That is great, congratulations! Its a great feeling when you finally know you and your partner are on the same page. My SO and I just had our own concrete moment only weeks ago, after a relationship of 4+ years. But first...
The background is that I graduated college in 2012 in a STEM field (I had a job for after graduation before going into my senior year - very lucky), and one semester prior to my graduation my significant made the hard decision to go back to school to get a more marketable degree. He was lucky and got a Research Assistant position in his masters program, but I was the primary source of income. Being it was my first job with any significant income and with naturally frugal tendencies (though I hadn't discovered MMM yet) I began to talk about finances a lot because it was all new. 401k! Investing! our company ESPP plan! Budgeting! And rental costs (that I fully subsidized at that time)... And he just didn't get it. I wonder if the discrepancy in life stages made him mad or if it was just simple disconnect in that it is hard to think about managing your money if you don't *think* you have any (any amount of money can be wasted or saved). Either is not a really respectable reason but they are emotional ones that can be hard to counter with logic.
I was able to convince him to pay off all his credit card debt (he was a good sport - I actually demanded it once I realized its existence in 2012), and a 12K loan to his grandfather for school - both before he graduated using his RA stipend and some modest internship income from summer 2014. Things only compounded when I found MMM and finally felt justification and could put a goal to my financial, and ultimately life, choices. But it was still this constant strain between us and he regularly said "I'm sick of talking about money". A lot of our conversations didn't even mention money directly, they centered around big picture freedoms that he knew were related to my financial goals and he got defensive almost every time. So yeah, he didn't make a ton with his RA stipend, but he blew a ton (percentage wise). He doesn't buy clothes, but was doing 40mi. roundtrip to school nearly 7 days a week (ie: driving up to study there rather than walking a block to a coffee shop/library), a cup or two of drip coffee from a shop every day, lunch out every day, cigarettes. Things so small and normal that it is easy to discount that you are really spending money at all. But on ~1000k take home a month, you don't get those luxuries, especially not when someone else is paying for all of your real costs of living (housing, most groceries, parents still paid car and health insurance). There's only so much you can tell someone though...many things need to be learned on one's own time.
Fast forward, he graduated in December 2014 and got his first job this January. Although this is not the first time he is making a full time paycheck, the last few years of discussing how to manage it all properly must have sunk in. He used to discount MMM as an abrasive blowhard, but he has been reading it with fervor lately, even sending me articles. And I got a phone call at lunch on June 15th where he told me "I get it now" and he is so sorry for taking so long and that he "never wants to spend money again" (which I chalk up to 1st stage pendulum swing from the consumerist side). But, he's put it in action too - started a side hustle and finalized setting up an i401k with Vanguard, stopped smoking, and started biking to work (as I've been suggesting since December, about a mile away along a bike path). Just this morning he told me that he didn't buy a tank of gasoline for the entire month of June.
The feeling of relief and excitement that we are finally firing on all cylinders as a team is the most incredible thing! It is very disheartening when one team member is essentially sabotaging another's goals, consciously or not. So, yay! MMM FTW. I can finally say WE are working to FI before 2018!
