the Piper Paradigm.

And the question is, where did we start, really?

Trying to start at “the beginning” feels impossible and has held me up too long from just… starting. I want to start to share this process.

Why?

That’s another long post for another day. Most simply – I continue to learn and grow and find so much value in what others have shared about this process. Why wouldn’t I want to do the same for someone else out there?

Process? What process?

My husband and I have been in pursuit of financial independence (FI) for some time now, and I’m determined to document the rest of our journey. What’s tricky is we had never heard of a name for what we were doing before we started to do it. It’s hard to write about a thing you don’t have a name for. But now we do, so maybe I can start to share about where we started…

This thing I didn’t have a name for began for me much earlier, but we began together on the eve of 2017. We had decided to build a house. Wow! Great! Exciting! Our first owned home and it was going to be brand new and amazing and a great “investment!” But we realized immediately after we committed to do this thing that we could barely afford it. What we could afford at that time simply meant – “What’s the most we can handle paying per month?” This house was something that barely fit into the parameters of making the monthly payment with other monthly payments. It was doable, but it didn’t feel great.

Let’s look at the rest of the picture for a moment – I had absolutely no context for what “student loan debt” really meant. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and while I qualified for a number of scholarships, it didn’t cover everything. My husband was even more “normal.” He fell into the category of families that make just a little too much for most scholarships, but not enough to pay for their kid’s college outright. Student Loan Debt was made for these “normal” people. And suddenly here we were, on the eve of 2017, with documents signed to build a brand new home… and over $100,000.00 in debt staring us in the face. N-O-R-M-A-L.

Fun side note: That’s nearly $130k in 2024 dollars, according to the U.S. inflation calculator. Also worth clarifying – that number did not include that nice new house.

Conclusion: “normal” sucks.

Zooming out a bit further – An extremely impactful event had occurred in 2016: We went to Italy for three weeks for our honeymoon. This was one of the first times that we exchanged money for experiences and memory building and the value correlation for me was unmatched. After this absolutely phenomenal experience, I could not fathom giving the next one million years of my life (only a slight exaggeration) spending money every single month to pay off an education that had already been completed. Continue to spend decades of current dollars on the past? That was a tall glass of NOPE.

FI pursuit Phase 1 begins…

Somewhere around this time (perhaps late 2016?) I started tuning in to the Dave Ramsey podcast, which I heard about by listening to a much more financially wise coworker. He mentioned Dave Ramsey as if this were a household name – like Martha Stewart. Who is this Dave Ramsey I wondered? He was someone I am honestly very surprised I was willing to listen to at all at that time in my life (an older religious white man telling me what to do? Yea, no thanks). But I did listen. And the process just… made sense. I knew we had to learn how to budget. I knew it started there.

After much convincing, my husband agreed to budget with me. We had no idea what we were doing. We both downloaded the EveryDollar app (free version) and used the same login so we had all of our household income and expenses in one place. It did not go well. Again, we had no idea what we were doing. We argued about it. We were frustrated. But we stuck with it. It took a solid 3 months of daily use to really understand what we had coming in each month and what we were spending.

The lightbulb moment…

I felt like I suddenly had access to secret information that previously alluded me – we could now see where we were spending too much and figure out what we actually had to work with after necessary expenses each month. It was like a door had opened to a secret room. Now it felt easier to make the next decision: that delta between income and expenses – that was going to go towards paying down our debt. And then we went WILD.

We made an outlandish goal – We were going to build that new house AND we were going to pay off over six-figures of debt… IN TWO YEARS. Friends and family thought we were nuts. We probably were. We are not lawyers or doctors or tech engineers. At that time, my husband was a high school teacher and I was in a mid-level leadership role at a startup that wasn’t even at the stage of offering health insurance to its employees yet. But here’s the thing – you have to start where you are. I have been on the listening end of so many conversations in the vein of “I’ll do this when this happens.” Let me save you a lot of disappointment. NO YOU WON’T. Start where you are. Do it NOW.

And so we started. And we continued. And once this simply became The Thing we were doing, we gained momentum. We went down to one car. We canceled subscriptions. I started regular meal planning and cooking at home. We found every way we could think of to grow that income/expense delta. In 2017, we built the house and paid off $35,000 or so in debt. Now we knew we could do it. We had evidence. In 2018 we worked even harder, which led to me increasing my salary as my efforts were rewarded through promotions and my husband increased his income by working as many side hustles as possible.

Isn’t it interesting how we can create our own luck?

In the thick of things, I looked at $100k in debt through this lens – if we could pay off $100k in debt in two years, we could logically make $100k that we could do whatever the hell we wanted to with over the following two years on the other side (and rinse and repeat). That was a powerful motivator for me. I used our expenditures for our honeymoon as a reference point (roughly $10k for flights, lodging, food, drink, entertainment, etc. Note that we did not opt to have the cheapest or most expensive experience. Really it was perfect. But I digress). If that kind of travel was THE THING I found most exciting and valuable (“memory dividends” are a topic for another day), then my logic was that I could therefore afford TEN of the same trips every two years by getting on the other side of debt. WOW. MATH. COOL.

That’s incredibly simplistic math, but it’s math I understood. At the time, that process over those two years were absolutely the hardest thing my husband and I had ever done yet, either individually or together. And here’s the thing about hard things – intentionally doing hard things that you control (as in you control the choice of doing them) is perfect practice for being able to contend with hard things you do NOT have control over. Queue the COVID-19 pandemic, wildfire evacuation, career changes and moves to a new location (those were all in the same year by the way). Any one of these things could be devastating to a relationship, but we had already gone through the exercise of working together through something incredibly difficult.

Again – more on that another day…

So how did this first phase turn out? I’ll let this 2018 NYE post explain that.

At the time, we thought this was the end of something. Really, it was barely the beginning. This is where we started.