Hello everyone! Just wanted to share our story.....
..... BUT FIRST wanted to say that this site kicks a$$! We are on the road (speedway!) to FI and should be there in the next 6-7 years. We currently live on 48% of our $95k take home pay and will be reducing that amount by @ 5% each year until we reach 18% living expenses, a paid off mortgage, large emergency fund, a few free and clear investment properties and maxed out retirement accounts. Not too bad for a family of five in less than 10 years!
Ok, my main reason for this post is to see if anyone else has experienced what we have. For a long time we had worked and worked and worked without gaining much ground. We could always plan on getting paid after a 50 hour work week and to be broke by the next paycheck. Our bills were piling up, stress was mounting and you could forget about anything close to a retirement plan or emergency fund. We were clueless on what to do and did the usual finger pointing - "need a raise, rising gas prices, foods too expensive........", the list goes on and on. We were in our early to mid 30's with a growing family and stressed out constantly.
Then one day I reached my boiling point. I had finally stressed out enough and decided to sit down to create a rough budget. Now with this budget we could finally see what we were doing wrong. But the reality was that I could tilt the numbers in our favor to make it seem like things were better than they were. We were still in the same boat even though we had created a budget - ARRGHHH!!! What were we still doing wrong? We had our incomes and our bills on paper so how could we still be clueless about our finances? Well, what we (and most people) miss was that we were still justifying the things that were draining our funds - weekly outings, restaurants, food delivery, a Ford F250 diesel for commuting, multiple trips to the store during the week etc.... We were also doing all of those things and attempting to save anything that was left over, which was usually nothing.
So as time went on my thought process and the budget evolved. I was reading as many personal financial books as I could get my hands on and looking over the budget. The weeks of the year appeared on our budget with holidays and special events, who was getting paid on which week and our bills mapped out for each weekly and monthly period - all in an Open Office format and computed automatically. I was "trimming the fat" so to speak and all of a sudden we were keeping pace with our bills and even had the occasional surplus of funds. The stress level was getting better but was still there. My wife would occasionally comment on how much time I was putting into the budget but I felt that something was changing inside of me - something that I could not describe.
I don't know if it was the budget or just plain old hard work but opportunities were popping up all around us. Plentiful amounts of overtime and side work, position changes, seemingly bigger tips, a few pay raises in combination with lots of coupon clipping and comparison shopping and things were starting to come together. Two things were still lacking though - an emergency fund and retirement account.
I went into work and immediately maxed out my employer matched 401k (matched at $0.67 per my $1.00 up to 10% of my pay with no limits on OT or bonuses). We also worked hard to build up a $10k emergency fund (on our way to $30k) and did something that we never had thought to do in the past - pay ourselves first before paying our bills. The first row on our budget now is a place to input our payment to ourselves ($300 weekly to the EF) BEFORE any bills are to be paid. We now max out both of our 401k's ($17k each) and have a growing emergency fund. All of our bills are paid the first week of each month and we can see our progress throughout the year.
I see situations completely different now. I call the funds in our retirement accounts "Our Employees" when my children ask me what am I looking at. I'm 39 and wife is 37 and we are starting our first triplex flip in the next two weeks - something that I've always wanted to do. My wife says that I am a different person now, always smiling and more relaxed. Some people have said that we seem more "snotty", maybe it's just that we are more focused now than we have ever been. When I hear them complain about their lives I cringe under my skin because I know that I could help them but they don't want to make the change (at least for now).
To decompress these days I'll pull up my laptop and review the budget, make some changes and pay bills - something she thinks is a little weird but knows my reasons for it. We now live a more relaxed life and see the light at the end of the employment tunnel. I consistently talk about FI to my friends and co-workers to the point that I have to watch it so I don't seem like I'm boasting to them about our journey. From complete "rags to riches to FI" will have taken less than 10 years but was worth every step along the way. We will be there by the ages of 46 and 44 on a working class income but could have been there 15 years earlier if we had the upbringing on living below your means. That is something we are instilling into our children as we speak.
Thank you for listening to my rant - V
