Working in my twenties.... RETIRED at 30

The goal of achieving a good work-life balance often feels like a pipe dream, but Gen Z think they've found the answer. Harriet Sim meets the women retiring in their thirties, and learns the extreme lengths required to get there

- Harriet Sim

Boomers might say youth is wasted on the young, but Gen Z have a smart B retort. According to them, retirement is wasted on the old - and they're no longer willing to sacrifice the prime of their lives in a drab office cubicle. Take 26-year-old Cherry Tung, for example.

Each morning, Tung wakes up, meditates, and performs her daily cacao ceremony. Then, instead of sitting in front of a monitor for eight hours in a low-paying, high-stress corporate gig, Tung fills her agenda with workouts, social catch-ups, and travel plans. At 6 pm, as commuters fight through crowded train platforms to get home, Tung relaxes in a massage chair and writes in her gratitude journal, before commencing a three-step skincare routine. No, Tung isn't living the high life thanks to a lucrative trust fund, nor is she part of a sugar daddy arrangement. The reason the former accountant has all this free time is because she retired at age 25.

Earlier this year, a sound bite of Kim Kardashian exclaiming, "It seems like nobody wants to work these days," went viral. And if you've spent any time on TikTok lately, you'll know young people want out.

Tung is part of a booming online community called FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), championing quitting work well before your twilight years. The approach, which has been around since the '90s but has made a recent revival on social media, relies on aggressive saving, uber-strict budgeting, and methods for diversifying your revenue streams and creating a passive income, such as flipping clothes, investing shrewdly in crypto and the stock market, and signing up for medical trials. Scroll through hashtags such as #retirebefore30 and #earlyretirement and you'll find bright young things offering their financial advice so that like them you can ditch your day job.