Like any other 28-year-old New Yorker, JP Livingston spends her free time playing with her corgi, binging on Netflix, and exploring NYC. However, unlike most 28-year-olds, Livingston is retired.

After spending seven years in the finance industry, working her way up the ranks to a senior position at her firm, Livingston had built a nest egg of over $2 million — 40% from investing and 60% from pure savings — allowing her to fulfill a dream she'd held since middle school: early retirement.

"The way I think about it is: If you don't need to work for money, you can do anything you like," she told Business Insider. "If you want to go work at a traditional job, you can, but you don't have to. [Early retirement] is a word I picked up when I was looking at my future way back in middle school [and] high school."

Livingston landed a lucrative job straight out of college, earning $100,000 a year. However, she was determined to achieve her goal of financial independence and chose to live frugally, squirreling away 70% of her take-home pay into savings. Even as her income rose year after year, she refused to succumb to lifestyle inflation, choosing instead to put even more money toward her retirement goals.

Since making financial independence a reality, Livingston spends her days working on her personal finance blog, The Money Habit, walking her dog along the Hudson River, and making up her schedule as she goes along — all while keeping her and her husband's combined expenses to about $65,000 a year.

As the second-most expensive city in the world, New York is notorious for its exorbitant prices. But as Livingston exemplifies, it's not impossible to enjoy city life without going bankrupt. Here are her four best tips and tricks for saving money in the Big Apple.
1. Identify your big-ticket expenses and cut them back.

The average American spends the bulk of their money on three things: housing, transportation, and food. For Livingston, minimizing these big-ticket items paved the way for her to save at least 70% of her income.

"You really should focus on the biggest needle-movers to your spending," she said.

Though her high salary could have afforded her a much more extravagant apartment, Livingston chose to live with a roommate in a three-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side that cost her $1,050 a month — a reasonable price by New York standards.

"You've just graduated [from] college, you're used to not-the-most-luxurious accommodations," she said. "That was my biggest thing. I know my contemporaries were probably spending $400 to $600 more on rent per month, so that's $7,000 more a year."

Even as her salary increased, Livingston kept her living arrangements modest. She and her husband now share a 300-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in the West Village for $2,400 a month, despite their multimillion-dollar nest egg.

By tackling her biggest expense first, Livingston could save and invest hundreds more per month than her peers. You'd have to cut out 100 lattes a month to achieve the same result.

2. Buy furniture secondhand.

New York's high turnover rate makes it an ideal place to score secondhand goods at dirt-cheap prices, especially through online marketplaces like Craigslist.

"Usually the stuff is less than a year old, just because there are so many people who are moving every year in the city," Livingston said. "There are people in the city for a couple years who then leave."

She routinely purchases her furniture through Craigslist, often for less than 50% of the original sticker price, she says. Livingston says New York's density and fast pace also makes it easy to take chances on pieces that end up being less than perfect.

"You can sell your mistakes really easily," she said. "Every once in a while, I'll buy something and never really use it, and I'll be able to offload it for a decent price."