Mine just hit $200K today! $0 was 3.5 years ago for us. I'm so looking forward to the $500K milestone!
now thats impressive !
you gotta let us know how you did that, i'd like to do that.
Slow and stead, one month at a time. I started out reading Dave Ramsey just after I got married in 2007. DH was totally not interested so I just made suggestions and we gradually implemented them. When we got married we were hugely in debt with less than $20K in retirement funds between us.
DH saw how wonderful it would be to have savings, so we started putting a bit in savings. This eventually became our 3 month emergency fund.
We had several small annoying debts - 2 cars, 2 credit cards. Paid these off in a year, $18K total.
He had a debt that was $100K and in collections. (Today this is our final debt remaining.) This took over a year to get it back in good standing, I never want to have to avoid the phone because of collection calls again!
Once we were there we started investing at least 15% of our gross income ala Dave Ramsey. At that point I was just not super comfortable with Dave's investing advice so I started reading investment books from the library until I stumbled on a Boglehead book. That was a good day!
Since then we've just invested monthly and paid down debt monthly. Boring stuff. Auto withdrawals to your 401-K are your friend! So are automatic payments to your loans! Each year since 2009 we've added at least $21K to our retirement accounts and paid down debt by an average of $6,700. During this time we've also used and replenished out emergency fund several times, purchased 2 inexpensive cars with cash, and cashflowed many home improvement projects.
So yeah, it's not exciting, it's just doing the right things day after day, month after month, and year after year.