Have you ever felt your financial future seemed hopeless, that you were destined to struggle? Bailey felt that way, but she was determined to change her future! Here’s how she did it!

My Financial Family Tree

As I looked towards my financial future, I felt hopeless. I came from a family that had made poor financial choices for generations and I felt myself slipping down that same path. At just 21 years old, I was $25,000 in debt due to student loans, a car loan, a personal loan, and one maxed-out credit card. Would I be stuck in debt, following in my family’s poor financial footsteps as well?

I didn’t want financial hardship to shape my story or continue to be a branch in my family tree. I dreamed of getting married someday, of meeting my person, and creating an amazing life together. I didn’t want to bring “financial baggage” into that life. I wanted to change my family’s story, eliminate my debt, and create a new path for a brighter future.

Making Changes

My dream gave me hope and a vision. It gave me the motivation I needed to work towards eliminating my debt, but it wasn’t easy.

My first full-time job in Human Resources barely paid above minimum wage. There was no way I would be able to get out of debt, let alone pay my rent at my current income. I knew that if I wanted to change my financial future I needed to change my circumstances. So I set out to change course!

I gave up a lot in order to pay off my loans:

• My Independence: I moved in with my mom to save on rent.
• My Fun: I cut out extras like entertainment and travel.
• My Time: I took on a part-time job working at a bookstore on evenings and weekends.

It was hard - super hard. I was working a total of 55-65 hours a week and found myself completely exhausted. I remember arriving home from a 12 hour day in tears from pure exhaustion. The only thing that kept me going was reminding myself that it would all be worth it when I was debt-free.

I wasn’t perfect about being frugal (it’s not easy) either. Some months I would get distracted from my goal and go over budget. This would cause setbacks. I could have beat myself up over it, but I accepted that I wasn’t perfect and gave myself the grace I needed to move forward in paying off my debts.

Each month I was able to pay off my debt little by little. After a year of this I had paid off $14,000! I was making progress towards my debt freedom dream. I figured it would take me another year to rid myself of this baggage and then I would then be ready for the next phase of my life!

Gaining A Partner

Plans never go the way you expect - the way you plan them to go. I had wanted to become financially successful on my own, before meeting my future husband, and definitely before getting married. But that wasn’t God’s plan for me. I started this journey on my own, but I was meant to continue down this path with a partner.

Andy entered my life a year and a half into my debt freedom journey. We clicked perfectly and planned to say “I DO” a year after we met! I wasn’t going to be debt-free by June 2016, but we were ready to start our life together.

Beyond still having debt, we didn’t have the cash for our wedding and decided to take out a loan for our big day. I don’t recommend this and I agree that this isn’t a good financial decision, but we were considering a lot of other factors than finances (namely, Andy’s military career.) As we became husband and wife, we walked into more debt, but we were going to tackle it as a team.

We worked hard together. Since I struggled with finding full-time, professional employment after our wedding, I worked two part-time jobs for 4 months. At times, I worked as many as 80 hours per week. (Talk about exhausting!) In addition to his busy work schedule with the military, my husband took care of things on the homefront so that I could focus solely on work. Our teamwork paid off, literally - haha. Less than eighteen months into married life, we made our last debt payment in November 2017.

My New Family Branch

When I started this journey, I felt hopeless in following my family tree in financial struggles. It took a total of three and a half years to change my branch in the tree, but the journey has been totally worth it. I sleep better at night, no longer worrying about bills or debt. Andy and I are living in a lovely little cottage in Iowa with our dog and cat. We are building up a six month emergency savings fund, have the financial freedom to freely give to those in need, and start traveling - things I never imagined possible!

No longer do I feel hopeless or destined for financial distress. Andy and I have created a new family branch together. One that is bright and full of hope. We are currently dreaming of taking an international trip to Europe or the Caribbean (we haven’t quite decided yet where we’ll travel). And who knows what will be next for us! All I do know is that debt no longer has a hold on me, my future, or my family tree. There is hope, there is light, and there is success in this branch!

Thank you to Bailey for sharing her story! We love that she she persevered through the tears and that her and her husband were able to take on their debt as a team and create a brighter future for their family! We can’t wait to see what they pick - Europe or Caribbean?!

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!

It’s time for another spending report! We spent a lot this month on getting from point A to point B - gas for our road trip to Florida, maintenance and insurance for our car, and two bikes (one for Jaime and one for our oldest daughter).

I’ll give some personal updates first and then we can dive into our full spending report.

Personal Updates

We had another action-packed month. The girls finished up the school year and within an hour of leaving class, we were on the road to Florida for our summer road trip.

With summer in full swing, we’ve been busy with water balloons, soccer balls, and science experiments. Add in summer school (the fun kind) for the kids and afternoon camp and we’ve been even busier than the school year.

That said, it’s been a good kind of busy - the kind that leaves you tired at the end of the day and a smile on your face.

One of the really fun things we picked up this month was a fully-functioning air hockey table that a neighbor put by the curb. The girls are becoming air hockey experts and Jaime and I are trying to keep up :)

My job search is progressing - I’ve had conversations with a number of companies and am making progress on a few promising positions. I anticipate we’ll have clarity within the next 1-2 months on where I’ll be headed for my work day and what our finances will look like going forward.

How We Track Our Spending

We’ve been manually tracking our spending for the last 2.5 years and it’s helped us make a big improvement in our spending habits.

I couldn’t talk Jaime into loving spreadsheets, so I created a web app for us instead. Once we had it for ourselves, it was a logical next step to put it online for anyone to access.

In the spending summary below, you’ll see screenshots straight out of our Thrifty account.

If you’d like to learn more, check out Thrifty and sign up for a free 7-day trial.

How We Manage our Money

We’ve been using Capital One 360 for our checking and savings accounts for years. We’ve been really happy with their ease-of-use and interest rates.

For travel rewards, we’ve been using a Capital One Venture Card and we just hit our spending threshold to get 50,000 bonus points - that’s $500 in travel!

Spending Summary - $8,749.27

In June, we spent a total of $8,749.27 - quite a bit more than our monthly target of $5,000. Almost all of this was travel-related (both our family road trip in June and paying ahead for parts of our 10-year anniversary trip in July).

Here’s how we’ve been trending on our spending:

Next, let’s take a look at how we spent by category this month:

And here’s a breakdown of each category:

Side-Hustle Income Summary - $250.00

Jaime and I made a bit this month from the blog (and the connections its made for us). Our $250.00 is a combination of income from our Freedom Series sponsor and from freelance writing. You can see our Work With Us page for the full list of opportunities we have.

How Was Your June?

How was your spending this June? We had a lot of seasonal expenses hit this month and some big investments in our health and travel. Everything was in alignment with our values, so we feel good about it even though it was a higher-spend month!

Don’t forget to check out Thrifty, the app behind all the pretty screenshots in these reports. You can get your own tracking started for free with a 7-day trial!

I’m so excited to have Ellen from Uncommon Dream share her family’s Financial Independence story! It’s amazing the dreams you can accomplish when you live frugally!

Our Frugal Beginning

Michael and I have always lived on the frugal side of life. We chose to buy a low cost home close to work, paying off our mortgage in two years. We even sold one of our vehicles (keeping a single old paid off car) and traveled by foot or bike as much as possible.

We’ve always worked hard and found ways to have fun without spending a lot of money. We would take our sweet dog for hikes, have friends over for game night, travel to visit family a few times a year, and stay up too late binge watching shows like The Wire or Breaking Bad.

Living frugally allowed us to live off my teacher salary (even after fully investing in my 403b) and invest Michael’s salary into index funds at Vanguard. Michael was really excited to see our projected retirement date as we saved his income. He would spend hours working on a spreadsheet he created and then pull me over to update me on our progress. This helped me get on board with the financial independence thing and showed me how high spending months impacted our projected date.

After seven years of marriage and living frugally, we achieved financial independence. We were both happy with our jobs, and had a baby on the way; so we decided to keep working and saving. Once we welcomed our son into our arms, our focus started to shift more toward parenthood. We found ourselves questioning our current lifestyle and talking about how we wanted to raise our family.

To Move Or Not To Move

We were living in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. While it’s a great place for many people, it just wasn’t for us. We had moved there from Olympia, Washington for Michael’s work with the plan to stay 2-3 years. We would often talk about where we wanted to move to next, where to put down roots. We’d be out walking our dog at 10pm, sweating in the summer heat, and go back and forth between moving back to Washington (where Michael wanted to go) and Baltimore (close to my brother). We just couldn’t come to an agreement.

One weekend we took a little getaway to a cabin overlooking the Palo Duro Canyon in West Texas. We worked together on our five year plan and had something of an epiphany. COLORADO!

If we moved to Colorado, we could be in a beautiful area with a lot of other family perks:

• Close to Michael’s extended family (Michael’s aunts, uncles, cousins, and his grandfather).
• A short flight from Michael’s parents in Texas.
• Within driving distance of my dad and stepmom in Arkansas.
• A reasonable flight away from Baltimore!

It’s one thing to make a decision, it’s another to make the move. Despite settling on Colorado as our destination sometime in 2012, we didn’t get there until 2016. I became pregnant with our second child and we realized that moving would need to happen now or not for a few years.

While a good friend of ours was visiting over Thanksgiving, we took my one year old to the park and brainstormed over our lives. She was looking to move from New York out west for a change of pace. Michael and I were hesitant to leave Texas and our support system right before having our second child. Our talk resulted in a whirlwind of a plan:

Michael and I would buy a house in Colorado a couple months before my due date, and she would move in with us for a few months, helping us make the transition to a two kid household.

I drove home pretty giddy to share our thinking with Michael, but we didn’t take the leap right away. There were a lot of back and forth moments. One week we’d tell ourselves no, that’s crazy! Other weeks we’d decide we were going to do it no matter what. Ultimately, we felt very strongly about moving before our daughter was born.

We flew out to Colorado in January 2016 and bought a house that weekend (we were very lucky). Our house in Texas sold within 24 hours and above our asking price. By the first week in March we were moved into our new home in Colorado. Our daughter was born exactly two months later!

Leaving our life in Texas came with another change. We decided to take advantage of the financial independence we had gained before our kids were born. We started co-parenting full time while working on passion projects on the side (such as FI Clubs).

Michael finds himself working about 70 hours a month (this happens to cover our expenses and allows us to continue saving). This allowed us a lot of flexibility in our life and we started talking about the things we wanted to do when we both “retired”. We had always dreamed of traveling abroad again.

But, yikes, we now have two very young kids! Who travels with little kids? As it turns out, we do.

