About

We are a married couple currently living in Arizona. We have no kids, but we do have a few fur babies. In 2018, we celebrated our 20^th wedding anniversary. That’s how this web site came into existence.

We’ve been married since our early 20s and, in many ways, we’ve grown up together. This site is another step in our shared evolution and is about us navigating our life together while we pursue Financial Independence. Since Financial Independence is our current passion, you will notice a very heavy focus on money and personal finance in our writing. 

Sara is the female half of this couple. She grew up slightly poor. Never in true poverty, but far from well off too. Her parents, who she loves very much, are terrible with money. They never taught her how to save or budget or anything about money, really. She learned that money was scarce and that if you had some extra money, you should use it to make your immediate situation better. Thus, she started out her adult life by spending any extra money she made and not saving.

Roy is the other side of this coin. He wasn’t raised to be frugal. Or more specifically, he didn’t grow up in a frugal environment. He grew up with layaway programs and credit cards. He grew up learning how to be a perfect consumer. Shopping endlessly was okay if you got a good deal. It didn’t matter if you paid for that deal with credit. You would always have enough credit. These were the values and ideas that he had at the beginning of his adult life.

Since getting married, we’ve made some bad moves and some good ones. We let lifestyle inflation creep in to our lives to a certain extent, but we also kept our housing expenses relatively low. We started putting money into retirement accounts earlier than many people do, but we didn’t fund them as much as we could or should have. We made dumb purchases using debt, but eventually managed to pay it all off so we are only left with mortgage debt. In addition, to all of this, we’ve been supporting Sara’s parents for well over 10 years now. Despite the things we’ve done wrong and the life circumstances that have held us back, we are still in a very good place.

We are about 5-7 years from reaching a target number that would cover spending of $60K per year, depending on what assumptions we use. I like to play with different assumptions (all assets vs. liquid assets only) and safe withdrawal rates (3.5% vs. 3.75%) to get a range of possibilities. We don’t have a specific number or date because we believe that we will instinctively know when we are ready to retire from our 9-5 jobs.

We hope that someone will benefit from us sharing our experiences on this site. We know that we also have a lot to learn from you, so please share your insights with us!