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We did not do this because we hated spending money.
We did it because we wanted our lives back.
The BBC wrote about our FIRE story and the internet immediately began debating our packed lunches.
Fair enough.
Packed lunches are visible. Packed lunches are relatable. Packed lunches make a much better headline than years of learning, earning, investing, spreadsheeting and building a life around freedom.
But the packed lunches were never the dream.
The dream was freedom.
Freedom from needing a salary. Freedom from the alarm clock. Freedom from the commute. Freedom from building our whole life around work and then trying to squeeze living into the gaps.
We wanted more time together. We wanted space to travel, create, learn, help people and live life on purpose. We wanted to stop sleepwalking into a life we had not consciously chosen.
With a strong enough why, almost any how becomes possible. For us, the packed lunches, the jumpers, the old cars, the spreadsheets and the investing all pointed in the same direction: buy freedom first.
Small clarification from the Donegan household: they were not sandwiches. They were giant box salads. We made them for health, cost and volume reasons, because we wanted food that filled us up, helped us feel good, and did not quietly drain our freedom fund one Pret trip at a time.
The BBC gave the story a headline that travelled. Our version probably would not have gone viral.
So here is the bigger story behind the headline.
Our response
The headline got people talking. Brilliant. Now we want to add the bit underneath the headline: income, choices, kids, frugality, purpose, investing, and the real engine behind financial independence.
Packed lunches helped. They did not do the heavy lifting.
The real engine was increasing income, keeping lifestyle inflation under control, investing the gap, and building towards a life we actually wanted.
The packed lunch was visible. The system underneath was invisible.
You can photograph a packed lunch. You can make a headline out of it. You can imagine someone hunched over Tupperware thinking, “Is this what financial freedom tastes like?”
Much harder to photograph: the monthly money meetings, the career decisions, the awkward conversations, the investing, the boring consistency, the decision not to upgrade everything as income rose, and compounding quietly doing its ridiculous wizardry in the background.
The real formula
The packed lunch was the visible bit. This was the system underneath.
Income minus spending creates the gap. Investing the gap gives compounding something to work on. Compounding creates options.
The simple system underneath the headline
At Rebel Finance School, we teach this as a simple system: keep more of what you earn, make that money work for you, and use it to buy freedom.
The course is completely free. We volunteer our time to run it because this is the financial education we wish everyone had been given at school.
Keep more of what you earn
The first job is to understand what comes in, what goes out, and what is left. That leftover bit is the gap. The gap is power.
Invest the gap
Saving money and then spending it later is useful for short-term goals. Investing the gap gives compounding something to work on.
Buy your freedom first
You can only spend each pound once. We chose to use a lot of ours to buy future freedom, not more stuff we did not really care about.
What people saw. What actually mattered.
The headline focused on the visible bits. The useful lesson is in the system underneath.
Packed lunches
What mattered: creating a repeatable gap between income and spending.
Jumpers and hot water bottles
What mattered: turning saving into a game, not a punishment.
Six-figure income
What mattered: working deliberately to increase income, then not spending it all.
No children
What mattered: building a path around our life. Your path has to fit yours.
Retired at 40 and 35
What mattered: freedom to choose our work, purpose, contribution and time.
£1m invested
What mattered: giving compounding enough time to do the heavy lifting.
Were we earning well? Yes.
A lot of people asked about income. Fair question.
By the time we were moving seriously towards financial independence, we were earning six figures between us. We did not start there, and we did not want to pretend that income did not matter.
It helped enormously.
But here is the bit we really want people to hear: we did not reach financial freedom because high income magically happened to us. We worked to increase our income because we wanted financial freedom.
Income can be part of the plan. You can learn skills. You can change jobs. You can ask for a raise. You can move industry. You can go contracting. You can start a business. You can build something on the side.
There is a floor to cutting costs. There is no ceiling on increasing income.
We do not say that casually. People have different constraints, responsibilities, health, energy, backgrounds and starting points. We are not saying everyone can copy our timeline. We are saying the principles are worth learning wherever you are starting from.
If you dismiss the whole story because we earned well, you miss one of the most useful parts: income was something we worked on deliberately.
We also don’t have children
That made our path simpler and faster.
Having children changes the numbers, the priorities, the energy, the time and the shape of the journey.
But it does not make the principles useless.
