Before I discovered F.I.R.E. (Financial Independence Retire Early), I never thought much about money except once a year when I spent time writing a budget that I had no intention of adhering to. As my SO and I both had good careers, we did not track our expenses. We were more interested in raising our incomes. Luckily we were naturally frugal which helped us save.
Once I discovered FI, I wanted to speed up that journey, so I started to look at the fat in our expenses and started to trim away. I didn’t think we overspent but still we found there were a lot of things that could be cut.
Costs that got cut
⁃ Car loans
⁃ Cleaning service (this is the only thing I miss!) 😭
⁃ Cable
⁃ AAA
⁃ Breakfast and lunch money spent at the office cafeteria 🍱
⁃ Kids haircuts, my SO bought a trimmer and learned to cut their hair 💇♂️ (they don’t always look presentable but don’t tell them that) 🤣⁃
– Home phone
⁃ Eating out 5-6x/wk cause I’m lazy and I don’t like to cook 👩🍳
⁃ Manis/pedis though I didn’t do those often
⁃ Paying for stock and mutual fund transactions 🤦🏻♀️
⁃ Big cell phone plans 📞
⁃ New clothes and shoes and bags and …..every quarter👗👠🥿👡👜
⁃ Car washes
⁃ New furniture
⁃ Star bucks everyday sometimes 2X/day☕️
⁃ Subscriptions I didn’t use – gym, spotify, WSJ, Audible, amazon unlimited, etc ..(psst I don’t pay for books anymore, I use Hoopla and Libby both online reading services through the library. Sorry Amazon!)
⁃ Massages but not often
And some costs got optimized
I also started to shop around to lower expenses I had to keep like insurance (one of my pet peeves), daycare and mortgage.
By doing this, we were able to make significant progress on our financial goals and cut out YEARS of working. I would never have anticipated we could have reached where we are. I remember in 2015 when a Financial Advisor modeled what we would need for retirement. When I first heard the number I balked! I never thought we’d ever be able to achieve it, but we did, even with only one of us working full time. Investing and compounding which are part of that equation also really helped us to get here.
This exercise helped me realize the importance of not just increasing our top line but also the bottom online. At the end of the day, if you make a lot of money, but use most of it towards expenses, it’s going to take many years of working to get to retirement.