Ecuador & Beyond

Michael and I met at a language school in Mexico back in 2004. We both speak Spanish and would love for our children to acquire some authentic bilingual skills as well. With that in mind, we spent a lot of time deliberating on where to travel.

Michael had used a site called TheEarthAwaits.com to find the safest, cleanest, most affordable Spanish-speaking locations to choose from. We eventually decided on Cuenca, Ecuador.

We put our house up on AirBnB, and spent an awesome three months in Ecuador during the winter of 2017. We met some really wonderful people during that time and decided to return to Cuenca for the winter for 2018. Our lifestyle there was really pretty normal. We walked everywhere, drank beer with friends, and took short trips to beautiful parts of the country. We enrolled both of our kids in a local preschool where they were immersed with native Spanish speakers for 3-4 hours a day.

We’ve been back in Colorado for about two months now and are enjoying time in our community, working on house projects, and spending time with friends and family. Along with enjoying our time back home, we are talking about taking a longer international trip. Our friends Chad & Kari have inspired us to take a bigger leap!

This time, we are looking at a longer stretch of time. We’re talking about slow traveling Latin America (starting in Costa Rica or maybe Colombia) for a full year and a half beginning in January. We may stay in one spot if we fall in love with it or we may try out a few different cities and countries. We’ll then return home to Colorado in time for our son to start kindergarten, enrolling him in a local bilingual elementary school that has a great reputation.

Life is still busy with balancing parenthood, doing work that fulfills us, taking care of our home, building our life in Colorado and traveling. These past two years have been full and crazy, but we wouldn’t change it for the world.

Thank you to Ellen & Michael for sharing their story with us! We love how frugality enabled you to save, become financially independent, and raise your little ones in your values! We wish you the best and can’t wait to hear more about your slow travels in the future!

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!

In the personal finance space, the phrase 9-to-5 often gets treated as a four-letter word. Everyone seems to be looking to escape the 9 to 5, whether that be through early retirement or a leap to entrepreneurship.

I’ve been lured by that thinking as well, but through a year of mini-retirement, I’ve come to recognize and appreciate some of the things that a 9-to-5 provides.

Before the internet police come in and fill up the comment section, I’m not saying you can only get these things through a 9-to-5. There are lots of ways to get these; for some a 9-to-5 is a great way to get them.

Community

When I was growing up in the suburbs of Minnesota, we had a high concentration of families in our neighborhood and the kids spent a lot of time hanging together in the backyards. The parents would get together, play cards, talk about parenting, and support each other when they needed help.

Our neighborhoods used to be our communities.

One of my good friends and I were talking about this recently and he remarked how much more of that community is now found through the workplace.

I certainly found this to be true. My coworkers were the people I spent the most time interacting with every day. We came to know one another on a personal basis, supporting each other and developing real friendships.

While peoples’ connections with their companies seem to be decreasing, their connections with their co-workers seem to be on the rise.

When you leave the 9-to-5 for entrepreneurship or retirement, you’ll find life is a whole lot quieter. That may sound idyllic for some, but even introverts like me need socialization for a healthy life.

Team-based Learning

I consider learning to be one of the most enjoyable parts of life.

Being in a 9-to-5 provides a great opportunity to learn from the community around you. You may have the benefit of learning from the 40-year-veteran of the industry. You may be able to develop new and creative approaches with your peer. Or you may have your perspective changed by an insightful intern.

Being around people with a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences puts you in a position to learn things you’ll have trouble doing through blog posts, tutorials, and courses. The powerful dynamic of direct personal interaction can’t be oversold.

Impact

As an entrepreneur and blogger, I’ve had the honor to reach a number of people. But there’s only so much you can accomplish as an individual or a small team. When you’re a part of a bigger team (with a bigger vision), you can take advantage of the compounding effect of diverse talents to reach a larger audience in bigger ways.

In my old career, I contributed to the development of safe and effective medical devices - ones my own family members have relied on. There’s a great feeling that comes from being a part of a business or project that makes the world around you a better place.

In the last year, I’ve worked hard to spread the word about our app, Thrifty, but have come to realize that sales and marketing isn’t my strong suit. Without that skillset, my ability to help people get their finances in order has been limited.

As I’m applying for jobs now, one of the biggest areas I’m looking at is the impact of the work I’d be doing based on the team I’d be with. Will my work be directly benefiting my friends and family? Will I be helping to enable others who do great work? Or will I be pouring my time and energy into developing luxuries and splurges?

I think you can guess where I want to head :)

9-to-5 Has Its Benefits

While the good ol’ “day job” gets a bad rap, it’s important to remember that there are a lot of non-financial benefits of working a standard job.

As you consider your future career and what you want your retirement to look like, keep these items in mind. If they are important to you, make sure to find a way ahead of time to ensure you can still achieve them no matter what path you take.

Chris and I have a goal to eventually travel to Europe (after we visit all 50 states - 3 more to go!). So when I heard that Millionaire Mob found a way to travel to Europe twice a year with his wife, I had to hear more! Here’s his story!

Discovering Our Love Of Europe

When my wife (girlfriend at the time) and I were in college, we studied abroad in Florence, Italy. This is where we fell in love with Europe’s culture and history! Walking along those ancient cobblestone streets were unbeatable. After spending all that time in Italy, we knew we wanted to return to Europe as often as possible.

When I graduated from college, I landed a job in investment banking. This allowed me to make a healthy income and support our love of travel, but after five years, the job was taking a toll on my spirit - the long hours and high pressure environment was burning me out. Realizing I needed a change of pace, I hung up my suit and left my job to pursue my passion in a more relaxed environment.

I took a steep pay cut to work in a more engaging, small team environment where I’m focused on energy investing. I love it. I don’t feel like I’m at work. My hours are much more manageable and I get to meet other energy professionals around the U.S. Work can still be stressful, but if it didn’t have some stress it wouldn’t be exciting.

While I took the pay cut, my wife has been working her way through law school to avoid student loans. Our monthly bills and expenses add up fast on my income, leaving little cash available for travel. We didn’t want my lower income to hold us back from the travel we love. So we decided to look into travel hacking and found a way to travel to Europe twice a year on our small income.

Travel Hacking To Europe & Beyond

We recently traveled to France, taking the opportunity to trace both of our family’s heritage. We had so much fun and learned that my wife’s family was from all over France. We even got to visit some of her long lost relatives! It was an amazing experience and I definitely recommend exploring one’s family roots! You never know what you will discover!

While this trip could have cost of thousands of dollars, we were able to stay in Paris and the South of France for free via credit card hacking. We used our Chase Sapphire Reserve and Delta Skymiles credit cards.

Discovering our own history in France was amazing, but we love taking in all the different cultures that traveling to Europe offers. That’s was makes Europe such an exciting place to travel - so many different cultures in close proximity to each other!

When my wife and I said “I Do” a year ago, we knew we would travel to Europe for our honeymoon. We took advantage of Europe’s diversity and easily hopped from one country to another! Naturally, we returned to Italy, sharpening our Italian communication skills. Then flew to the Netherlands and tried to learn Dutch. It was a crazy experience. Let’s just say the culture of Italians is a lot different than the Dutch. Luckily, one similarity is that they both have amazing cheese… We love cheese, haha.

For our next trip, we are stretching beyond Europe and flying to Japan. I racked up enough points through credit card hacking and manufactured spending that our round trip tickets only cost $3.20!

I love how travel hacking has allowed us to continue to travel. While travel hacking can be complicated, it doesn’t have to be. Credit card hacking can be simple - try opening one credit card like the Chase Sapphire Preferred and earn the bonus with the minimum spend. This card is great for starters. Manufactured spending is even easier - you can fund a new bank account with a credit card and hit your minimum spending requirement instantly.

Our Retirement Dream: Living In Europe

While we love that we are able to travel twice a year, we would love to be able to extend our travels in the future. Living a carefree life in Europe is at the top of our list every time we talk about our dreams and goals.

Right now, work and school take up most of our time, but we are hoping that this investment up front will allow us to retire early (in our 40’s). We are hoping that when that happens we can split our time between the U.S. and Europe!

Retirement, let alone early retirement, is hard to work towards when you don’t have a large gap between your income and expenses. In order to help with that, I’ve started focusing on a few side hustles: freelance consulting, blogging, ecommerce, and travel photography. With these side incomes, I’m able to invest in saving for our dream.

How I’m Investing For Our Dream

There are a lot of options for investing, but I’ve found dividend growth investments to be the most rewarding. I focus on investing in undervalued stocks. This way I’m able to receive additional income (yearly payouts) while also seeing stock values increase over time. You can see my portfolio and follow our investing journey here. I also created a guide to help others build a successful dividend portfolio!

My wife and I are a long way from reaching early retirement, but I’m glad that we’ve started the journey now. So far, I’m happy with our investing success and bi-annual travels!

Thank you to Millionaire Mob for sharing his journey! I’m officially interested in manufactured spending and intrigued by Dividend Investing! We wish you and your wife the best as you work towards early retirement and traveling the world!

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!

Today we’ve got something new at Keep Thrifty - our first reader case study! One of our readers, Alex, reached out with the situation below. I’ll provide my response and some commentary. I encourage all of you to provide your thoughts in the comments section as well. Our collective wisdom can certainly provide Alex with some direction and hopefully help him make a thrifty decision!

Here’s Alex’s situation:

I inherited a house, sold it, and netted 338,000. I maxed my Roth IRA out at 5500. And stashed enough away into emergency reserves. Now I have 300,000 to invest. But I am grappling with using half of that to purchase a 300k house. I don’t have the income to finance 80%. Typically houses don’t yield as much as long-term stock investments. I own 2 vehicles outright and I am debt free. I’d be interested in your perspective.

After talking with Alex further, I got clarification that the home purchase would be for personal use, not for rental income.

My Analysis

First off, kudos to Alex for maxing out his Roth IRA and topping off his emergency fund. The tax benefits of a Roth IRA are definitely worth taking advantage of if he wasn’t already getting there. Ensuring he’s got a healthy emergency fund is a wise move before any major investing.

That leaves us with the big question of buying half of a house (financing the rest) versus investing the amount (presumably in something like passive index funds).

Let’s take the home purchase on first.

The Case For Buying a House

If Alex’s goal has been to get into personal home-ownership, I certainly see the allure of putting a portion of the inheritance toward home ownership.

In Alex’s part of the country, $300k can easily get him a 1700-square-foot home (or more) with a pool and a great location.

Financing $150k with 30-year mortgage rates in the low 4% range would give a monthly payment of about $700-$750, which is a fraction of comparable rents in his area for similar houses.

Getting into a situation where he’s building equity and having a nice living situation for low monthly cost certainly has its appeal.

But having some appeal doesn’t necessarily make it the right move. Let’s check the flip side.

