How I FIREd
When I was on my journey to financial independence, I was always looking for stories of how other people did it. So today, I’m sharing mine.
In this post, I’ll outline the strategies my husband and I employed to reach FIRE. This is just one person’s story, so disclaimer time, I’m not a financial professional of any kind, and this is for information and entertainment.
In today’s post, I want to share the strategies that allowed us to reach “Coast FIRE” in a little under ten years.
Background:
I almost couldn’t wait to quit my career. I had planned to work until this year (2024) in my mind’s eye, for more of a “FatFIRE” scenario. And then Covid hit. And my young son was doing distance learning. We had no family nearby to help.
It was at this point when I decided that I had saved enough. My husband, who had finished his military service, was enjoying his new career path in a skilled trade, and had no plans to stop working. I realized that my priorities had shifted. I could keep working and maybe get a nanny for our son who was doing school at home, or, I could step away a little sooner than I originally planned. So that’s what I did.
In Coast FIRE, our strategy is to live off of my husband’s income, allowing our investments to continue to grow. We still contribute to retirement funds and other investments.
So how did we do it? I’ll break down our strategy step by step.
Tackle consumer debt
We started our journey by looking at our balance sheet. We tallied what we owned and what we owed. At the time, we had very little consumer debt. Only a small car loan. I had around $130k of remaining student loan debt, and a small home loan.
We realized it was silly to have the car loan at that point, and promptly paid it off, which immediately freed up more money that we could put towards investments.
Tackle student loan debt
The student loan debt I had felt like an enormous weight on my shoulders. I thought about it every day. And there is a good reason for this; it seemed like the one thing between me leaving my career and having to stay for the long haul. I knew I had to get rid of it in order to feel a greater sense of freedom.
I began to brainstorm ways to pay it off quickly. At the time, my husband was in the military and I was working as a civilian on the military base. One option would be to join the military as an active-duty soldier. As I reflected on that, I realized that I was not a good fit for the military. (massive understatement, to be sure)
One of the good things about having student loans when you are a medical professional, is that there is a vast array of programs to help with repayment. I researched things like Indian health services, municipal and state health systems, and Federal student loan repayment.
My options were a little limited at the time because my husband was on military orders for Kansas for his next duty station. I searched the local area and found a public health clinic that was a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC). I cold called them from Germany and asked if they needed a dentist. By a stroke of luck, they did! I had a phone interview and was hired the following week.
When I started my position at the FQHC, I became eligible to participate in the National Health Service Corps, which would pay a certain amount of my student loans in exchange for a time commitment. This payment was tax-free and separate from my salary, which tracked the national average. I applied for this and was awarded repayment.
Side note: Anyone who is curious about finding a method like this to repay their loans, I have a few words of caution. One, loans won’t qualify if they are comingled with non-student loan debt. There are companies that will consolidate different types of debt together, which is nice, but if you plan to payoff student loan debt in this manner, they would have to remain separate. Two, loan repayment from the federal government comes with big strings attached. Read the fine print. There are crazy bad consequences if you don’t uphold your end of the bargain.
Leveraging military resources
There are a lot of incredible perks to being a military family. The top one is free healthcare. That made something that is normally a huge cost, like having a baby, basically free. Not only that, but the emergency room is free, as are most treatments, medications, or surgeries we could have needed.
Military families also have access to on-post preschool. The cost of preschool is on an income-based sliding scale. When we moved to Kansas, the military base we were at did not have any more room in their preschool, so we found preschool in the community. The military will subsidize the cost of preschool so that you only have to pay what you would, had there been a spot in the preschool on base. Which meant that I got to send my son to the best preschool in the area, run by the local college’s early childhood development program, for really, really cheap.
There is a vast array of free or low-cost things from workout classes/ gym facilities to cheap travel that also come with active military service. But probably the greatest things we had access to were a VA loan and basic housing allowance.
A VA loan allowed us to purchase a duplex at a good rate without a huge downpayment. We covered the entire mortgage with my husband’s basic housing allowance from the military. We rented the other side and essentially got paid to live there.
I also still had a small house in Indiana, which I was renting the entire time I was overseas and in Kansas.
Leveraging frugality
My husband’s salary was lower than mine, and we decided that, for the most part, we would live only on his earnings. That allowed me to fully fund my retirement investments through work and invest the rest after-tax.
Frugality wasn’t too difficult where we were. The cost of living was reasonable. I like to cook and prepared most of our food. We took short trips and went to parks for entertainment which worked great when our son was very young. If I’m being completely honest, there wasn’t a whole lot to do where we lived. So we kept it simple, enjoying the pleasures of gardening and sitting around a campfire.
Playing hopscotch
When my husband had completed his military service, he worked at a bank and finished up his college degree. When I finished my contract with public health, he was able to keep his job while we moved back to my original house in Indiana and I looked for a new job. He worked, which gave me more time to look for a job, find a good preschool, and work on the house.
Our duplex in Kansas was now fully rented out, allowing us to continued cashflow.
Once I found a job, he was able to search for a job with a better salary, which took a few months. Having a substantial savings and frugal habits during this time allowed everything to go smoothly. We started to realize how great it was to have growing financial freedom
Maximizing earnings
The job I found in Indiana was at a very high-tech, cutting-edge practice. I was able to work three days/week at almost double the national average salary. The downside to this time period is that we no longer had great health insurance and had to find an out-of-pocket plan. Even though my husband had found a job that was making a decent amount of money, he was having a difficult time finding work in his degree field.
So, he changed his approach and applied for a job that trained him in a skilled trade. It came with great health insurance, and pay rose as the training progressed. Now, he has journeyman status.
Revisiting military benefits
When my husband’s contract with the military ended, he had not looked into benefits as a veteran. Military guys are trained to be tough and as a result, they don’t always look for all of the resources, even when they need them. At a friend’s urging, my husband was able to access veteran benefits even though he was not in the military long enough to retire.
Coasting along
When it comes to building wealth, I think of earning as an “offensive strategy” and spending as a “defensive strategy”. These days, since I have more time, I can lean into a good defensive strategy when it makes sense. When I was working, making lots of money was good offense.
Indiana is a low cost of living state in many areas. I have access to great inexpensive grocery stores and farmer’s markets. There are a lot of things to do in our walkable community. We love spending money lavishly on the things that matter-like our son’s sports, vacations with extended families, and weekend getaways in nearby Chicago or Lake Michigan. We are closer to my husband’s family and make trips often to see them.
My husband will continue to work as long as it makes sense. At some point, we might like to find a slightly bigger property so that I have a larger studio space and a bigger bit of land to garden, and its much easier to get a mortgage when there is someone working.
I hope the this has been helpful in your own journey to FI. We were able to reach FI with these strategies, but yours may look totally different. That’s the beauty of it. I hope you are inspired on your own journey.
