Steve Antonioni saved $90,000 in four years, enough to quit his job and pursue YouTube. He took a temporary pay cut but says he now earns more from YouTube than he did from his 9-to-5. He maintains a simple lifestyle, which allows him to save and invest the majority of his income. Steve Antonioni has never been interested in “the traditional sequence of life,” he told Insider. “Going to school, starting work, buying a house, getting married, having kids — I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied by that path.”
He was sure of that as early as high school, but as a teenager, “I didn’t know how to break out of it. I didn’t know if that was actually realistic or what the strategy would be to do it.”
Antonioni grew up in a small, blue-collar mining town outside of Sudbury, Ontario, where he says he wasn’t exposed to a variety of ideas or encouraged to think entrepreneurially. It wasn’t until he went to university in Ontario that he started to formulate what an alternative path could look like.
He made some like-minded friends and they would explore the idea of escaping the rat race by reading books like “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss. “That’s when we realized that there are people living outside of the box,” he said.
Ferriss’ book, which details how the author started working less and earning more, led Antonioni to discover the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) community. He started reading early-retiree blogs, including Mr. Money Mustache, and the financial independence subreddit thread. That’s when he started laying the foundation for a major financial milestone: to achieve financial independence by age 35 and make work optional. He wanted the freedom to choose how he spent his days and what he worked on.
Antonioni graduated in 2016. His dad helped pay for tuition and Antonioni was responsible for all of his other costs, including living expenses and books. He would pick up odd jobs during the summer and save everything he earned to cover all of his costs over the next school year.
After graduating, Antonioni continued along the “traditional” path, taking a job at an investment advisory firm in Mississauga, just outside of Toronto. It was a rotation program and involved working in various departments. At the time, he was still unsure of exactly what he wanted to do career-wise, but knew he wanted to help people manage their money. His dad was an accountant and Antonioni had started investing in the stock market as early as 16.
He spent four months in the program and completed his Canadian Securities Course (CSC), one of the basic requirements to be a licensed financial advisor in Canada. Next, he took a job in the finance department of one of the largest mining companies in the world, he said.
It was located in Toronto, a pricier city than Mississauga, but offered better pay and a great RRSP matching program, he said. (An RRSP is the Canadian equivalent of the 401(k) in the US.)
He wasn’t incredibly passionate about his work, but he thought about it as a stepping stone towards financial independence. “I decided to save up and pull as much money as I could out of that job, put it into investments or savings accounts, and start building essentially a war chest that I could use to buy future flexibility,” said Antonioni.
Living simply, saving 50-80% of his income, and building a $90,000 ‘war chest’ Over the next four years, Antonioni set aside the majority of his income and built up about $90,000 in savings, he said.
Smart savings habits were instilled in him as a kid. Antonioni’s dad was the breadwinner of the family, while his mom stayed home to raise him and his brother, he said. “My dad never spent money on himself. He saved as much as he could to support us. I was taught that when you decide to go out and buy something, be very intentional about what you get.”
He developed a savings-first mindset after graduating from university because he had to. His salary from the training program barely covered his rent, transportation, and food, he said. “If I wanted to save any money, I couldn’t spend much, so I had to be very disciplined.”
At first, the most he could save was a couple hundred dollars a month. He put it in a high-yield savings account, which started as an emergency fund and eventually evolved into his nearly six-figure “war chest.”
When he took his second job and started earning more, he was able to bump his savings rate up to 50%.
Antonioni’s values and appreciation for simplicity make it fairly easy to save a bunch of money. “I really enjoy doing things for myself, as opposed to people doing things for me,” he explained. For example, he’d rather go to the grocery store, pick out his ingredients, and cook his own food than eat out at a restaurant. “That naturally saves you money. If you’re paying somebody else to do something for you, it’s always going to cost more money.”
He saved hundreds of dollars a month by commuting to work on his bike, rather than having a car or using public transportation.
If you’re paying somebody else to do something for you, it’s always going to cost more money. Steve Antonioni”I don’t need a lot of things to be content,” said Antonioni, who now lives with his girlfriend and splits all of his costs with her, including rent. That said, when it comes to saving, “I’ll never cut down on something so much to the point where I’m depriving myself.”