Families can still track spending, create a gap, reduce waste, invest, build emergency funds, improve pensions, talk about money and build more choice.
If anything, we think it is even more important to get on top of your finances as a parent. You need your money working for you so you can look after your kids, reduce pressure on the family, and build a brighter financial future.
And your kids are watching. When you learn how money works, talk about it openly, and make intentional choices, you are not just improving your own future. You are teaching the next generation a different way.
Our path was different. That does not stop someone with kids using the same principles and tools in a way that fits their life.
Compounding does not judge your household. It works the same no matter where you are starting from or who is sitting around your dinner table.
Is putting on a jumper really that weird?
The heating bit got people going too.
We didn’t turn the heating into a moral crusade. We just didn’t make it the first option.
Put on a jumper. Use a hot water bottle. Close the door. Warm the human, not the whole building.
If you are still cold, turn the heating on.
This was common sense. It saved money. It used less energy. It was probably better for the planet.
Somewhere along the way, ordinary sensible behaviour got rebranded as extreme.
Taking lunch to work is not weird. Putting on a jumper before turning up the heating is not weird. Driving a smaller car is not weird. Choosing not to buy things you don’t really care about is not weird.
What is weird is being told that every pay rise must become a bigger house, a newer car, a fancier lifestyle and a more expensive version of the same stress.
And we always put the heating on when my Mum came round at Christmas. Love you Mum! xx
Purpose matters. Incentives matter too.
One of the most important challenges in the BBC article came from Carol Schleif, Chief Market Strategist at BMO Private Wealth. Her point was that early retirement is not much of a win if you lose your health, friendships or sense of purpose along the way.
We agree with that. Completely.
Freedom is amazing. But freedom becomes even better when you know what you want to do with it.
That is one of the reasons Rebel Finance School exists. We bought our freedom and then chose to use a big chunk of it helping other people take control of their money.Money on its own is not enough. If you reach financial independence and have no idea what you are moving towards, that can be painful. We travelled the world, learned Spanish, hiked mountains, had adventures and loved the freedom, but we also discovered something important about ourselves.
We needed purpose.
That is why the “retire early” part of FIRE can be misleading. The point is not to win a spreadsheet and then sit in a chair for the rest of your life wondering what happened. The point is to build enough choice that you can spend your time on things that matter to you.
For us, that became travel, creativity, adventure and, eventually, Rebel Finance School. We did not buy freedom so we could disappear from life. We bought freedom so we could live more fully and give more freely.
And while we are talking about advice, incentives matter
There is another layer to this conversation that is worth saying out loud. The financial industry has incentives, and incentives shape behaviour.
If a wealth management firm charges a percentage of assets under management, the firm generally earns more when clients keep larger pots invested and continue paying ongoing management fees. That does not make every adviser bad. Good advice can be incredibly valuable. But it does mean we should understand the business model behind any advice we receive.
Katie likes to say: never ask a barber if you need a haircut.
We made this short because adviser fees can look tiny while quietly taking a huge slice of future wealth. A 1% fee sounds harmless until you see what it can do over decades.
This is why we keep saying: learn the basics, ask questions, understand the fees and know what you are paying for. If you want to go deeper, read our article on how incentives warp financial advice and our breakdown of the impact of fees on your investments.
And because people often ask whether Rebel Finance School is secretly a sales funnel, we also published the full numbers behind what Rebel Finance School costs to run and whether it makes money. Spoiler: there is no secret upsell hiding behind the curtains.
We are not against advice. We are against people being kept confused, overcharged, or nudged into products and services they do not understand.
The more you understand the basics, the better questions you can ask. The better questions you ask, the better protected your future becomes.
Read our full article on financial advice incentivesLet compounding do the heavy lifting
You do not have to earn every pound of your future wealth yourself.
You build a gap. You invest the gap. Then your money starts working alongside you.
Eventually, given enough time, your money starts doing more of the heavy lifting.
That still blows our minds.
Want to go deeper?
If the BBC article brought you here and you want the useful stuff, start with these.
What freedom gave us
We bought our freedom, and then we had to work out what to do with it.
For seven years, we have travelled the world, lived in different countries, learned Spanish, followed our curiosity, built projects, made memories and woken up without anyone else owning our calendar.
That freedom has been extraordinary.
But the best part has not been doing nothing.
The best part has been choosing.