The Case Against Buying a House

Alex is currently renting and it seems to be working ok for him. Putting his money into a personal home has a number of limitations that are worth considering.

First, there’s liquidity. While Alex has built up his emergency fund (which is a big help here), homes aren’t very liquid. If Alex finds himself in a situation where he needs to move or needs to free up more money, he’s going to be in the position of selling his home under pressure.

In the case he needs to sell, Alex may not get the price he wants in the timeline he’s looking for and could risk getting a lower sale price and/or being unable to sell in time for his needs altogether.

Second, there’s return on investment. Typically, people comparing real estate investing with stock investing are in the business of real estate rentals. Rental properties have monthly cash flow and the chance for value appreciation over time.

A personal home doesn’t have true monthly cash flow, so the investment upside is limited to value appreciation. As the experts will tell you, most home value appreciation is due to inflation anyway, so as an investment strategy, home-buying is a pretty poor choice.

Another Option

One of the items Alex highlighted in his scenario was the fact that he’s debt-free. The fact he took the time to mention this lets me know that this is something he’s proud of and is valuable to him. It sounds like Alex wants to get into home ownership at some point, but his $300k home idea would be a step in the wrong direction.

Whenever presented with two options that you don’t love, it’s always worth exploring if there are other options available. Fortunately, there’s another option here that I think is worth considering.

My big question to Alex was, why a $300k house?

As I mentioned earlier, $300k would buy a 1700-square foot house in Alex’s area. With 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a pool, Alex would be living the high life.

With just a minute of searching, I was able to find an 1100-square foot home with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms (but no pool) listed for $150k. By sacrificing a small amount of space (and his own personal pool), Alex could buy the house outright, still invest $150k into index funds, and get the best of both worlds.

He’d have no rent payment, no mortgage payment, and know that he should be getting a good return on investment from stocks over his 40+ year time horizon.

With his reduced monthly costs, he’s in a better position in case of job loss or other financial hardship and having $150k in passive investments working for him should ensure he’s got a liquid secondary emergency fund.

My Recommendation

Were I in Alex’s situation, that’s the route I’d go - buying a smaller place outright and putting the rest into investments.

That said, a lot of this has to do with my personality. I’m not a fan of debt but want to be a homeowner as a part of my pathway to complete payment freedom.

If Alex is open to taking on more debt or is comfortable renting for the long-haul, putting a higher share of the $300k (or all of it) in passive index funds is the strategy that is most likely to bring higher returns.

What Do You Think?

What would you do if you were in Alex’s situation? Do you have an Option D that I didn’t think of? Leave your thoughts in the comments section below!

P.S. I’d like to give a big thanks to Alex for reaching out with his scenario. If you have a scenario you’d like to hear our thoughts on, sign up for our newsletter below and let us know!

Going to college and getting a degree doesn’t guarantee you to a job offer. What do you do if you find yourself in this position? Amanda found herself jobless after college, here’s how she found her own path to success!

My Pathway to Success Disappeared

All my life, I had a simple formula, a simple direction to follow. I was told to go to college, get a job, make money. Simple, right? I followed this path somewhat blindly. I didn’t really think about the future, I just did what I was told to do.

When I graduated, I faced a different reality. It was 2010, the economy was suffering. No one was hiring. I found myself with no money, no prospects for gaining an income, and no skills (or so I thought).

I found myself in the middle of an existential crisis. My pathway literally disappeared. Everything I had been told to do in order to be a successful adult no longer applied. I started suffering from panic attacks and a total lack of direction and purpose.

I spent my first six months after graduation in a dark place, unsure of how to move forward. Luckily, during this time, a friend handed me The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau. It was this book that helped me realize that there is more than one path in life. I didn’t have to live the way it had been prescribed to me. I could make my own decisions, including working for myself or traveling the world. I could design my own life.

I had no idea what I wanted my life to look like or what I wanted to do, but for the first time I realized that I had the power to create my own path.

Creating My Own Financial Path

After reading that book, I took a chance and looked into freelance writing. I had always wanted to be a writer, maybe I could get paid a little to write while I look for a full time job. One of the writing gigs I landed was looking for personal finance articles. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about money, but I told myself:

“Whatever dream life I come up with in the future - it’s going to cost money, so I better figure it out. If I get paid for these articles, then I’m getting paid to research personal finance topics and teach myself.”

And so began my obsession with learning about money! As I wrote articles from my research, I shared my own financial journey on my blog and eventually landed a full time job as a recruiter.

During my day job I interviewed people for jobs within Fortune 500 companies. I was literally spending my days with people who’d been laid off and had no money. To top it off, the companies were also in a financial bind because they were trying to recover from the economy. This opened my eyes to the reality that working for someone else doesn’t mean you have financial security. I stayed in this job for two years while my blog and freelance gigs were growing.

While I was thankful for my full time work, I was becoming burnt out. I wanted to quit my job and turn my blog into my full time income. I just wasn’t sure how to make this happen! In December of 2013, I hired a business coach to help me monetize the brand I had worked so hard to build. I think I literally paid her my entire emergency fund at the time to take this risk!

This was a really hard leap to take. I feared that I wouldn’t make the money back, but I pushed myself to get over my fear and change my mindset so I could move forward. The risk paid off and I quit my job six months later!

That success was followed by writing a bestselling book, rebranding my business, coaching others, landing corporate writing gigs, and then landing influencer campaigns. It’s been five years; I love what I do and am earning four times more than when I was a recruiter.

How I did it without being frugal

The idea of scrimping, saving, and living frugally never inspired me. I tried it, and it only got me so far. I want to have fun and own nice things. I also like paying for convenience. For me, gaining financial security is all about my income. If I want something I can’t afford, I just figure out how to make more money to pay for it! This is how:

First, Be Intentional: I’ve always been clear about what things matter to me and what don’t. I don’t care about owning a car; but I love healthy food, fitness classes, and getting a massage once in a while. I don’t spend my money on the things I don’t care about.

Second, Grow Your Potential: Once I landed my job, I was still living with my parents. This allowed me to dump the money I made into my business, allowing it to grow and earn more money.

Third, Take Risks: If I wanted something - like to visit a friend in Mexico (which I did) - then I would force myself to find the money. I’d take small risks (book the plane ticket, put something on a credit card) to force myself to find the money.

With time, I started to realize I can earn whatever I want because there is no limit to my earning potential whereas there is only so much I can save before life starts to suck. I’ve also used credit card points (haven’t paid for a flight in years) and would AirBnB or crash with friends.

I’m loving my life in Miami. Every day I get to wake up to a view of Biscayne Bay and do work that I love. Running my own business has been a dream come true - a dream I never realized I had. And I’m excited to continue down this path. My next goal is to become a seven figure business, helping others create their dream life, and booking a trip to London to visit a friend!

Thank you to Amanda for sharing her story! I love that she took small risks and found the money to be able to follow through on her dreams. I look forward to watching Amanda continue to thrive in entrepreneurship and taking that trip to London!

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!

Young & Full Of Fear

I’ve been dreaming of traveling internationally for a long time. When Chris and I got married we traveled to the Dominican Republic for our honeymoon. We stayed at an all inclusive resort and never left the premises. That was 2008 (I was 23 years old) and I was terrified of going out on excursions or walking off the resort to explore the rest of the island. I guess it didn’t help that when we took the bus to our resort we passed men in the trees and on the streets with rifles in hand. That scared the shit out of me (excuse my language).

I had read many stories of people leaving their resorts in foreign countries only to end up with life threatening illnesses or disappearing. To say that fear ruled my decision making at the time is an understatement. I even refused to step in the ocean! (Do we look young in this picture, or what! That’s me after half a bottle of wine! haha)

I loved our honeymoon, but living in fear is no way to live. There is so much more to life! As I’ve grown up, I realize that so much of life is out of my hands, that I have to live my best life without regrets. I have to smile, laugh, do silly things, and take risks. I don’t want to refuse to get on a plane because I’m afraid it’s going to crash. I don’t want to be afraid of visiting Europe because there may be a bomb on a train. And I don’t want to refuse to eat fresh fruit in a third world country because I may ingest something that will make me sick. That doesn’t mean I want to be reckless. I want to research, learn, explore, and have faith that everything will be an amazing!

Picking Costa Rica

When Chris took his one year mini-retirement, we decided to stay in our town and live life, but when we talked about possibly extending the retirement a second year I wanted our family to take an adventure! I talked Chris into living in Costa Rica for nine months!

Why Costa Rica? Honestly, I don’t know. I wanted to go somewhere tropical with warm winters. Costa Rica just stuck out in my mind. I was determined to figure out all the logistics. I researched towns, schools, homeschooling, cost of living, border runs, health insurance, and even signed up for Trusted Housesitters to see if we could house sit instead of renting!

In the end, Chris wasn’t ready to take such a big leap. He needed to get his feet wet first. We canceled our idea of living in Costa Rica for nine months but agreed to travel to Costa Rica for our ten year wedding anniversary!!!!

I had no idea where in Costa Rica to go. I did a random google search for a small resort near the beach. Google directed me to The Harmony Hotel. I instantly fell in love with the small boutique hotel located in Nosara, CR. After further research, I learned that Nosara is a small surfer/yoga beach town with dirt roads far from any major city! It was perfect! I told Chris and we booked it right away!

Ten Years Older & Throwing My Fear To The Wind

Getting off the plane in Costa Rica was surreal for me. I was so excited to be exploring a new country with my husband! After navigating customs, we took a 2.5 hour shuttle ride to Nosara, walked up to our hotel with our 2 backpacks (I love being a minimalist!) and were greeted with mint lemonade (so yummy). Chris even surprised me with a bottle of red wine and a plate of brownies waiting for us in our room (My husband knows me well!).

Our Lazy Days: The next four days were spent wandering the dirt streets, walking the beach, lounging by the pool, and playing a board game each evening in our room while snacking on the most delicious homemade chocolate peanut butter treats from the mini bar! We loved soaking up the sun and enjoying the slow pace of Costa Rica together!

Our Excursion: I told Chris I wanted to go zip-lining while in Costa Rica and toss my fear to the wind! That is something my 23 year old self never would have done! It was a crazy adrenaline inducing adventure that bonded Chris and I with the other people on the tour with whom we are now blessed to call friends! When we returned to our resort my adrenaline crashed and I passed out hard on a lounge chair by the pool!

Amazing Eats: We loved the food in Nosara! We ventured out on the dirt roads and stopped at different restaurants. We grabbed awesome pizza at Pura Pizza run by a true Italian, had an amazing salad at Cafe de Paris, and ate the yummiest vegan friendly dishes at Robin’s Cafe. Chris even fell in love with the local dish - Casado (rice, beans, chicken, and fried plantain, ordering it for dinner three different nights.

