Inside the Secret World of ‘Interest-Maxxing’ as Homeowners Race To Keep Up

They’re rolling over balances, using debt strategically, and carefully managing taxable income. They have money in the bank and even more in tax-advantaged accounts.

Call them "interest-maxxers": a new generation of optimization-obsessed Americans trying to squeeze more from their savings through elaborate systems of DIY money management.

Their methods may sound like madness, but the results are unreal.

Raymond Zeng, a 24-year-old software engineer living in the San Francisco Bay Area, is aiming for retirement by age 30—and says he is on track to do it.

In a series of videos posted on his YouTube channel, Zeng meticulously breaks down his strategies, returns, and current net worth, which he estimates at roughly $462,000 as of June—up more than $33,000 from a month earlier, and more than 25 times the median savings of Americans under 35.

But Zeng's strategy is not quite as exotic as it might look from the outside.

“My philosophy toward financial management is that simplicity generally wins out, unless you have a particularly complex financial situation,” Zeng tells Realtor.com®.

“There are really three levers in my opinion—earning more money, saving more money, and earning better returns,” he explains. “Being where I am now (and given the historically atrocious track record of active investing), my strategy really boils down to the second lever.”

Zeng and his compatriots are riding a historic wave of recent tax-advantaged investing tools, high-earner income growth, and record stock market gains—while many homeowners remain anchored to a very different kind of wealth.

As financial assets compound inside accounts and home equity remains locked inside increasingly expensive homes, the rise of interest-maxxing reveals a hard truth about the modern retirement system: The people best positioned to make their money work harder are often those with enough income, time, liquidity, and financial fluency to perform.

The shift that created interest-maxxing

The trend is just the latest chapter in a decades-long shift from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution accounts. As employers moved away from guaranteeing a set payout in retirement, workers inherited more of the responsibility for managing what their postretirement income would look like.

The share of U.S. workers covered by defined-benefit plans fell from 59% in 1989 to 21% in 2022, while defined-contribution coverage rose from 55% to 83%, according to a St. Louis Fed analysis of Survey of Consumer Finances data. And in effect, millions of workers were asked to become their own pension managers.

“Recent retirees and those currently reaching retirement face different challenges than private-sector workers who retired years before,” the Employee Benefit Research Institute put plainly in a 2026 analysis. “Future retirees will have greater responsibility for managing their retirement plan assets throughout retirement.”

For people like Zeng, that control is the point.

He says the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) community has long had “a streak of DIY-ness in terms of planning,” in part because even many financial professionals have not always understood how FIRE works.

Zeng’s own system reflects that do-it-yourself philosophy, but not in the frantic way the term “maxxing” can imply.

His 401(k) and mega backdoor Roth contributions are “effectively a forced amount of savings per paycheck,” he says, “such that the money never reaches my account.”

He uses Fidelity as his primary financial institution and keeps a spreadsheet for his budget, net worth tracking, projections, and future restricted stock unit vests.

But he doesn't describe any of it as a set of hard rules.

“To me, the best tools I have in my toolbox when it comes to managing my finances is flexibility and introspection,” Zeng says.

It’s a notable contrast to the path many homeowners were taught to trust.

The typical homebuyer in 2025 was 59, and the typical repeat buyer was 62, according to the National Association of Realtors®. That means many of today’s buyers entered the workforce in the mid-to-late 1980s, just as traditional pensions were retreating and 401(k)-style plans were becoming the new workplace norm.

So many homeowners today spent their careers in a system that made retirement their responsibility, while homeownership remained a clear and visible way for middle-class households to build wealth. And today, the effects of that split are hard to miss: Median retirement savings are just $40,000, compared with median home equity of $130,000.

When wealth is in the house

Zeng’s own family history captures that split. His parents, first-generation immigrants, were wary of investing in equity markets and put their savings toward real estate instead. But Zeng has taken a different lesson from the current system.

“I believe that homeownership is more of a personal/psychological choice rather than a financial one,” he says, while noting that some people inside and outside the FIRE community have built wealth through real estate.

“I’m perfectly content with the returns within equity markets historically and don’t intend currently to complicate my portfolio with real estate.”

It's a striking statement in a country where homeownership has long been treated as the default path to middle-class security. But to Zeng's point, that legacy is becoming far more complicated today.

