Blogger Chris Mamula paid off his house and built a 6-figure portfolio by his mid-30s. He shares the 3 'game changers' that led to his early retirement.

• Chris Mamula, personal finance blogger at Can I Retire Yet?, owes his early retirement to being able to nail three important facets of his finances.
• He doesn't think an early retirement requires penny-pinching and extreme lifestyle.
• At age 41, Mamula retired with over 25-times his annual expenses saved.
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The goal of the FIRE - financial independence, retire early - movement is simple: Achieve a flexible lifestyle that's not dictated by financial restraint and strive for a retirement decades before you reach your late 50s or early 60s.

But many associate this expedited path to financial freedom with extreme frugality and an inconvenient, spreadsheet-obsessed lifestyle. After all, to be considered financial independent in the FIRE community's eyes means that your net worth is 25-times your annual expenses. It's a tall order for an individual at any age.

Still, Chris Mamula, personal finance blogger at Can I Retire Yet?, doesn't think it has to be this way.

"A lot of people think this requires an extreme lifestyle," he said on "The Long View," an investing podcast. "But if you get a couple of the big things right - and you stack them on top of one another so these effects start to compound - it doesn't really take a very extreme lifestyle."

Three of those big things that were momentous in Mamula's journey to an early retirement were:

1. Avoiding debt at all costs

2. Purchasing way less home than he could afford

3. Driving "crappy, used cars"

"Those three things were really the game changers," he said. "And that put us in this position."

Nailing these facets of personal finance allowed Mamula and his wife to sock away swaths of cash. By their mid 30s, they had paid off their house, obtained a six-figure investment portfolio, and fully completed their five-year-old daughter's college tuition fund.

"We were never ultra-frugal people," he said. "We really never even had a budget."

When Mamula turned 41, he retired.

Mamula's philosophy is similar to that of Ramit Sethi, author of New York Times best-seller "I Will Teach You To Be Rich." Both Mamula and Sethi aren't going to tell you to cut back on trivial $3 or $4 dollar purchases. They want you to focus on the financial decisions that can really put you in a bind. Sethi encompasses this notion perfectly when he says "stop asking $3 questions and start asking $30,000 questions."

What do you value?

The way Mamula and his spouse avoid debt and save more is simple: spend and save with intentionality.

"You're not necessarily frugal for the sake of frugality, or you're not necessarily a minimalist because you just eschew all possessions," he said. "You're figuring out 'What do I actually value?' And then 'Is my spending actually lining up with that?'"

He continued: "My wife and I, we knew we didn't value having the biggest, fanciest house we could afford. We knew we didn't value having cars that other people were envying, so we just chose not to do those things."

But just because Mamula and his wife weren't interested in houses or cars doesn't mean they weren't hoarding every dollar the made. They figured out what was important to them, and allocated their cash accordingly.

"We've traveled internationally. We've been to Africa. We've been to Australia," he said. "We've been to the Super Bowl. We've done all these things because that's what we truly valued."

"We didn't feel like we were sacrificing at all," he concluded.