He doesn’t believe in putting off his happiness for a future date. “If you’re going to be miserable now just so one day, maybe you can be happy, I don’t know if that’s the right trade to make for the sake of financial independence.”
Quitting his 9-to-5 and launching a YouTube channel After four years of diligent saving, Antonioni felt financially equipped to leave his job and a steady paycheck. He quit in July 2020 to test out a more creative career: creating videos about personal finance on YouTube.
It was a side project he started while working at the mining company. His original vision was a central educational website that anyone could visit to learn everything about money they weren’t taught in school. Thinking his content might reach a broader audience if he incorporated videos, Antonioni’s idea evolved into a YouTube channel.
He posted his first video in November 2019. It was an explainer on his mission for the channel: making financial education more accessible and demystifying the idea that investing has to be complicated.
For about six months, he filmed and edited after work and on the weekends. Although it was a side project, he’d researched how much money successful YouTubers can make and started his channel with the intention of monetizing it.
He didn’t start earning right away. For months, he made about $1 a day, he said. By July 2020, when he decided to quit, he wasn’t doing much better: “The day that I quit my job, I made about $5 on YouTube.”
But he believed in his product. “I can sometimes be, you could say, delusionally optimistic about what I can do, and I was really confident about making this work,” he admitted. “I felt as though I was on the path to making this a sustainable income, especially if I could devote one hundred percent of my time to it instead of just my evenings and weekends.”
Plus, he had nearly six-figures in savings as a buffer, which he figured could last him three years if he didn’t make a penny from YouTube. He reasoned that if his channel didn’t make money in that amount of time, it probably never would make money, “but at least I would have tried it.”
Antonioni quit his 9-to-5 in July 2020 to pursue a career as a YouTuber. Courtesy of Steve Antonioni For about a year, he took a pay cut. “I was making enough to cover my living expenses and save a little bit, but I wasn’t making as much as I did at my old job,” he said. “I definitely was not in a better financial situation, but I was happy as long as I wasn’t losing money.”
Even if his income never budged and he continued earning just enough to live off of, Antonioni had already achieved part of what he was after: the freedom and flexibility to set his own schedule and do what he wanted.
His income didn’t stagnate, though. “I took a short-term, temporary financial hit for a long-term financial gain,” explained Antonioni, who now has about 80,000 subscribers to his channel. He says he earns, on average, $15,000 per month from ads, sponsorships, and referral links. “In my second year on YouTube, I’ve made more money than I’ve ever made in my life doing this.”
Investing in ETFs and hitting $1 million by age 35Antonioni’s goal is to have $1 million in investments by age 35. He got to that number using the “4% rule,” which helps retirees figure out how much they can withdraw from their retirement funds each year. It essentially says that you can comfortably live off of 4% of your money in investments each year.
A $1 million portfolio would allow Antonioni to withdraw $40,000 a year. He recognizes that there are many caveats with the rule, “so I’m not basing my entire future off of it,” he emphasized.
Spending $40,000 annually is completely reasonable with his current lifestyle, he said. “I don’t have kids and I don’t have a lot of other responsibilities that many other people do right now.” He expects to be able to live off of about $40,000 a year through his 30s, but also recognizes that anything can happen. “It’s futile to try and project anything super specific because life has a way of throwing plans to the wind. So many things can just drastically change your assumptions.”
He prefers investing in ETFs, but also owns some individual stocks and invests a small amount of his portfolio in crypto.
Plus, he keeps money accessible in a high-yield savings account. “Any dollar that I save, if I won’t need it for the next ten years, then it goes into the investment portfolio,” he said. “If I might need it in the next three to five years, I’ll put that into a high-interest savings account.”
While $1 million is a goal he expects to hit before 35, he’s less concerned with his “retirement number.”
“My main goal was to be doing something every day that I feel purpose in,” he said. “I’m continuing to head in that direction, so I don’t need to be as granular about the finance aspect of it all.”