Two mirror modifiers, two empties, 14 vertices.
I used an empty for both of the mirror modifiers and parented the first half of the boot to the first empty. you can see it sticking up from the left boot. The idea was that you could just move the empty if needed. Probably unnecessary, was a just-in-case kind of thing.
I like the way Mike is approaching this in steps. It was tempting to tweak and tweak to get more shape than is needed, at this stage. So consciously, declaring this is the first step and we only need the basic shape made the workflow a little leaner. (Did I use lean in the right context there?)