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Several months ago, I was introduced to the concept of Financial Independence. I had recently asked Corey to read one of “my books,” Lean In, to learn more about challenges that women can experience in the workplace, and in return, he provided me with one of “his books”, Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robbins. I will say the books starts out a little slow and kitschy (it was written in the 90s), and I will have to admit I was skeptical at first. As I got further into it and got to the chapter that asked, “What would you do if you didn’t have to work for money?”, I was hooked.

I finally turned to Corey, and I said, “Is this real? Could we actually do this?”  

I knew he had already been keeping various spreadsheets that tracked things like net worth, income, expenses, savings rate, etc.  What I didn’t know was that he’d be able to quickly put information into a calculator and say, “Yes, and in fact, we could be FI in 10 years.” Then, he showed me the basic calculations that assumed similar expenses and income.

We were 30 and could be financially independent by 40, assuming our expenses and income both remained the same. If we kept our same lifestyle, and we got no raises or promotions in the next 10 years (which is frankly unlikely), we could retire in 10 years!

At this moment, I realized that this was a potential reality in less time if we really got serious.  

How Can We Reach Financial Independence before 40?

You may be wondering how we got here. What’s the catch? Do we have family money? Is this only for the already wealthy?

I’d be asking the same questions too. In many ways, I feel like we are regular human beings. We have managed our money fairly well, but we don’t have trust funds. We work in non-profits and, thus, don’t have million dollar salaries. As you’ll see in the rest of this post, we’ve done some things well that have helped to set us up for success, and we’ve also had some setbacks that have lengthened the timeline, some our fault and some not. While I will never claim any universal experience, I hope that you can see yourself in some aspects of our story.

To help structure this in a way that makes sense, I’ve organized our 13-years together, 9 of them married, into 4 stages of how we viewed and related to money.  These phases go from scarcity to responsibility to lifestyle inflation to our current stage, Fioneering.

Scarcity

Corey and I met in college. We were lucky to graduate with no debt through a combination of a number of things: attending a small liberal arts college in the south with very low tuition, scholarships, working during the summer and the school-year, and for myself, assistance from my parents to cover the remaining tuition, room, and board. We were unlucky that this school wasn’t great academically (likely correlated with the low cost…), and it prepared us poorly for life beyond the university (although I’m not sure this is unique by university standards). On top of this, we graduated in 2009, just 7 months after the start of the recession. Little did we know how much it would impact us.

I studied anthropology in college and wanted to do international development work. Corey wanted to be a professor, and I’m not sure we ever thought we’d work in the actual 9-to-5 workforce. In fact, our very first “job” out of college was to be English professors at a university in Nicaragua, where we each got paid $30/month, a wage that was on par with local professor salaries. We were fortunate that our room and board was covered by the university, or so we thought. Within two months, we both got extremely sick from circumstances relating to our “free” living situation and were forced to return to the United States and face reality. (I used quotes around “free,” because we paid for it with our health.)

We had deferred Corey’s graduate school and thus, when we returned to the US to recover, the university allowed him to enroll a semester early. This meant we were moving to the northern New Jersey/New York City Metro area, one of the highest cost of living areas in the country with no jobs and little savings. Luckily, Corey quickly got a part-time, hourly job at the university. I did not have as much luck. I applied for over a hundred jobs and finally found one as a fundraiser for a for-profit fundraising company. I learned pretty quickly that most people in this industry don’t make it past their first 3 days. I made it through a full year. I commuted a minimum of 2 ½ hours round trip per day into NYC, worked long-hours on commission in a high stress environment, and made just enough for us to make ends meet.

While working for this fundraising company, I continued to apply for jobs. It is not an exaggeration to say that I applied for hundreds of them. After a year, when the desperation of despising my current role was no longer bearable, I decided to apply to AmeriCorps to gain experience in the non-profit sector. For those of you who don’t know, AmeriCorps is a government program that places its members in non-profit organizations and pays you 105% of the poverty rate in your county. Therefore, I made $11,000/year before taxes. Luckily around this same time, Mr. Fioneer got a slightly higher paying full-time job at the university, which offered him free tuition. With a bit more belt tightening, we were able to scrape by.

During this time, we were very fortunate to have a familial safety net. We were still on the family cell phone plan with my parents, and the law allowing parents to keep kids on their health insurance until 26 was passed, allowing me to go back on my parents’ insurance. Corey used the insurance provided to him from his then recent change to full-time at the university. We recognize how lucky we were to have this familial safety net, as we know that many people don’t.