Exploring Beyond: One day we tracked down a Tuk Tuk so we could explore Central Nosara. Our driver happily dropped us off and agreed to pick us back up in an hour. We visited the local supermarket where we had to leave our bag in a locker outside, walked the food isles on the main level and wandered the upstairs filled with shoes and household supplies! Our driver picked us up an hour and a half later right where he had dropped us off!

Before we knew it, it was our last day in Costa Rica. The rain came and we relaxed in the open air lobby listening to the rain while drinking coffee and sketching up designs of our little white shack. It was the perfect way to end our stay in Nosara - relaxing and dreaming of our future!

Slowing Down In Order To Dream Together

Traveling to Costa Rica started as my dream. I wanted an adventure. I wanted to explore and face my fears.

But when you are married your partner may not share your dream. Chris didn’t want to navigate a nine month trip in another country like I did.

This was really frustrating. I even questioned if we could keep moving forward together. We had been married for nine and a half years! Were we starting to want different things out of life? This question made me sad. The thing I wanted most out of life was my husband.

Knowing that, I gave up on a nine month trip to Costa Rica. I was devastated, but I didn’t want to push us to do something that we didn’t both want! When I let go of that dream, Chris offered the idea of going to Costa Rica for our ten year wedding anniversary! I was ecstatic about this and had our hotel picked out and booked within 24 hours! (Yes, I’m super spontaneous!)

We entered this adventure and ten year celebration really thankful. I was thankful that Chris was willing to explore Costa Rica. Chris was thankful that I made the trip a reality! This only strengthened our love for each other!

To make things even more exciting, Chris fell in love with Costa Rica just as much as I did. Now we both want to return for a longer period of time with our girls! What started as my dream is slowly becoming our dream - which is way better! I just had to wait for Chris’s vision to catch up to my own so that we could create an even better vision together!

Traveling to Nosara, Costa Rica was about celebrating our marriage. A marriage where we put each other first and slow down for each other. In doing so, we found ourselves wandering the beautiful dirt roads, overcoming fears, and looking forward to a future that includes a family adventure to Costa Rica in the near future!

We fell in love with Nosara because it warmed our hearts, forced us to slow down and face our fears, and reminded us that an adventure is best taken when Chris and I are a team!

We’ve got an awesome freedom story today from Claudia at Two Cup House. They found their way to debt freedom and are now on their way to achieving the financial freedom they dreamed about back in 2015!

Building Normal Debt

When you graduate from college, you find yourself eager to live a grown-up life. You start your career and start spending all your money to create that picture of what you think life is supposed to be like. The student loans you have - you can just pay the minimums. No need to sacrifice your ability to make that perfect picture a reality! Bring on the home mortgage, new cars, and awesome furniture.

That’s what we did! We financed our college education, landed jobs in stable fields, bought new cars, a house (1,500 square feet & remodeled it), furniture, and ate out all the time. We were living the normal American life with over $200,000 of “normal” debt.

• Credit Card Debt: $16,515
• Mortgage: $156,013
• Student Loans: $36,079

Realizing We Didn’t Want Normal Debt

About ten years later in April of 2015, we found two blogs that got us thinking differently. John and David of the Debt Free Guys paid off a ton of debt and Carl of 1500 Days was pursuing financial independence so he could quit his job – both were (and continue to be) inspiring for us.

We had dreamed about getting out of debt. Then our eyes opened to the possibility of downsizing to a lower-maintenance home and traveling the US to visit all the national parks.

While we had the inspiration, we weren’t on a fast track to change. We experienced some health troubles that made us realize how short life could be. Fortunately, the health issues dissipated, but our desire for financial freedom didn’t. We didn’t want to wait around to see if our health issues resurfaced. We would have to make change happen NOW!

Achieving Debt Freedom

Inspired by 1500 Days, we decided we were going to pay off all of our debt and achieve financial freedom in 1,500 days. If this plan sounds half-baked, that’s because it was. At the time we made this decision, it was April 2015 and we had more than $200,000 in debt!

We forged ahead with our half-baked plan. We needed to get out of debt fast! Our first step was to eliminate our mortgage. We put our house on the market and planned to pay for a tiny home with the equity from the sale. Our second step was to pay off the rest of our debt. In order to do this, I applied for a full-time job and Garrett spent a lot more time on his commission-based sales job. We also cut expenses, including food and utilities. Every little bit helped us save more money to pay off our debt faster.

We listed our house and while we waited for the sale to go through, we worked on paying off our credit card debt. After six months, we were credit card debt free, but hadn’t been able to sell our house. This was frustrating as we were excited to move on. So the next month, we took out a small mortgage and moved. It was another six months before the house sold and an additional six months before we were completely mortgage free. With a lot of dedication, in March of 2017 we paid the last of our student loans and became officially debt free two years after we started this journey (about 730 days).

Tackling Complete Financial Freedom

The second half of our dream is to become financially free. Since paying off all of our debt, this dream has evolved. Instead of focusing on retiring early, we are focusing more on doing work that matters and spending more time outdoors. Right now we are trying to balance enjoying this life and creating the flexibility that financial freedom affords.

For now, we are loving our tiny home and have adapted to it quite quickly. Sure, it has its challenges, but every housing situation does. Living in a “tiny” house is a dream come true because it’s low-cost, low-maintenance, and affords us tons of time to spend outdoors hiking and kayaking.

As we look to the future, financial freedom or having enough money to make a change in our lifestyle is still the goal. We’re constantly trying to make smarter decisions on how we spend our money and time so that we can work less, earn more, and travel in a location-independent fashion. I know that we’ll get there, maybe even within our half-baked 1,500 day goal (about 300 days left to go).

Once we reach financial freedom we’ll be free to focus more on our passion projects and then who knows what will happen!

Advice For Others Jumping Into Lifestyle Changes

Enjoy The Journey: One thing I wish we had done differently is focus more on enjoying the journey. We’ve had a blast so far, but there were times that we worked tons of extra hours to get to debt freedom faster. Sometimes it’s OK to slow down and enjoy the view.

Find Your Tribe: Personal finance bloggers inspired us to dream big and pushed us to take action, so without them, I don’t think we would have made the progress we’ve made. An added benefit is that bloggers who were our accountability partners throughout this journey have become good friends.

Thank you to Claudia for sharing their journey with us. It’s amazing how much you can change your life when you find the inspiration, create a plan, and start making the necessary changes right away! We’re looking forward to seeing you accomplish complete financial freedom and checking off the rest of your national parks list!

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!

Our mini-retirement was an incredible year of travel, family time, and personal growth. Beyond the amazing experiences we had, we learned so much about ourselves, our dreams, and where we hope to direct our lives in the future.

But taking a year off of work doesn’t come without a cost. Was it worth it?

Let’s take a look at the numbers and you can be the judge.

Planned Mini-Retirement Budget

Before we started our mini-retirement, we analyzed our spending in Thrifty to get an idea of what we’d be spending. We used the data from two years of spending, along with our projections about how our spending in Mini-Retirement would be different to come up with a detailed budget for the full year.

Our mini-retirement budget totaled up to just over $60k ($60,206.88 to be exact).

Changes In Course

A proper budget reinforces your priorities through a financial plan (Tweet this )

Our original budget captured our intentions and priorities for the year. As the year progressed, we had two opportunities arise that fit our goals and were worth deviating from the budget.

Had we known of these ahead of time, we would have built them in :)

First, we bought land in our town. A low-cost piece of land (roughly 40% the cost of most other lots) was listed in our area with the benefit of no deed restrictions. That meant we could build a small, cozy home of our dreams in the community we love. We jumped on the opportunity and happily got the land at the listing price.

Second, we decided to travel to Hawaii. This was one of 4 states we hadn’t visited yet as a family and we were looking for a way to break out of winter in the midwest. We loved the aloha spirit we found there and the trip gave us clarity on the life of travel we wanted to create.

Actual Mini-Retirement Spending

Because our land purchase is a non-depreciating purchase and helps us toward payment freedom, we don’t include it in our actual spending. We think the same way about principal payments on a mortgage.

Here’s the detailed comparison of what we planned to spend with what we actually did, excluding our land and Hawaii trip spending.

Excluding our Hawaii trip and land purchase, we were about $900 over budget. Adding in our Hawaii spending and our total spend for the year was $69,966.48.

A couple notable lessons from our spending and budget:

• We forgot to include the pro-rated property tax from the sale of our home in our original budget - that was about $3,000 of expense.
• We didn’t realize how much less we’d spend on transportation. Without a daily commute (even though it was only 8 miles), we saved a bunch on gas. This also led to savings on maintenance as well!
• We put $2,000 in an unassigned category in our budget - this gave us flexibility for unexpected purchases, like buying Jaime and our oldest daughter bicycles, etc.

Total Mini-Retirement Cost (Cash and Net Worth Impact)

So, the total cost for one year of mini-retirement for our family was $69,966.48.

Or was it?

One way to look at the cost of the mini-retirement is to look at the total spending for our year. But another way would be to look at the impact on our net worth.

After all, during this year, we did earn some freelance income, received a payout from my old employer, and our investments continued to grow.

Our net worth actually increased by 1.55% during our mini-retirement! (Tweet this )

So, in one way of looking at it, we actually made money during our mini-retirement.

That’s the power of investing, friends. All those years of savings are paying off with financial momentum!

Our net worth certainly would have been much higher if I had continued working and making contributions to our investments, but it’s amazing to think that we made it through the year with our net worth increasing!

Was It Worth It?

Through the mini-retirement, I got a chance to try my hand at entrepreneurship, which had been a lifelong dream. I discovered what parts worked (and which parts didn’t) for me and ultimately decided that heading back into the workforce was the right fit.

As a family, I got to take my kids to school and home almost every day, volunteer more in the classroom, and do a bunch of travel (a road trip to the northeastern US, two weeks in Hawaii, a trip to Florida, and our 10-year anniversary trip to Costa Rica).

Now, I’ve landed a remote software developer job that I’m super excited about. This job should give us work-life balance and flexibility to travel, all while letting me pursue a career path that I’ve been excited about for a long time.

As one of my good friends coached me (during one of my more stressful moments in the job search), “If you spent the last year and figured out what you really want in life, you’ve gained something that most people will never achieve. That’s worth every penny.”

We plan to stay in our community in Wisconsin, build our tiny white shack and focus on building a life focused on faith, positive family routines, and lots of adventure.

So yes, this year was absolutely worth it. We’ve got an exciting vision for the future and are so excited for the next chapter in our life!

