I had just received my bachelors degree in business, and stayed on for an extra year to get my MBA. I was destined for big things.
I took a job in Orlando, Florida with a big company. The pay sucked, but you have to start somewhere.
I packed my car with everything I owned, and headed south.
And 2 months into the job… I knew there was no way I was going to last.
I had transitioned from an environment of curiosity and excitement, to gray cubicle walls and silence. From walking across the quad, to sitting behind the same desk all day long. From youthful energy, to a slow, draining routine that felt like it aged me overnight… and did I mention the pay sucked?
I couldn’t understand how people could do this for 45+ years, trading their lives for something so unfulfilling. Surely this wasn’t what I had been working towards my whole life. This wasn’t the opportunity I had been sold… was it?
I traveled home that Christmas.
One night, while standing in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, enjoying a few beers with my dad, I asked a simple question, “When did you start accumulating wealth?”.
He laughed, as if embarrassed to say it was honestly something he had never thought about before. He simply said, “I’m the wrong guy to ask. If I was your age and had any money in the bank, I would have bought a motorcycle.”
And it occurred to me, my dad had never thought about this before because he didn’t have to. It used to be enough to go to college and get a job with a good company, but this was no longer the case. I realized that the system was broken and I was on my own to figure it out.
So I took to the internet.
I started searching for anything that would help me make sense of how to get ahead.
I read about frugality and the scarcity mindset, where you focus on cutting costs and living with as little as possible to make ends meet.
I read about the abundance mindset, where working longer and harder to get promoted quickly, and how job-hopping can maximize your earning potential.
The premise of these ideas were fine, but to what end?
And then I discovered a community called, FIRE. The acronym stands for, Financial Independence Retire Early. I didn’t really understand the financial independence part, but retiring early sounded great to me. So I dove down the rabbit hole and started consuming as much as possible.
I couldn’t get enough. It was like a support group filled with people that felt the same way I did – frustrated with the lack of fulfillment in modern work, and desperate for a way out.
So how did this FIRE group achieve their goal? Was it really possible?
The idea was actually quite simple: save and invest your money in the stock market using index funds, and once you can live on 4% of the total value annually, you are financially independent. For example, if you needed $80,000 per year to live, you needed to have $2 million in an index fund (like the S&P500) and you were set. Now that obviously sounds like a lot of money – and it certainly is – but the examples of people achieving their goals and sharing their stories were overwhelming.
The best part of the FIRE group was that everyone was getting there differently. Some reached financial independence through real estate, some through stocks, some through selling their own businesses, side hustles, crypto currencies – it didn’t matter how you got there. As long as at the end of the day, you could put that money into an index fund and live off of 4%, you were essentially free.
And just like that, I had a goal.
I no longer looked at work as something I had to do for the rest of my life, but rather something I only had to do for as long as it took me to hit my financial goal. It was completely up to me. This felt like the first thing I really had control over in my young adult life. My ability to achieve success or fail completely hinged on my ability to follow through with the plan.
It changed my perspective on everything. I no longer wanted to live in a really nice apartment, or drive a new car. I didn’t want to just buy stuff to have things. I only wanted to spend on the essentials, save some money for going out with friends, and invest whatever I had left.
I started researching and reading as much as I could about building wealth. And if I could offer the two most helpful resources to get your journey started, it would be these two personal heroes of mine below:
I’m grateful for that conversation I had with my dad. Sometimes the best way to teach isn’t by giving the answers, but by inspiring a journey.
How have you started to accumulate wealth? Do you have a different view on financial independence and how you will achieve it?