This year challenged us financially, although I think that was supposed to be the point of AmeriCorps. One thing I remember that characterizes that year for me: We didn’t eat out for an entire year unless someone else was buying. We also had an amazing friend this year who would bring pizza over most Friday nights; we are forever in her debt. We were always on the verge of being in the red; in fact, many months we were. Without our safety net, one catastrophic challenge could have caused the precarious house of cards to fall.

For these years, money was a scarce resource and not having enough of it could have catastrophic consequences. We were working a lot of hours at low wages just to make ends meet.

Responsibility

By the end of my AmeriCorps year, I was glad I did it, because I built valuable skills, and ended up being hired full-time into my organization. Looking back, my starting salary at the time was quite low, but I felt like we were “rolling in the dough.”

Around this time, Corey decided to leave the university without finishing his program. He realized that he didn’t really want to be a professor, especially since being a professor often meant working for low wages as an adjunct professor, and it required you to be willing to relocate to “Nowhere, USA.” We knew someone at the time who was a professor, and he counseled Corey against this path. So he left the university and went to work in Operations for a nonprofit organization. We both wanted to do meaningful work that was helping the world, and therefore, it seemed like working for a non-profit was the best thing we could pursue.  

During this time, Corey also learned more about personal finance, and began a personal finance blog for people who were new to managing their money. We learned a lot through the process about saving, investing, and the value of being debt-free, and it helped to supplement our income for a couple of years. Now we had a new set of goals: build up an emergency fund, start saving for retirement, and save enough for a down payment for a house. I credit Corey’s fascination with personal finance for the level of responsibility we took to manage our finances well in our twenties. We even ended up saving to buy our first house (a 2-bedroom condo) in Boston when we were only 28.  

At this point, working a 9-to-5 job felt productive and like we were real adults. We had a goal (getting our finances in order and buying a house), and we were moving toward it.  

Lifestyle Inflation

By the time we moved to Boston and bought our condo, we were moving up in our careers. We had gotten multiple raises and promotions. We were soon to a point where we were max-ing out all of our retirement accounts. We didn’t have any financial goals besides saving for retirement, which I will say is not a very motivating goal, if you assume you’ll have to work for 20-30 more years.  

Because we didn’t have a more immediate goal and our jobs became much more demanding, we began to let lifestyle inflation creep in. I would define lifestyle inflation as gradually allowing your expenses to increase as your income increases without really realizing the extent to which you are doing it. For us, the main drivers of lifestyle inflation were buying experiences and convenience, although we began to accumulate more than our fair share of stuff.

We had extra money, so we bought the books we wanted to read (rather than borrowing them from the library), new clothes (even when our closets were full), new furniture (because we’re real adults now), etc. We started eating out and ordering in more and more. We were tired after our long, grueling days at work, so didn’t we deserve it? I even got to the point where part of my “self-care” was buying lunch at work every day because I felt like I didn’t have the time or brain space to make it or bring it with me.

We also started to spend more money on experiences – concerts, vacations that were more elaborate than a weekend trip or a cabin rental in the wilderness, and going out to dinner and other activities with friends. We also realized we weren’t happy. We were squarely in the 9-to-5 rat race – getting up, going to work, coming home, recovering from work, going to sleep, and doing it all over again. Because we weren’t happy, we were spending money to try to make the rat-race more bearable.

Fioneering

financial independence sunset

We are now in a new stage – Fioneering!.  We have decided to seek financial independence, meaning that sometime within the next 10 years, we will no longer need to work for money.  

FIoneering is based on the core premise that you can seek Financial Independence while also seeking happiness and fulfillment now. Fioneering does not mean that we will never spend money; it is not extreme frugality. In the grand scheme of things, I do believe that it’s better to spend money on experiences than on stuff. However, FIoneering means we don’t have to spend money to make the 9-to-5 rat race seem more bearable, because we are seeking meaning and fulfillment now.  

For me, I think that will still involve seeking learning and experiences that may cost money, but I’ll be more mindful about it. I can have just as much fun inviting friends over for dinner as going out. I can have just as much fun travel hacking my way through Central America as I had spending thousands on a trip to France, Switzerland, and Spain. In fact, it might even be more fun because of the challenge of optimizing to get free travel. I am in a stage now where I want to be mindful of the ways I spend my money, balancing both short-term and long-term happiness. And if I can have the same amount of, or more, meaning and happiness in my life by spending and buying less, why not get to Financial Independence faster?  

Have you gone through these stages or different stages on your path to discovering FI?

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