Note: I wrote this post June 6, 2018 sitting at my computer in the kitchen while my husband was in bed in the middle of a nervous breakdown about our financial future. I needed to put my thoughts to paper. I needed to write down my lack of fear so that I could share it with my husband in the hopes that my faith would lift him up. At the time, we didn’t know what our life would look like on September 4, 2018 - life is good, everything worked out. But first - the prequel, the hardship, the darkness before the light:

A Naive Little Girl’s Dream

When I was a little girl, I never thought about money. I thought about things I wanted, things I enjoyed, but I never related it to money. Maybe I was naive. Actually, I know I was. I always have been - looking at the world and seeing potential without seeing the struggles that may lie beneath those amazing visions.

When I was about 6 years old, my family rented the lower level of a home. It was a modest house that my parents turned into their home. I remember dancing in the living room with my mom to an Amy Grant song and holding barbie fashion competitions with my family. I remember cuddling up to watch Full House and the coziness of the comforter my mom made for my bed. It was a wonderful home full of love. It never dawned on me that we might be poor.

My parents were struggling financially. My dad had dreamed of running his own grocery store and he was finally granted his wish. We moved into this little white home and my dad opened his grocery store! I remember being at the grand opening and seeing the excitement on everyone’s faces, but the joy of a dream fulfilled didn’t last. The business struggled and before long, the reality that this career path was falling apart hit hard. With three little girls to care for, rent to pay, and food to put on the table, I can’t imagine the fear my dad felt when he closed the doors to what was supposed to be the answer to his success.

At some point during this season in my family’s life, I remember turning to my mom and saying, “Someday, I want to live in a little white house with the love of my life.” I meant it with all my heart and my mom’s response didn’t make sense to me. She said, “Ok, Jaime. Just know that having some money makes life a lot easier.”

I tossed my mom’s response to the wind. Who needs money! All I need is love! That was the smartest and most naive thought I’ve probably ever had. My dream was simple and filled with all that is truly important in life. If only life were that simple. As I’ve grown-up I still hold true to my statement, but I’m starting to understand what my mom was trying to tell me twenty-six years ago.

Still Naively Confident

A year ago my husband had a stable job while I was home with our three daughters. We had a nice house and more than enough money to live on. We had a comfortable life, but we wanted the dream.

We dreamed of Chris working on his own business from home and having more time for family adventures. Summer of 2017 we made the leap to make our dreams a reality - Chris left his job, we sold our home, and moved into an apartment. I couldn’t have been more excited for our future. We even found land where we could build my dream little home, nicknamed The Little White Shack.

Money wasn’t a concern when Chris left his job. We had more than enough cash from selling our home. Our finances weren’t a concern for me. Making our dreams come true had taken center stage and I was ready to forge ahead.

While my naive self has been able to stay positive, my husband has found himself consumed with worry. Losing his stable paycheck hit him harder than he thought it would. In order to combat his concern, he started working around the clock to make his business successful. His hard work hasn’t created the outcome he had wished. He is feeling defeated and questioning if this year was a mistake. With three little girls to care for, rent to pay, and food to put on the table, his fear of failure has completely overtaken him.

I try to comfort my husband. I tell him, “We are OK. Everything will work out. Good things are coming.” I wish my words had more impact, that they would allow him to catch his breath and relax. Instead, he responds, “I wish I felt that way, but I feel like our money is disappearing. I need a job. I want a career I will find success and purpose in.”

I sit here, in this moment, and my mom’s words come back to me - that money makes life easier. I think back to the struggles my parents went through and I look at the struggle my husband is going through. And I think - Yes, having money (an active income) does make life easier. And while my heart is breaking for my husband, my naive self is still strong.

Filled With Faith

I may be naive, blind to the realities and struggles of this life, but I still believe in our dreams, even as they are crumbling. I still believe that love (not money) is the answer. I have faith that everything will work out, that we will still accomplish an amazing work/life balance and have amazing family adventures. I am confident that everything will come together.

How can I be so confident in our future? How am I able to move forward and not worry?

To be honest, I feel completely helpless in moving forward in our future. I have no answers. I don’t know which way to go. I’ve tried to plan a nine-month adventure in Central America. That path crumbled. I’ve tried to embrace our cold winters. I’ve crumbled. Chris tried entrepreneurship and crumbled. Chris tried to go back to his old work to find out that his old path no longer existed. I’ve tried to move our family to Florida, but I couldn’t make it happen. We’ve wanted to build a home, but a lack of a W-2 form prevents us from getting a mortgage. Everywhere we turn we hit a dead end.

I don’t know where our family is supposed to go. I don’t know what my husband is supposed to do or how to make him feel better. I literally don’t know where to turn. The paths we’ve tried to walk down don’t take us anywhere. I’m tired and don’t have the energy to try another path. The only thing I seem to be able to do is be still.

And in this stillness, I am finding comfort and hope. I’m realizing that I’m not naive, but full of faith. I have faith that everything will work out, that God is using this struggle, this fear of our money fading away, to strengthen us and lead us toward an even better path.

Now then, stand still and see this great thing the Lord is about to do before your eyes!
1 Samuel 12:16

I have faith in God’s love and in His plan for our life. I may not know what He wants for us, but I know it’s going to be great. And with this knowledge, I’m able to persevere and patiently await the path that will lead to our dreams coming true.

We want to thank FRANK for sponsoring and sharing this awesome story!

We’ve got a great story from C.M. in Arizona. He found a company that helped him get more funding for his son’s college education! If you’ve got a child in high school, you will want to read this!

My College Education Debt

When I got out of the Marine Corps, I knew I wanted two things. One, I wanted to live somewhere warm. Two, I wanted to go to college. I had grown up in the Northeast schlepping through the snow every winter with a wind-chill factor of about a million below zero. Knowing I didn’t want to go back to that, I looked for a good college far from the Northeast. With a little research and a map in hand, I decided to move to Phoenix, Arizona and attend Arizona State University!

Coming out of the military, my tuition was covered and thanks to the GI Bill I was receiving a monthly stipend. However, the money I was receiving barely covered rent and utilities. I needed a part time job, but didn’t have much work experience coming out of the military. This made it really difficult to find a part-time job that worked with my school schedule. I had to take out student loans to supplement my income. By the time I finished college I was about $25,000 in debt!

That was over twenty years ago! Now, as a father, my son is gearing up for college and I don’t want him to be in debt like I was. I’d like to say I have a college fund set aside - but let’s be realistic. Life happens and boys eat. A LOT.

If I was going to be able to help my son out with his college tuition, I was going need to find another way!

My Son’s College Tuition Covered

My son is smart; and with those smarts come expensive colleges. His top choices made me proud, but also kept me up at night. I would crunch numbers. How on earth was I going to provide my son with an education and set him up to achieve his dreams?

We started with filing FAFSA (no easy task). When we got it back I was no more prepared to send him to college than before. FAFSA seemed to think I had some secret money hiding in the Caymans. He was offered a small grant, but mostly LOANS. This is where my nightmare begins.

I call the college financial aid office for help, advice, anything… I’m jumping through hoops trying to get someone to talk to me - long hold times, phone cutting out, being told to simply look at the website. I felt defeated and was considering driving for Uber on the weekends to make some extra money.

Then, on one of my sleepless nights I was scrolling through Facebook and saw an ad for a company called Frank. There was a tagline about being able to afford the college of your dreams. So obviously, I clicked. I scheduled an appointment with an advisor, and the rest as they say, was history.

I received a call from Stefanie later that week. She let me ask all the questions I had and really helped me understand the financial aid process. Turns out, I had filed my son’s FAFSA incorrectly (she assured me this was common, which made me feel a little better). After fixing my FAFSA, she also walked me through applying for scholarships and more grants!

With Frank’s help, we received significantly more aid! In fact, we received enough to the point where I am able to cover the rest of the cost of his dream school (No Uber job needed!). My son is now entering his sophomore year and I’m proud to say, he will not be held back by mountains of financial debt!

We are so happy for C.M. and his son! What an awesome resource! Are you or a a child of your heading off to college soon? How are you preparing for the financial mountain that a college education tends to create? Maybe FRANK can help you too!

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!

This blog post is part of the 3rd Annual Suicide Prevention Awareness Month blog tour. If you are feeling suicidal, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741.

Last week, Jaime shared how she felt during the toughest part of our mini-retirement - my mental breakdown. This week, I’d like to give you my story, what I learned, and a peek into where our life is at now.

Getting Lost

By mid-Spring of this year, I had developed a routine for my day. Not a healthy one, mind you, but a routine nonetheless.

I woke every morning at 5:30 am with my mind racing with worry.

Where will we live?

Where will I work?

What if I can’t get a job somewhere meaningful?

What if I can’t get a job at all?

How am I going to provide for my family?

As the questions repeated in my head, the tension built until it boiled over as a full-on panic attack. I hadn’t ever experienced one before this spring, but now they were a fixture of my day. My leg would shake like Thumper, but it wasn’t out of excitement - it was the only outlet for boundless anxiety built up in my body.

Jaime would hear, see, or sense my panic and would jump into action. She’d calmly ask what I was thinking about - what was worrying me - and then take me through the steps to get myself calm enough to stay still.

The first few weeks, I spent these days in bed, but as time went on, I began to learn that I needed to get up and do something or I would spiral all day. Despite having been awake for hours, I’d only finally get out of bed around noon. As I got moving and interacted with Jaime and the girls, things would slowly improve. By dinnertime, I was back to my normal self, but I knew every night that I had but a few hours of rest before the whole process started over.

A year before, I had been a well-regarded engineering manager at a medical device company. I loved the people I worked with and the products I worked on. I was paid a very healthy salary - more than enough to provide for our family of five and allow my wife to be home with the girls. By every outside measure, I was a huge success.

But it wasn’t enough for me. I had always craved a chance to run my own business. Thus, the mini-retirement was born. I parted ways with my employer and struck out on my own.

After a year of strategizing, testing, executing, and pivoting, I came to a realization. It wasn’t going to work.

The things I needed to do in order to successfully create a full-time income on my own came into conflict with my priorities, my values, or my talents. Every day, I learned more about how hard entrepreneurship is and how, at least for now, it’s not a great fit for me.

Where a year ago, I had been a success in the eyes of my family and friends, I now felt like a complete and utter failure.

As we tried to figure out the next steps in our life, things only got worse. I started my job search and met resistance at every turn. Doors were closing left and right and I saw my ability to provide for my family slipping out of reach. We had enough money to buy us time, but I became convinced that the problem was me.

And so, I slipped deeper into anxiety, panic attacks, and depression.

At my worst points, I saw my wife and children as being held back by me. The lies in my head told me that Jaime and the girls would be happier without me - that I was dragging them down and would be better off if I weren’t alive.

