My Purpose With This Blog

As someone who struggled with debt for decades, I understand the stress and lack of freedom living paycheck to paycheck brings.

It’s my mission to help others break free from that hopeless feeling by educating you on the basics of personal finance, encouraging you to think differently and experimenting with different methods and strategies to achieve your goals. 

What This Blog Is

This blog is my way of sharing what I’ve learned about personal finance over the past couple of decades as well as what I continue to learn as our family pursues financial independence.

It will be more heavily weighted towards those that are struggling with debt or just getting started on their financial journey.

My goal is to offer my knowledge and experience to help you follow me out of debt and towards financial freedom.

What This Blog Is Not

This is not a retirement (or early retirement) focused blog, though I may talk about those things occasionally.

This is also not a high-level advice or strategy blog. While I enjoy reading about more advanced strategies for building wealth, my goal with this blog is to simply help others start along the path to financial freedom.

It is my sincere hope that you outgrow this blog and can move on to those advanced strategies someday soon.

More About Me

I remember vividly being in college while working on my second degree and offering to treat my classmates out to a tasty Mexican lunch.

We weren’t allowed to work the first year of the program so I was met with confusion and asked, “How can you afford that?”

And this is the response I remember with both despair and embarrassment, “I’m already 20 grand in debt. What’s a few more dollars?”

I’ve been both blessed and cursed along my financial path.

I’ve had massive debt, but I’ve also received a few windfalls to help manage it. But it wasn’t until I realized I was only barely managing things that I decided I needed to wake up and master them. 

In 2007 we planned to take a family vacation to Disneyland. As a family that deals with food allergies, Disney is like the Holy Land of vacation destinations so I wanted to do it right by staying on site to take advantage of the allergy-friendly restaurants.

Despite knowing it was going to be crazy expensive, we made a goal to enjoy a debt-free Disney. Yes, we had other debt, but the goal was to take this Disney trip without adding to it.

And we started strong. We managed to save half of our goal in just a couple months.

And that’s when all hell broke loose. Car repairs, vet bills, housing repairs, and other unexpected expenses had us emptying out the Disney fund in the span of a couple weeks.

The smart thing might have been to cancel the trip, but everything was already arranged so we just decided to enjoy the moment and deal with the cost later.

Fortunately, despite decades of debt, my credit has always been stellar, so I was able to hack our debt by consolidating it onto 0% interest cards. 

While I had an excuse for why debt-free Disney didn’t happen, the failure still stung.

So I started 2018 with the goal of paying off our debt as soon as possible. Regardless of it being interest-free, I just wanted it gone. We managed to slash our expenses, prioritize our spending and pay off the debt 8 months later. 

We’ve been fortunate to have fewer costly surprises (there have still be a few) and another windfall to help us hit our goal faster than expected, but primarily I credit our success to a change in mindset.

Instead of accepting debt as a given and something that was simply managed, I started viewing our finances as something I needed to master. 

It’s that subtle shift in perspective that I hope to instill in you as you read through this blog. I’m thankful for all the personal finance blogs, Facebook groups, and podcasts that have helped (and continue to inspire) me along the way and I hope this blog can be a point of inspiration and education for you along your journey.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking around.

If you want or need help to get started check out the Start Here page for a step by step approach.

I really do want to help break the debt acceptance that’s so prevalent in society right now so if you have any questions or issues or just want to reach out, please email me.