While the national median list price is up almost 44% compared to the pre-pandemic, the costs of owning have climbed just as sharply during that period. Property taxes are up 31% compared to 2019, while average monthly insurance premiums jumped 72%, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. All the while, appreciation is projected to slow to just 1.2% in the year ahead.

It's far from the independence Zeng is pursuing. A home can build wealth, to be sure, but it lacks the same flexibility as money in a retirement or brokerage account.

A homeowner can sell, borrow against the property, downsize, rent part of it out, or pass the home on. But none of those options is as simple as moving money between accounts or adjusting a contribution rate. When the investment is also the place the investor and their family calls home, every financial decision carries personal consequences, too.

Who gets to optimize

But if homeownership is becoming a more complicated investment, the alternatives are not equally available either.

For one, interest-maxxing rewards surplus. A worker who can max out all of their benefits—be it a 401(k), Roth IRA, or health savings accounts while keeping spare cash in a money market account—has room for those savings to compound.

But that surplus hasn’t reached every worker—between 1979 and 2023, wages for the bottom 90% grew just 43.7%, while wages for the top 1% grew 181.7% and wages for the top 0.1% grew 353.9%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Zeng says that is where his own strategy changed most dramatically. While his investing approach didn't change much when his income rose from $105,000 to more than $300,000, how much money he could push into the system did.

“The returns percentage-wise would be roughly the same,” he says. “But because I am able to save about 3X of what I used to be able to, the compounding over time is just incredible.”

The market has more than rewarded those who have been able to push more into the system. The S&P 500 posted total returns of 24% in 2023, 23% in 2024, and 16% in 2025, giving investors who had the most money already in the market a powerful tailwind.

And all of these points speak to a deeper issue: The modern retirement system rewards individuals who have the wealth, workplace access, and financial fluency to maximize its benefits. According to a 2024 study, these advantages disproportionately favor workers from wealthier backgrounds over similar-earning peers from lower-income families.

The extreme version of that logic is Peter Thiel. The billionaire PayPal co-founder turned a Roth IRA worth less than $2,000 in 1999 into a $5 billion windfall using an array of stock deals unavailable to the average person, according to a 2021 ProPublica investigation. And all of those gains will be available to withdraw tax-free as early as April 2027, when Thiel reaches age 59½. For perspective, the median Roth IRA balance is just $41,000.

Most savers aren't Thiel, of course. But the example lays bare the architecture that interest-maxxers are trying to use on a much smaller scale: Find the account, shelter the gain, manage the tax, and give the money time to grow.

The limits of control

With such a clear divide, it’s hardly any wonder more Americans are taking their savings strategies into their own hands.

As many as 29% of investors rely on social media as an information source for their strategies, while 26% use recommendations from social media influencers when making investment decisions, according to research from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. That number jumps to 61% when looking at those under 35.

These channels can make savers more fluent, but they can also flatten very different financial realities into one set of advice.

Zeng is just one example. His annual earnings put him in the top 5% of earners nationally. Put another way, 95% of workers don't have the same surplus income to invest.

To his credit, Zeng does not argue that his exact path is universally replicable. He says financial independence can still be a reasonable goal for many people outside extremely high-earning roles, but the timeline and sacrifice will vary dramatically.

“The crux of it, however, are both the expectations in terms of financial outcome, as well as the amount of sacrifice required to reach that financial goal,” he says.

That caveat is important because optimization can look deceptively portable.

According to FINRA, young investors lean more heavily on social media for investing advice and are far more likely to use high-risk trading tools than older generations. The study found that among investors under 35:

• 43% trade options, compared to just 10% of investors aged 55 and older.
• 22% buy on margin, compared to only 4% of the older demographic.

And again, the timeline is worth mentioning here. A 35-year-old investor today entered adulthood in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession, when trillions of dollars in retirement savings and home equity were wiped out across U.S. households. 

These younger workers have then spent much of their adult lives facing expensive housing, uneven wage gains, and a retirement system with no guarantees. For them, interest-maxxing may be an attempt to regain control over a wealth-building path that looks harder to trust than it once did.

What's interesting is that homeowners are facing their own version of the same problem. They may have done the thing previous generations were told to do: Buy the house, hold it, build equity, and let time turn ownership into security. But now, for some, that security is harder to use without giving something up.

Both paths still promise independence, but now, neither is as simple as it once sounded.