I never had plans for suicide, but the thought that they’d be better off if I were killed in a freak accident crossed my mind more than once.

I had lost all logical thinking. I had lost all hope. I had lost myself.

Getting Help

I cannot thank God enough for my wife. Jaime has had her own struggles with depression. Those experiences have equipped her with the tools and knowledge to support me in ways I’ve never been able to do for her.

She tapped on every shoulder in my support system to give me the reassurance, faith, and validation I needed to get through.

She helped me call friends to have lunch with me and give me support and encouragement about my job search.

She helped me meet with my doctor to get on anti-anxiety medication and start talking with a therapist.

She reached out to one of our Pastors to remind me that my value doesn’t lie in the paycheck I bring home - it lies in the love God has for me. God has measured my worth and nothing can redefine what God has determined.

Through prayer, friendship, medication, therapy, and most of all, my wife, I was slowly able to pick up the broken pieces of my confidence and rebuild my psyche.

God’s Hand Working

As I continued in the job search, there was one job opportunity that kept progressing. One opening that kept putting me to the next interview round and getting closer to an offer.

There was just one problem. The job was going to require relocation to Florida (or one of a dozen other states not named Wisconsin).

That requirement was a blessing and a curse. Jaime’s been struggling with winter here in the Midwest and moving to Florida was an opportunity that could help with her mental state.

But on the flip side, I was so reliant on the support structure here that the thought of moving spiked my anxiety any time it came up. And I love our town. I love our friends, our church, and even our favorite pizza place. I love our schools and the bike trail and the fact that we can be close to family.

The details of the job sounded incredible - a chance to get back to my technical roots and code in the language I used to make Thrifty. The team members I met during the interview process were both kind and technically savvy. I knew I’d enjoy working with them and would learn a ton. And the job was for a Christian non-profit company - a great way for me to achieve my personal goal of focusing on Jesus more in all parts of my day.

So, I kept interviewing and praying. I prayed for faith and trust in God’s plan for our family. I prayed for the ability to give up my thirst for control of the situation. I even prayed for the best of all worlds - to have a great job but maintain the lifestyle here that we have come to love.

It took time. Lots of time. When you’re searching for a job, it seems like time moves so slowly.

But at the right time, God revealed His plan and answered our prayers.

The company in Florida gave me an offer, and they decided to add Wisconsin as a state in their system so I could join the company while staying here.

The Present, The Future

So, our story of mini-retirement had a happy ending after all. I’m now four weeks into my new job and am loving it. I’m learning a ton, laughing a ton (seriously, my co-workers are hilarious), and I get up every weekday excited for work.

The job is remote, giving us the flexibility we’ve enjoyed over the last year and have dreamt of keeping for the future. I can bike with our oldest daughter to and from school every day (in true Mustachian style). I can sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee with my wife while reviewing some code. And this November, I can work remotely from Costa Rica so we can visit (all five of us this time) without using any vacation days.

But beyond the details of my exciting new job, my mental breakdown helped me learn more about myself, life, and faith.

I learned that I have more people that care about me than I had imagined.

I’ve gained perspective on where my value lies and what is valuable to me.

I’m better about giving up my need for control and leaning into God’s plans. Letting go and trusting in Him has only ever brought me great things. It’s hard to do in the moment, but awesome to see in action.

The mental breakdown was a brutal experience, but I’m coming out the other side much stronger. I have more clarity on what’s important to me and what I want out of life than I’ve ever had before. I’m finding more joy in the day-to-day things. I know our future won’t be without bumps, but I’ve got a strong sense that God has us covered; we’re going to be ok - great even.

As winter approaches, Jaime and I are talking about our travel plans and layouts for our little white shack. We can see a beautiful life ahead of us and have found our faith strengthened so much after one of the hardest times in our lives. We don’t know what God has in store for us, but we’re ready to lean into His plans and see where He takes our family.

We’ll continue to share our story here, and are so thankful for all of you for joining us in this crazy adventure!

If You’re Struggling

Some of my words here may have struck a chord with you because you are struggling with your own situation. It may be debt, relationships, job loss, family struggles, or something completely different.

If that’s you, I encourage you: Please reach out for help.

• If you are feeling suicidal, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741.
• Talk with a friend or loved one and share what you’re feeling.
• Tell your doctor and discuss options for medication and/or therapy.
• If you attend church, talk with your pastor. If you don’t, give one nearby a call and ask if you can talk with someone about struggles you’re having. You might be surprised.

You are loved. God loves you and there are people in your life that love you - even if you can’t see it right now.

I love you. I want healing for you and I want to pray for you. Even though we may never have met, you are God’s child the same as me. Reach out - I’m here for you.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)

Last week, I opened up about my mental breakdown from late in my mini-retirement. Recounting the most challenging and painful period in my life left a big question unanswered:

Do you regret it?

You may have been wondering the same as you read about where my head was at over the spring and summer. Was the mini-retirement a mistake?

A Financial Failure

Looking at the mini-retirement from a purely financial perspective, there’s little to be excited about:

• We spent over $60,000 covering our living and travel expenses
• We brought in only a few thousand dollars of income to offset those expenses
• We haven’t established any real passive income from our work over the year
• We made no additional investment in our retirement accounts
• My salary after the mini-retirement is roughly 25% less than my salary before

By almost every standard measure, my mini-retirement was a miserable failure. (Tweet this )

But I don’t look at this year as a failure at all. Despite all the heartache and pain, the challenge and struggle, I have no regrets about the leap we took this year. On the contrary - I think this year was one of the most important and successful years of my life.

A Personal Success

Sure, the finances didn’t turn out great. But, on the flip side, I take stock of these victories:

• I enjoyed over 5 weeks of travel with Jaime and the girls
• I participated as a more active parent in our daughters’ classrooms and in their daily lives
• I gained a newfound appreciation for the love and support of the people around me - friends, family, even people I hadn’t talked with in years
• I found clarity on what I really wanted in a career and found a job I love in a team that I can grow and learn
• I built a stronger faith in God than I’ve had in my whole life, now trusting I can lean on Him in any situation

Because of the mini-retirement, I’m becoming a better husband, a better father, a better friend, a better engineer, and most importantly, a better child of God.

By every measure that actually matters, my mini-retirement was an incredible success. (Tweet this )

Would I do it again? In a heartbeat.

The financial and psychological cost of the mini-retirement was worth every cent and every panic attack because of where we are now.

Success is How You Choose to Define It

Too often, we view ourselves as failures because we’re using the wrong measures of success.

Success isn’t a big house, a fancy car, or an overflowing 401k account. Success isn’t financial independence, early retirement, or winning the lottery.

Real success is growth - becoming a better version of yourself. Success is learning what’s really important in life so you have the confidence to pursue it. Success is seeing the love you have around you and the opportunities for love you’re not taking advantage of.

That kind of success means more. That kind of success is always within your grasp. That kind of success doesn’t depend on luck, personality or privilege.

Success is how you choose to define it. (Tweet this )

Don’t conform to the way the world measures success - with money, celebrity, and appearance. Choose a better set of measures - growth, learning, and love.

Go. Redefine success. You’ll be surprised to find that you already have it all around you.

I love taking our kids to the playground, walking the trails of a state park, and visiting the beach on a hot summer day. I love the beauty of this world - giant trees providing shade or changing colors, trails weaving through forests, and the fresh air outside my doorstep. I feel a peace come over me when I get outside and take in the beauty around me.

This love for nature leads me to want to live differently, to handle trash and recycling consciously. I don’t want to add to the landfills. I want to preserve what we have. When I see trash floating around at the beach or park I feel sad. When I see a garbage can overflowing I think - we can do better than this! And when I hear about plastics in our oceans I want to cry.

I want to help take care of our environment. And one way I can do this is by recycling as much as I can. The recycling pick up in our town takes cardboard, paper, food boxes, mail, beverage cans, food cans, glass bottles, glass and plastic jars, jugs, and plastic bottles & caps. We fill our recycling with these items, but I find that we have a lot of other items in our home that can’t be placed in our recycling bin - worn out flip flops, old bicycle helmets, dried up markers, small plastic toys, old paint brushes, and a lot of non-recyclable plastic packaging.

This was completely disheartening to me. In response, I told myself to avoid most of these items. If I didn’t have them coming into our home, I wouldn’t have to eventually throw them in the trash. Unfortunately, this is REALLY hard to do. My kids come home from a birthday party with small trinket toys in a favor bag. I need a paint brush to paint our walls. We need bicycle helmets for safety. And sometimes buying convenience foods makes my life less stressful. In order to truly avoid all these items, I would have to cook from scratch all the time, not allow my kids to accept gifts, and extremely limit the art supplies in my home that inspire creativity. This wasn’t going to work, but I was serious about doing what I could and finding another way to reduce our trash!

I was able to make a few changes that work for my family. I buy foods like rice, oatmeal, chocolate covered pretzels, and syrup in the bulk section of my grocery story with my personal glass jars. This greatly reduces trash (and some recycling). When I can, I’ll spend the extra money to purchase a clothing item from Patagonia because I can send those clothes back to be recycled when they wear out. These changes have helped, but I still wanted to find a solution to those flip flops, markers, plastic toys, and non-recyclable plastics?

After reading a few books and blogs, I found the answer. There is a company that will take all these items (and more) and make sure they are recycled responsibly. I couldn’t contain my excitement when I discovered this. I wanted to leap right in and send them all my stuff, but then I saw the price tag. It’s not free. It’s not even affordable. It’s expensive. I debated for a long time whether it was worth our money.

Do we want to spend our money on recycling trash? I mean, that money could go towards our financial freedom goals! Then one day I looked at my cash back from my credit card. I had enough to purchase an All-In-One Zero Waste Box. I would be able to recycle just about anything besides organics, sharps, or hazardous waste. I figured this was a good way to try it out for free (or felt like free). I filled that box up in less than a week with random plastic trash from all over our home!

I was so happy to have all those items being diverted from the landfills, parks, and oceans. I felt I was using my financial resources within my values and to help keep this world beautiful. I followed up that free investment with intentional spending on other zero waste boxes from TerraCycle. We currently have two different boxes in our kitchen collecting trash to be recycled!

While this may not be the best financial investment according to some, it’s an investment in our planet. An investment that leads to an awesome return on investment - a beautiful world that we can all enjoy!

We handled our finances differently during our Mini-Retirement. We had set an annual budget and deducted from that amount each month. Now that the mini-retirement is over and we are back to receiving a paycheck, we want to get back to a healthy monthly budget.

