Can you go from clueless at 40 to financially independent in less than 10 years? We are. And, we’ll do it as two public educators, not doctors or investment bankers. 

We aren’t quite there yet, but here’s how we’ve turned things around and why I’m confident we’ll get there.

If you’ve just started paying attention to your finances in your 30s, 40s, or even 50s it’s not too late. No doubt your situation is different, but you’re aware now and that matters. Ours is just one story – you can write your own!

Our First Twenty Years

We Started Out Broke

We started out as two new teachers, more than $100,000 in debt thanks to student loans and consumer debt from our college years. We then bought a house on a zero down mortgage and jumped into our careers. Living the American dream!

They say money doesn’t make you happy, but I can’t fully agree. Who doesn’t want to reach financial freedom? I love money, and I believe it’s normal. We all work to earn. How else can you achieve financial freedom? However, money is not a goal; its an instrument to make your dreams come true, to live a fulfilled life, travel, be able to pay kids education and finally retire.

Money is simply a necessity like food or water, it helps you buy the things you need.

One of my earliest money lessons came while I was sitting in a K-Mart cafeteria. I was 16 years old and was on a lunch break, eating something I’d just bought from the in-store restaurant. At the time I was making $4.25 per hour, which was minimum wage at that time.

Whatever I’d bought for lunch must have cost about $4.25 because I had thought ‘I just traded an hour of my life for this food.’  I wasn’t upset or bothered. It was just an interesting factoid. But the idea of looking at the cost of an item in terms of time has always stuck with me.

And now I’ve turned that idea into a time currency calculator.

It was during the darkest year of my life when I discovered the FIRE movement and learned about financial independence. I learned about it from a blog post titled The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement written by a guy that was calling himself Mr. Money Mustache.  That article resonated with me like few things ever have. Something inside of me clicked and it’s not an exaggeration to say that my life hasn’t been the same ever since.

I’d just found something that would help me go from broke and unemployed to financially independent in about 13 years. I’ll retire early when I’m 49 years old, all because I learned about one simple concept called Financial Independence.  And just like we tell our friends and family whenever we find a great new restaurant, or find a binge-worthy show on Netflix, I want EVERYONE to know about financial independence.