I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes.
— Rich in Abigal Thomas’s 2007 memoir A Three Dog Life
In July of this year (2018), I hit a personal milestone: saving 65% of my income toward financial freedom.
This after saving only 5-15% for most of the last 10 years.
I’d like to share my story with you — how I made this change, my continuing journey — in hopes that I might keep you company in your own.
Why This Blog
This blog was born after I left New York City for a new life in Colorado. The lower cost of living in Colorado gave me hope of saving money toward something special. But what?
That’s when a friend turned me on to the Mr Money Mustache blog, written by Pete Adeney. He explains how he and his wife retired at age 30 through intentional, frugal living. I was shocked — I realized that being frugal could set me up for a freer life, whether that meant taking a couple fun years off or retiring early. Within three days, I had consumed dozens of posts and committed to living a Mustachian (read: frugal badass) lifestyle.
What I lacked was company, people who could help me feel less alone on this journey. I looked around the internet for other people like me who lived frugally and thought about retiring early, but I couldn’t relate to the personal finance bloggers out there:
- Unlike most Early Retirement bloggers, I don’t have a giant retirement success story to tell. In fact, I’m not retired. Or living on a yacht. 😉
- And I’m okay with that. I love my job. I’m not gonna live under a bridge and slurp gruel out of my armpits to survive until I can retire.
- I’ve made lots of dumb money decisions.
- I don’t have a partner (dual income) or own a home.
- I don’t live in rural Idaho where everything costs 10 cents.
- I’m a gurl. Which shouldn’t matter. But the financial / career advice I received from the world around me was VERY different than what my brothers received.
Beginnings*
I was raised in a household where the expectation and hope was that I would grow up to be a stay-at-home mom. There’s nothing wrong with this, except that I did not prepare for the possibility that stay-at-home mom wouldn’t happen for me.
The women around me worked in the helping professions until they had kids, then quit paid work to raise children, with the expectation that their husbands would provide for them. In my religious tradition, being a full-time wife and mother was the best and only choice. Unlike my brothers, I grew up doing a lot of babysitting, cooking, and cleaning in preparation for my life as a helpmeet and homemaker.
Like those around me, I looked to the helping professions for what I presumed would be a short stint in paid work. I went to school to become a music teacher, fully expecting my main job to be ‘wife and mother’ and a servant of God.
But things didn’t turn out that way.
My first semester in college, I got a hand injury. My music teacher aspiration was out. I had no idea how to approach the future.
That same year, I had my first experience of debilitating depression, pretty much the most ungodly thing one can experience. According to my faith, depression was a sure sign of not trusting God. (Btw if you want a cash-sucking disease, go get depression.) We didn’t believe in medication or counseling.
These factors snowballed over time into a deep depression in my late 20s that led to me checking myself into the psych ward at a nearby hospital. Staying in a locked ward was pretty much the furthest thing I could imagine from the calm and put-together adult I had aspired to be.
Other frugal bloggers *ahem* might call this the complainy-pants syndrome. I call it life.
I’ve gone through a lot of anguish trying to make my life work. No godly husband came along to rescue me. Amid the depression and the dead-end jobs, I kept wondering if there was something better out there. I wanted to take control of my life instead of being held hostage to circumstances.
So I started taking control. My first major change was deciding to go car-free. A few years later, I changed careers. Then in 2018, I moved across the United States from NYC to Colorado.
My hope is that this blog will help you find the freedom — financial and otherwise — that you are seeking. If you’re like me and have had a little too much ‘life’ happen to you — and maybe have not made great decisions all the time (we humans don’t…), read on. You’re in good company.
*I’m not going to pretend I started with nothing and worked my way up by pure grit. I’ve had tons of advantages: I’m white, I have financially stable family members, and thanks to my parents have almost no education debt. To pretend otherwise is dishonest, an injustice to people who really have worked up from nothing.