This kind of stresses me out. I mean, budgets can be complicated! When things get complicated I curl into a ball and have a hard time moving forward. Over time, I’ve found the best way to uncurl myself is to break the complicated into small easy tasks.

That’s what I’m going to do with our budget now. I’m not going to take it all on right away. I’m going to take on a small category (or small cluster of related categories) one at at time. I’ll dive into how we’ve spent our money in that category and how we want to adjust our spending.

The following month I’ll share how we did and any further adjustments we want to make. I’ll also add in a new category to tackle. By taking on a single category at a time and building from there, I’m hoping we’ll have a refreshed budget for 2019!

Pizza and Movie Night is an important tradition in our family. Friday nights are traditionally reserved for ordering pizza and ice cream from our favorite pizza place. Originally, this was a 16 inch pizza with one topping and 2 pints of ice cream. Then we added in a large order of breadsticks. And more recently, we added a 10 inch gluten free veggie pizza (I was trying to go gluten free). This increased our weekly Friday dinner cost from roughly $35.00 to $53.00!

When I think about it - we don’t need to consume that much food. While I like being gluten free, it’s not worth $15. Nor do I need a separate individual pizza. We also usually have leftovers. I would love to get back to the basics here. For October, we are going to try ordering the single topping 16 inch pizza and a single pint of ice cream. This will bring our weekly budget down to $27 (monthly $108).

We have also switched from renting a movie from the library to renting movies from Redbox in the hopes that we can get a more current movie we can all enjoy. We will probably continue this, but I would like us to limit it to a single movie per Friday. This will cost 1.85 (monthly $7.40)

Date Night is something that Chris and I have budgeted for in the past, but find that we usually don’t make it happen. When we do, it hasn’t always been worth the money. This past month we went out a on triple date that cost us $120 (totally worth it). Seeing as this isn’t a regular occurrence though and we don’t enjoy spending on regular dates, I don’t want a regular monthly budget for this. I would rather have a weekend getaway with Chris and a some extra wiggle room in our overall budget for the random triple date!

Eating out is something we have wanted to minimize over the years. We saw it as a waste of money when we ate out instead of making our own meals. On the flip side, we ate out a few times with friends this past month and I feel that was money well spent! With this in mind, I want to make sure that we have a budget for eating out with friends because it’s an investment in friendship. For October, I’m budgeting $100 for friendship investment!

Our Grocery budget was also way higher in September than normal. Some of this was wasteful and some was stocking up on pantry items. I want to focus on buying more non perishables in bulk so that when we are feeling tired we can gather the energy to make a quick pasta dinner instead of grabbing fast food or pizza. I’m also going to try to cut out the waste. Hopefully I can get back to a monthly budget of $800.

If we can make these changes, we will end up spending $1015.40 on these categories. This would allow us to divert over $500 towards a weekend getaway!

Do you need to refresh your food budget too? Is there a food category you spend money on that you feel is a waste or very valuable to you?

It seems like the world is buzzing these days with talk of financial independence and early retirement. Jaime and I big proponents of the power of financial freedom, but it’s healthy to recognize that for many people, it may seem like an impossible dream.

After all, here’s what the state of retirement savings looks like for people in the US:

Is that enough? Most people think they’ll need $1,000,000 to retire comfortably. If that’s the case, I highly doubt that having $172,000 at age 60 puts someone on track to comfortably retire with $1,000,000 at age 65.

For the majority of Americans, the concern isn’t retiring early. Their concern is retiring ever.
(Tweet this )

If you’re trying to answer that question, then this is the guide for you. Let’s go through how to figure out if you’ll ever be able to retire.

Will I Ever Be Able to Retire?

It’s not a simple question and there are certainly many ways to look at answering it. Below, I’ve got an approach (with embedded calculations for your situation along the way) that lets you measure what you’d need to retire and how long it’ll take you to get there.

Disclaimer: any retirement calculator out there - this one included - operates on a wide variety of assumptions. While these assumptions usually come based on some data about how things have worked out in recent history, there’s no guarantee that the future will look the same. Consider this guide an introduction to retirement calculators. I highly encourage you to look at others as well.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s get started with the first question we need to answer.

How Much Will I Spend In Retirement?

The first thing we need to understand is what your annual expenses will look like. If you’ve ever tracked your spending, you’ll likely have an idea of what your spending would look like in retirement.

If you haven’t tracked your spending before, you might consider using the MIT living wage calculator to estimate your annual expenses. This won’t provide for a lavish retirement with cruises and getaways, but it can help answer the question of whether you could ever retire.

To use the living wage calculator, enter your location (either your zip code or your state/county).

Scroll down to the “Typical Expenses” section and find the row labeled “Required annual income before taxes” at the bottom of the table.

We’ll assume you aren’t taking care of children in retirement, so the only question is whether or not your retirement funds are for you alone or if there’s a spouse in the picture.

If you’re single, find the number under “1 Adult”. If you’re married, find the number under “2 Adults”.

Enter that number here:

How Much Do I Need to Save to Retire?

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use the 4% rule to estimate how much money you need to retire. With this rule, you need to save up 25 times your annual expenses in order to retire.

Based on the annual expenses you entered earlier, here’s what you’d need saved up to retire today:

But unfortunately, that doesn’t tell us how much you’ll need saved in the future. You know how the cost of milk (and everything else) goes up a bit every year? That’s what we call inflation. With everything costing more next year than this year, you’ll need more saved by next year to retire than you would have needed to retire today.

We’ll assume inflation is 2.5% every year. If something cost you $10.00 to buy this year, you could expect that inflation to bring the price up to $10.25 by next year.

Here’s what inflation would do to your retirement target for next year:

Bummer, right? The good news is you can work to “beat” inflation by investing your retirement savings instead of stuffing it under a mattress.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at savings and investments.

When Will I Have Enough Saved to Retire?

Do you have anything saved for retirement already? Maybe you’ve put some money in a 401k (or 403b) or an IRA. If so, that’s great; Enter the amount you’ve got here:

With any money set aside, you’re already on the way to retire at some point; it might just be “too far” down the road to be meaningful. After all, if your nest egg won’t get big enough to retire until you’re 120, that’s not going to do much good for you, is it?

If you don’t have anything set aside for retirement, don’t fret. Keep reading and we’ll handle that situation later.

For your retirement, let’s presume you choose to invest your money instead of just putting it under a mattress (or in a low-yield savings account), you can get a return that not only beats inflation but actually grows beyond that. I won’t get into the details on why to invest in index funds, but let’s say you do and can get an average annual return of 8%.

Even without putting any more money into that account, it’s going to grow - beating inflation and then some.

In fact, that investment would eventually grow to the point of hitting your retirement number, even if you didn’t contribute another penny. This concept in personal finance is called “coasting” or, as I like to call it, retirement freedom

It’s a cool concept, but what age does that put you at when you get to retire?

Will I Get To My Retirement Target While I’m Still Alive?

Put in your current age here and see what that means for your retirement prospects:

Based on what you’ve entered so far, your investments would build up for you to retire when you are:

So now, the million dollar question - are you still going to be around at that point? There are no guarantees, but here’s your life expectancy based on your current age (courtesy of the Social Security System Actuarial Life Table):

To retire “ever”, you need to get to that point before you die. So, getting there before you hit your life expectancy is a pretty good measure. If your coast retirement age is less than your life expectancy, then you’re on track to retire at some point even if you don’t contribute another penny.

How Much Faster Can I Retire If I Invest More?

Depending on your situation, those figures may have been exciting or terrifying (or perfectly reasonable). No matter what the case, there’s one thing that should hold true - your retirement date should get better if you make regular contributions.

So, let’s build those in and see where you’re at. To keep things simple, we’ll use a “percentage of income” approach to figure out how much you’ll put toward retirement investing every year. With that in mind, go ahead and put in your household income and the percentage of that income you can save for retirement every year. If your employer includes a “401k match”, don’t forget to include their portion here as well - that money counts!

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume you get annual cost-of-living income increases at the same rate as inflation.

With what you put in, here’s where you end up:

If this age is less than your life expectancy (see above), then you should be on track to retire assuming you can continue to work and make the investments you entered above!

What do you think? If you’re not happy with the results, don’t worry - not all is lost. The result is based on what you entered above and you’ve got the power to adjust your path.

Adjusting Your Path

While this calculator made a lot of assumptions, you still have some flexibility. To accelerate your timeline, increase your income and/or your savings rate in the How Much Faster Can I Retire If I Invest More section. Otherwise, you could reduce your needed spending by changing your expected annual expenses in the How Much Will I Spend In Retirement? section.

What’s Next?

There you have it. Consider this an “entry-level” retirement calculator. There are plenty of others out there to explore as you dig into the details. Many of these will let you tweak the assumptions and try more complex scenarios. Here are a few I recommend you give a shot:

• When Can I Retire? When Will I Be Financially Independent? from ESI Money
• Early Retirement Calculator from Millennial Money
• Ultimate Retirement Calculator from Financial Mentor

And here are a couple retirement-related calculators I’ve worked on that might help you think differently about your path to financial freedom:

• Would You Trade $25 for an Extra Day of Freedom?
• Introducing Retirement Freedom
• Annual Savings to Walk Away Calculator
• Savings Rate to Walk Away Calculator

Happy number-crunching!

What if you were granted every conceivable luxury of life, financial freedom and even more, but it came with expectations that made your soul miserable? Would you let the money dictate your life or would you be willing to let it all go for a different type of freedom? This is the battle that Liz endured. She was forced to make a decision she never imagined. Here is her story:

Everything I Had

My childhood was one of fairy tales. I grew up in a mansion with staff attending to my every need. My every desire was granted. This was all thanks to my father’s success.

My father has a business empire that sprawls across the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, China, and Singapore. As I grew up, my father enticed me in taking an interest in helming his empire. I started traveling with him to all these exotic places, marveling first-hand at all his business acquisitions. We stayed in the fanciest hotels and enjoyed the most luxurious transportation. Nothing was off limits. I certainly saw the benefit in joining my father’s business empire!

Before I could join my father in running his business, he insisted that I go to law school and work at a top law firm for a few years. I completely understood and entered law school without hesitation. One semester in, however, I found my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t enjoy what I was learning and I was terrified of the cut throat culture. I ended up crying myself to sleep most nights, dreaming of becoming an author, a musician, or a linguist. Although I dreamed of pursuing a different career, the thing I desired most was making my dad proud. With this as my priority, I buried my dreams and persevered. Not only was I going to join his business empire, I was also sitting on a 9-digit inheritance.

Losing It All

While I was pushing myself forward through law school, I fell in love. This relationship meant the world to me, but I was nervous to share this part of my life with my parents. I was afraid they wouldn’t be accepting of my partner - a beautiful girl with the heartiest laugh and warmest embrace.