Choosing where to live. Choosing what to create. Choosing who to help. Choosing how to spend our energy. Choosing to run Rebel Finance School and give away the financial education we wish everyone had been given at school.
That is the part I wish every headline could hold.
Financial independence was never really about packed lunches.
It was about building a life we wanted to live and now we help other people sort out their finances so they can live the life they want to live! Not our life, their dream life.
So yes, packed lunches helped.
So did jumpers.
So did hot water bottles, old cars, tiny liabilities, awkward money conversations, spreadsheets, career moves, index funds and years of not upgrading everything just because we could.
But the biggest thing was this:
We believed freedom was worth buying. And then we built a system to buy it.
You are not weird for wanting more choice. You are not weird for taking lunch to work. You are not weird for wanting to understand your money. You are not weird for choosing future freedom over stuff you do not really care about.
You are just early. Welcome to the rebellion.
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This sums it all up perfectly! I have completed the Rebel Finance School and found it highly relevant to me even though I have kids and don’t live as frugally as you. The principles are still all relevant and doing the course has helped me increase my gap and understand how I can invest it and make the most of compounding to ensure I have a comfortable (slightly early) retirement. It also got me interested in learning about my pensions and making sure they were working as hard as me! (They weren’t but using new knowledge from the course I made some very positive and much needed changes)
Gem that is AWESOME. I love that you used the strategies and optimised the work pension1 that is brilliant! We all have different paths, we just want to help people realise that what we share on the course works for everyone! Thank you for commenting. Sending happiness!
Brilliantly written, very inspiring. I always made a packed lunch and absolutely hated doing it so found jobs where I could eat it at home everyday with staff who made it for me! We also moved to such hot countries no one had heating!! All the time saving – wish we had known about investing but hey ho at least we do now. Thank you so much.
hey Sarah, jobs with food included can be amazing! lol. Such a saving. and hot countries too! Love that. Alan
Did you not sell your houses to invest the proceeds? Surely that did most of the heavy lifting. It’s not a strategy most would want to replicate though – the nomad life doesn’t work for most people.
hey Paul, no we didn’t. we hit our financial independence number before going travelling and then realised we didn’t want to be tied down and wanted to travel. The 2 investment properties were to generate income and we sold them when we paid off the mortgages as the return on equity went through the floor. And the flat we lived in, in Basingstoke we worth about 250k I think. That took 2 years to sell, and we only sold it after we had got to financial independence. The investment properties did help us get to financial freedom but if we were doing it all again we would not buy them, we would invest in index funds instead.
You are right it is not a repeatable strategy and it is not even a strategy we used.. we focused on keeping expenses down, heavily on increasing income and then investing everything in a tax optimised way (ISAs and SIPPs) and that is the strategy we used to get to financial freedom. We will be talking all about this on the course on monday if you want to join us! Alan
OK, but I don’t get how the sale of 2 rental properties and your actual main home does not contribute more to your current net worth than investing savings made from eating cat-food sandwiches and turning down the thermostat.
Hey Paul. Katie here. Lovely to hear from you. On our way to Financial Freedom, we tracked two figures – A) our net worth including the home we lived in and B) our net worth excluding the home we lived in (Freedom Fund plus a little bit of cash). When B) hit £1m we hit what we call Financial Freedom. It was after that we chose to sell the home we lived in and travel the world. The 2 rental properties were already part of our Freedom Fund, we later chose to sell them and invest in the stock market instead in a low-cost broad based global index fund. Those 2 properties definitely did help us get to Financial Freedom. Our original plan was to get to Financial Freedom by investing exclusively in property until we discovered index investing in the stock market which was way less effort and allowed us to enjoy our travels more, not worrying about fixing toilets from overseas! Sending big happiness! Katie :) xx
Fantastic summary. I’m doing the course for a second time and my husband is fully on board having started a bit later first time round. I really look forward to the sessions for so many reasons including: the humorous upbeat delivery, the invaluable information (which makes you look with fresh eyes at all aspects of your finances), and the great togetherness it brings for us as a couple.
Alan and Katie are giving people such a tremendous gift on so many levels. It has such heart and soul and encouragement for everyone no matter where they are in their financial journey.
Rosalie thank you so much. That comment made our day. THANK YOU. We have so much fun creating it all for you all and enjoy building on it each year to try and make it better. THANK YOU. Sending huge happiness. Alan