time)>as soon as the state lets me at 16 I start working as a fry cook for a local bar and grill for $6.15/hr 32 hours a week (school and sports prevented me from working fulltime)>by 18 I'm lead cook making $9.30/hr, go to fulltime (45hrs) as soon as I graduateI moved out of my parents' house the day I turned 18, and never went back. By that point I had somewhere around $35,000 banked since I was living at home and riding my bike to work. So that was a bit of a leg up. Bought a beater sedan, got state-minimum insurance, a tiny run-down apartment for $275/mo including utilities (seriously I was renting the loft over somebody's flower shop in a ~150yo building on the square of a small farm town, place was like 170sqft but I could fit a twin bed and had a kitchenette and a shower). Here I kinda cheated: I enlisted. Free room and board, didn't really need a car, pay was better than much of the skilled labor I had in my area once I got through IET. Basically saved every penny I earned.
Now, mind you, this was a long time ago. Residential internet wasn't really a thing outside of big cities, smartphones didn't exist and cells in general had juuust made the transition from the big bricks to the Nokia unkillables (I had a tracfone which cost me around $170/yr and a landline which was $9/mo).