Before telling my parents, my partner and I came out to our closest friends. I was nervous introducing my partner to my Christian friends. I even expected resistance, but there was none. Their warm response gave me the courage to talk to my parents.

My parents’ initial resistance to my relationship didn’t surprise me, but I thought they would come around to accepting us. Instead, they tried to manipulate me into ending my relationship. They took away my allowance, my credit cards, and forced me to return the $250,000 that they had previously gifted me for my 21st birthday. Then they wrote me out of their wills, leaving a nominal sum to prevent me from contesting their wills.

Related Post: The One Life Lesson I Wish I Had Learnt, Before I Lost My 9-Digit Inheritance Overnight

That was hard to endure, but it continued to get uglier. They told me I was no longer fit to helm my dad’s empire. They felt that I was now poor and would have the inclination to steal their riches. They kicked me out of their home and accused me of being a “useless f*cking daughter”. All this just because I started dating someone they didn’t approve of. All the effort I had made in trying to make them proud of me was discounted.

I became a homeless, penniless 22 year old with no future. All the love and support I once had from my parents became non-existent. The loss I felt was more than I could endure. I became depressed with anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia, and thoughts of suicide took over. My once-perfect life had vanished.

Tug-Of-War Struggle

The next two years of my life were a struggle for survival. For every step I tried taking forward, I felt like I was pushed back a step or two. I graduated from law school with dismal grades. This resulted in only 1 out of the 200 jobs I applied for taking a chance on me. Unfortunately, that employer took complete advantage of my desperation, paying me very little for my hard work.

Related Post: The Time I Was Paid $0.10 an Hour at a Corporate Job

The money I made wasn’t enough to cover all my expenses. Luckily, my partner’s father opened his house to me when I became homeless. My parents didn’t like this and insisted that I move back home. I agreed, hoping we could salvage our relationship, but it only made things worse. My relationship with my parents got so toxic that my partner told me that I needed to break up with her. She knew that I had a lot to lose, and she thought that maybe, this relationship wasn’t worth all of that. That broke my heart, but no matter how tough things got, my partner and I always found a way back to each other.

Eventually, I got to the point where I couldn’t keep living this tug-of-war. I could no longer try to salvage my relationship with my parents and find happiness. No longer could I keep trying to succeed in a career that made me miserable. If I was going to pull myself out of my depression, I needed to change my focus.

So I started focusing on what I had left, not what I had lost. I had a loving partner, the freedom to pursue something different, and the ability to change my future. I was finally ready to let go of trying to make my parents proud of me. It took me two years, but I was ready to start pursuing my own life, my own dreams.

The Blessing

My parents had taught me that a life without riches is a sad life. For a very long time, I had believed them. Until the day I became utterly broke - financially and mentally. But in the midst of all that, I realized that I had amazing friends and a partner that loved me as I was. That gave me the strength to fight for myself. So I started fighting for my own happiness. No longer was I going to look to my parents as the only source of acceptance.

I saw for the first time that I could have a wonderful life without a 9-digit inheritance. Better yet, I saw that I could have a wonderful life without much money at all! I only needed enough money to pay for shelter and food. I could find joy in spending time with the people who loved me. I found joy in writing, reading, and making music. I enjoy the sunshine and walking through the park. I started seeing joy in the very simple things in life. And I’ve come to realise that, as cliché as it sounds, some of the best things in life are absolutely free. All the money I had before had blinded me from this truth. But I’m happy to have found a life beyond power, business empires, and millions of dollars.

Related Post: How to Live a Life of Freedom – A Comprehensive 5-Step Guide

These days I’m working as a lowly analyst in a small company. I don’t get paid a lot, and I don’t love what I do, but it allows me to take care of myself and build a comfortable amount of savings. After everything I’ve gone through, I’ve learned the importance of having money set aside for the unexpected. And I’m learning to be proud of myself for accomplishing this much despite all the pain in my life.

While I don’t have the luxurious life that had been planned for me, I have a life of my own. I have a life with unconditional love and a simple joy that money could never buy. I’ve even started to focus on pursuing one of my dream careers on the side, by writing and trying to inspire others on my blog. It’s only a matter of time before I quit my job and start chasing all my dreams. I may have foolishly buried these dreams before, but no longer will they stay buried in my new life.

If there’s one thing I can say for sure, it’s this - My new life is a blessing I never could have imagined before.

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!

Two weeks ago I looked at our Food Budget and this week I’m moving forward to tackle another budget category.

Our Household category needs to be overhauled! Do you have a budget category that you feel is out of control? Our household spending has been all over the place. Just to show you how bad it is, here is a look at August and September.

August: $545.35 September: $231.96

This is crazy. When I looked into what I was actually spending this money on, it began to make more sense. I listed toilet paper, toothpaste, toothbrushes, cleaning supplies, laundry detergent, etc. These were all necessary and needed to be replenished. Then I saw I that I listed a new beach bag, glass containers for the kitchen, new water bottles, etc. These items made life nicer/easier, but don’t need to be replenished from month to month. When I took these items out of this category, here is how the spending in August and September looked.

August: $185.76 September: $189.96

With this knowledge, I’ve decided to separate out those nice to have items from the consumables. The consumables will be our Hygiene Budget, while we will move those other purchases over to a Fun Category (I’ll address this in another post).

In an effort to help be a bit more conscientious of our spending, I’m making a goal to only spend $150 in October. We’ve spent $102.52 so far, but I think we are pretty set. If we can make this happen, I can save us $30 a month and hopefully a lot more by not disguising those fun purchases as necessities!

Is there a spending category you feel you need to split into two different groups? Or have you found a unique way to save on your hygiene budget?

Do you know what you want your future retirement to look like? Or where you want to be? Jen and Tom found their ideal retirement in Door County, Wisconsin. Here’s how they discovered their ideal lifestyle.

Discovering Our Ideal Vacation

We desperately needed a break from our home in southern Indiana. The sweltering heat and humidity of summer was draining our family of four. We needed a vacation, a true vacation, where we could relax, get a break from the heat, but still enjoy the summer with our boys.

I racked my brain for a good vacation idea and remembered an article I had read in Midwest Living Magazine about Door County, WI. I don’t remember what it said, but it must have reminded me of my childhood. My parents used to take my brother and I on fishing vacations when we were kids. We would stay in a cabin on a lake and spend our days swimming while my dad fished and my mom hiked/read novels. Door County sounded like a step back in time. Maybe this is where my husband, Tom, and I could create our own version of a fishing vacation with our boys who were 9 and 12 years old.

A few weeks later we were on our way to Rowley’s Bay in Door County. I had booked a cabin for four nights at The Wagon Wheel Resort. It was a long nine hour drive before we parked in front of our little rustic cabin getaway on the edge of Lake Michigan!

The drive had been long, but well worth it. The next morning I got up before anyone else and made a pot of coffee before strolling outside in the cool morning air. It was refreshing beyond belief. With my coffee in hand, I found a place to sit back and take in the beautiful scenery. I even saw newbies get an early morning kayak lesson!

When my husband and boys woke up they were ready to take to the lake. My dad had made tackle boxes for the boys and they were eager to catch their first fish. Every day, they tried, but it didn’t come easy. Then, one day a gull swooped down and grabbed the cork on my 9 year old’s line and tried to fly away with it! That story went down in family lore as the day Drew caught a gull! When the boys weren’t feverishly trying to catch a fish, they were swimming in the lake or biking with their dad along the cedar lined roads. We kept our meals simple, using the cabin’s kitchen and always ended our day with a family board game. It was exactly what our family needed.

That week was pure bliss and went by quickly. We were all sad when it was time to head back home. We had learned that this type of vacation - a simple cabin with outdoor activities - was our favorite. We didn’t need a lot of money to take a vacation, just a bit of time. With this realization, we decided to return to Door County the following Summer. It quickly became a yearly summer getaway for our family!

Creating a Vacation Home

As the years went by and the boys grew up, we continued to visit Door County. After 10 years of summer getaways we realized that this wasn’t enough. We wanted more time at our favorite place. My husband and I started dreaming of retiring here and talked about the possibility of buying a vacation home so we could return whenever we wanted.

We looked around for five years before we found a place that fit us perfectly. There was a condo for sale in Egg Harbor with water front property. At 1,250 square foot, ground level, and a deck looking over beautiful Green Bay of Lake Michigan, we knew it was exactly what we wanted. With the condo, we could come and go without worrying about yard work or snow removal and could fully enjoy the laid back vibe of Door County whenever we were here.

When we closed on the condo, Tom was still working full time and I was caring for my ailing parents. We made it back whenever we could, even bringing my Dad with several times. He loved it there and we nicknamed the second bedroom Pop’s Room. We spent a number of years driving back and forth between our home in Indiana and the condo in Door County before Tom and I started talking plans for actually retiring in Door County.

Retirement Living in Door County

About two years ago we started talking seriously about retirement. More specifically, early retirement. I had retired several years prior, but now we were both 57 years old and were considering our ability for Tom to retire early as well.

My parents had passed away and our boys had moved to Florida and Kentucky. With no family in Indiana, we figured we would sell our home and move into our condo full time. Tom announced his early retirement at work, but his company asked him to stay on as a senior adviser and work remotely. He would still need to go into the office every 6-7 weeks though. This meant that we would still need a place to live in Indiana.

We weighed our options and felt that the offer to stay with the company would work wonderfully for us. Not only would it be a great transition towards full retirement, it was less hours, offered flexibility, had a salary that would cover our expenses (no need to dip into our retirement savings yet), and included our health insurance until we are eligible for Medicare. Plus, Tom loves his job!

Since we could spend a majority of our time in Door County, we didn’t need our big family house in Indiana. We decided to sell and rent a duplex near Tom’s work. The transition has been really easy.

It’s been over 2 months since we made this change and we are enjoying the blissful lifestyle of Door Country we discovered 20 years ago! Life here is relaxing yet active. We head over to the YMCA most days and I spend Wednesday afternoons with an awesome knitting group. We’ve even found a tiny church with a big heart in Fish Creek! Tom works out on the deck during the summer while and I read. And when we feel like doing a little something special, we take an afternoon break to visit one of our favorite coffee shops for coffee and biscotti!

We love our life here, but we do take a break from the cold winter in January and February by visiting our son in Tampa!

Then, over the 4th of July our boys and their families return to Door County for a week of vacation! I love that we are keeping our little family fishing vacation alive! It’s amazing how 20 years ago, the need to find some family rejuvenation led us to where we would eventually find retirement bliss!

Do you have a freedom story you would like to share? We would love to hear from you! Submit your story here!