{
  "id": 6129992,
  "title": "She retired at 40 — and credits K-pop group BTS for making it happen. How fandom turned into financial freedom",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/07/she-retired-at-40-and-credits-k-pop-group-bts-for-making-it-happen",
  "topic": "finance",
  "section": "Finance & Markets",
  "published": "2026-09-07T10:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Yahoo Finance",
    "slug": "yahoo-finance",
    "url": "https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/she-retired-40-credits-k-100000786.html"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Bernadette Joy, a personal finance expert, retired at 40 and credits her love for the K-pop group BTS for her financial freedom. Joy and her husband now live on $6,000 a month, a lifestyle their savings and investments can comfortably support. The turning point came when she planned to attend BTS's world tour, which provided her with a specific activity in retirement and helped her realize that financial freedom is about having flexibility to use her time as she chooses. Joy opened a dedicated savings account for the tour and budgeted every expense related to it, reshaping her broader retirement portfolio to include index funds, money market funds, dividend-producing ETFs, and accessible cash income. While the 4% safe withdrawal rule suggests she would need $1.8 million to sustain $72,000 in annual spending, using a more conservative 3% withdrawal rate would require about $2.4 million. Joy emphasizes that the freedom of early retirement can be disorienting without structure, and BTS's tour gave her the structure she needed. Her father worked until 72 and had only 10 years of retirement before he passed away, which motivated her to retire early to avoid a similar fate.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}