• Andre Nader found himself in a financial hole after losing money trading options.
• He shifted his investment strategy and started buying low-cost index funds.
• He owns various Fidelity and Vanguard index funds, including VTI and VXUS.

Andre Nader lost a good chunk of money in the stock market in his early 20s.

"I used my student loan money in my junior and senior years and started trading options. I ended up losing $15,000 to $20,000 of student loan funds," he told Business Insider. "It was nothing I needed to pay off right away, but I was originally graduating college without any debts."

It taught him a valuable lesson, he added: "What I was doing wasn't investing. The options trading was tapping into that poker mindset; it was just pure gambling." And it prompted him to start researching investment strategies.

Nader came across the Bogleheads Forum and Mr. Money Mustache, one of the original FIRE (financial independence, retire early) bloggers.

The content introduced him to the idea that investing "doesn't need to be complicated," he said. With index-fund investing, "you don't need to outsmart the system."

It also introduced the idea of a different path than the traditional one many of his peers seemed to be on: work a 9-to-5, save and invest over the span of three to four decades, and retire by 65.

"I thought, Okay, there's this ability to continue being frugal while my income is growing, and there's this exit path, where I have the freedom to do whatever I want with my time," said Nader, adding that it wasn't exactly early retirement that he was after. "It was more around having extreme flexibility and control over my time."

Frugality came naturally to Nader — "My friends that knew me in high school and college might use the word 'cheap,'" he said — and, once he found an investment strategy that worked for him and his goals, hitting financial independence in his 30s or 40s was within reach.

It helped that he worked in tech. While he started with a modest $40,000 salary right after graduating, he eventually landed a high-paying job at Meta in 2014. His wife also works in tech. Up until Nader was affected by Meta's layoffs in 2023, they were comfortably living on one of their incomes and able to save and invest the rest.

As Nader puts it, "I won the income game by being in tech, by being a dual-income household. I didn't need to be taking these outsized risks by investing in extremely speculative ways. I could be boring in my portfolio."

The majority of his savings have gone into low-cost index funds. He describes the strategy as, "super boring, super low fee, and trying to match the overall market in a diversified way without needing to be overly clever about it."

While the strategy may be boring, it's effective. It helped him build a seven-figure net worth, which BI verified by looking at a copy of his investment report, and meant that he didn't have to find a new job after the Meta layoffs.

Nader, who considers himself "semi-FIRE'd" since his wife still works, owns various Fidelity and Vanguard index funds.

"Lately, I've been all in on Vanguard's ETFs," he said. Specifically, he likes Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF Shares (VTI) and Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund ETF Shares (VXUS).

He targets a specific asset allocation between the primary asset classes he owns — 58% US markets, 27% international markets, and 15% bonds — and says he's able to get close to that target by owning index funds.

Nader's money is spread out among various accounts. In addition to using a taxable brokerage account, he maxes out several tax-advantaged accounts, including a 401(k), traditional IRA, and HSA.

"Take advantage of those tax-advantaged accounts because when you're in those high-earning years, any amount that you can defer those taxes into the future is potentially extremely, extremely valuable," he said. "Take advantage of those 401(k)s and understand your company benefits."