One of the questions we often receive is “How did you find the Financial Independence movement?” Today we’re answering that question, which requires a journey back about six years, to 2017-ish. During that time I was on the edge of a quarter life crisis.
It’s ironic how you can look back on something, such as a difficult time in life, and realize how it truly changed your trajectory. My quarter life crisis actually helped us discover the Financial Independence (FI) movement, and kickstarted our FI journey.
Sit back, grab some coffee, and enjoy story time!
From New Career to Crisis
When I graduated college with my Bachelors in psychology, I knew I was going to graduate school. While I knew I wanted to pursue psychology from the start of college, I did not have a clear vision of what I was actually going to do with the degree. I assumed I’d be a counselor, a therapist, possibly work with kids, possibly in a school… I would figure it out.
Due to my lack of vision on the clinical side, after graduation I fell into my back-up option, a graduate program in Industrial-Organizational psychology (basically business psychology). After the first semester of the program, I landed my first full-time, big-girl job in Human Resources (and continued going to classes full-time in the evenings, 3 days per week). I was officially on the path to being a successful, self-sufficient adult!
When I wrote about (spoiler alert!) quitting my career in HR, I shared how I changed positions every two to three years from the start of my HR career in 2007. While job hopping was not looked upon favorably during that time (those dang millennials!), it worked well for me.
I kept moving up, getting pay bumps, taking on more responsibility, learned what I enjoyed and what I didn’t, etc.
Between 2011-2014 I remember starting to wonder though, “What’s it all for?” as I drove to work in my first leadership position. I was approximately 28 years old.
That feeling only grew as I chased other positions. I grew bored quickly; I thought I needed and wanted more responsibility, a bigger organization, a team to manage, etc., and then I would feel satisfied and happy.
During 2017 my quarter life crisis really started to take hold. What is a quarter life crisis?
According to Wikipedia, a quarter life crisis "involves anxiety over the direction and quality of one's life," and is typically experienced between the ages of early twenties to mid-thirties.
At the time I didn’t realize I was in a bit of a crisis. I just couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy, despite the outward appearance of being quite “successful” and having worked so hard to get where I was. Instead, I was full of anxiety and dread all the time, and couldn’t stop thinking about work, even on weekends. I guess I thought that was normal for the role I was in.
Further, things were tough at work. I was butting heads with the CFO with little support, one of my HR team members was not working out, and no matter how long or hard I worked, I was underwater with work.
In mid-2018 my anxiety only increased. We started having conversations that I might need to quit my job without having anything else lined up. It was scary.
To further complicate things, I was deeply unsettled by the fact I didn’t know what position was next. I was currently in a director-level role. Where does one go from a director-level role other than higher into leadership?!
Thankfully, one thing I knew with certainty was moving into another HR leadership position was not the answer. In fact, my intuition told me to go back into an individual contributor role. But that meant I would probably take a step down on the career ladder, and make less money (although money had never been a motivator working in nonprofit for the majority of my career).
Which begged the question, what had I worked so hard for after all these years? Success, money, reputation, accolades, prestige?
Truly, if I worked so hard to get to this point and I wasn’t satisfied, what was I working for?
The Turning Point
Meanwhile, he was doing his own research and problem-solving while he dealt with me repeatedly coming home from work crying and upset, anxious, and miserable.
The one thing you need to know is he is a problem-solver, a fixer. While he accepted and understood my job-hopping, it was contrary to his slow and steady nature. This, demonstrated by the fact he’s been with the same company for 16+ years, except for a brief break that resulted in his own career crisis in 2015. But that’s a story for another day!
I don’t recall the exact conversation, but I remember sitting on the couch one night and him saying something to the effect of:
What if we don’t have to work until retirement age?
While that sounded amazing, I immediately dismissed the idea. I mean, everyone works until retirement age, or even longer, right? Sure, you can retire early, if you happen to make millions of dollars a year, come from a rich family, receive a large inheritance, or somehow marry into money, etc.
Not us though… We were just average people, making decent salaries (who happened to be pretty good at saving money).
Ever prepared, he proceeded to run through different financial calculators (here and here) that took into account our (then fuzzy) financial picture. Basically, if we watched our expenses and kept shoveling money into savings, we could retire early in about 8-10 years, around the age of 45.
Questions swirled in my brain….
How could this be possible?!
Could we know with certainty we could retire in 10 years?
How much money does that mean we need to save?
Are other people doing this?
If so, why aren’t they talking about it?
Well, it’s called FIRE, Financial Independence Retire Early, he explained.
Tell me more…
I'm not going into the mechanics of the FIRE movement because there are tons of resources available, including websites, podcasts, books, FIRE Facebook groups (even local ones!), and even a documentary. If you want to learn more this could be a great place to start. Mr. Money Mustache is another great place to start.
The Financial Independence Rabbit Hole
Once he explained the simple math (based on the 4% rule and saving 25x our annual expenses), we quickly jumped down the rabbit hole.
It was one of those times that we were equally (‘cuse the pun) fired up about what seemed like unlocking a new level to our “good” life.
Have you had those moments with your partner? Others I can think of include buying and flipping the current home we live in, and purchasing our RV… You just know something’s good on the other side, despite inevitable challenges along the way.
So, we discovered FIRE. We know this is a path we want to take.
Then what happened? My quarter life crisis helped us get here, but did discovering FIRE resolve my crisis? Fast forward five years to present day… We have learned quite a bit!
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Thanks for sharing your story! Climbing the corporate ladder is so engrained in our corporate culture, but I too learned the hard way that at a certain point, it’s simply not worth it. I remember one time when my boss was pushing me to get promoted, and I said “seriously I do not want a promotion.” Even with better pay, the next level at that company was not worth all the added stress and anxiety. One day my boss literally collapsed at work and had to get an ambulance to the hospital because she had completely physically and mentally exhausted herself. I wanted no part of that “next level!”
I’m thankful that I had enough self-awareness to realize I didn’t want to move up the ladder any further. That is so frightening about your boss collapsing at work! I hope that was a wake up call for her.