This is where we found ourselves on our twentieth wedding anniversary. Sitting on a beach in Puerto Vallarta and wondering about our next twenty years.
We want more of this. Not necessarily Mexican beaches, but the freedom that this represents. That is, the freedom to do what we want with our time. We can do this for 10 days because company vacation policies allow it, but what if we could do this whenever we wanted?
How do we get this kind of freedom? This is where Financial Independence comes in.
Last year (2017), we discovered this whole community of people that are trying to get or keep their freedom by saving more, spending less, and rejecting consumerism. This freedom is called Financial Independence (FI for short). Although we didn’t know there was a name for it, we’d both been interested in FI concepts over the years, but always at different points in our life. The light bulb finally went on for both of us at the same time and now we’re firmly on the road to financial freedom!
Now that we know about FI, what are we doing to get there? We’ll go into more detail about all of these in other posts, but at a glance, here is what we’ve been doing:
- Investing and saving a lot more than we did before.
- Optimizing our spending by finding ways to lower expenses on necessary items and reducing the amount we spend on discretionary items.
- Focusing hardcore on attacking debt.
Getting to FI can take a long time. How can we ensure that we are living for the present, not always waiting for the future?
- Living more intentionally
- Doing or buying things because they add value to our lives and support our goals, not because society or marketers say we should.
- Thinking about what kind of impact we want to leave on this world and figuring out how to make it happen.
- Having fun while working on our path to FI
- Using Credit Card rewards bonuses to pay for travel, so we’re not putting off our bucket list until “someday”
- Discovering what else we like to do outside of work and finding things other than FI to focus on (hence, this web site!).
As we celebrate this milestone in our lives, we want to chronicle our steps of intentionally building our future freedom, while also getting joy out of the present. So, here’s to making the most out of Our Next Twenty!