As the end of another year draws near, I find myself doing what I always do around this time: reflecting. Reflecting on all that I’ve learned this year. Reflecting on the goals I’ve achieved, the places I’ve fallen short, all the activities I did or didn’t do.
In this spirit of reflection, I’ve been thinking about how grateful I am for where I find myself right now, happily living a slow FI lifestyle, and all the financial decisions I’ve made that have led me to this very place. So today, I’m here to share some of those decisions I’m most proud of and hopefully inspire you to reflect on some of the best financial decisions you’ve made on your path.
I see so many social media posts in the personal finance space highlighting the worst financial decisions people have ever made. These posts have good intentions – the moral often is that we shouldn’t dwell, we shouldn’t worry so much about these decisions. And sure, I’ve even fallen down this rabbit hole a bit, with this post on my worst financial mistake, complete with the message that we are not, in fact, our worst mistakes.
It’s natural for us humans, especially us Americans, to focus on the bad instead of the good. Just look at the news. That’s how the news gets us to keep watching, with doom and gloom rather than sunshine and rainbows. Why would we keep watching if everything is fine? Hence why a post on our worst financial mistakes might get more clicks than one on our best financial decisions…
But today, I don’t care about the clicks (who am I kidding, I’ve never cared about the clicks when it comes to this blog). Today, I want to spin this topic even further, and talk about our best financial decisions.
I think sometimes we (especially women) don’t discuss what we’re best at because society has told us that we have to be modest. We have to be humble. We shouldn’t flaunt our successes for fear of being seen as over-the-top braggarts. But I argue that we can be modest and humble while still being proud of our accomplishments, of what we have done well, of all we have achieved. And the more we share our successes, the more conversations can be started, and the more others can see that they’re not alone and that they, too, can celebrate their accomplishments and wins, no matter how big or small.
In that spirit, let’s all pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come. Go ahead, I’ll wait. No matter how long your journey, I’ll bet you’re somewhere different than the place you started. So why not look back and reflect, visualize how far you’ve actually come?
To get the ball rolling, while also acknowledging my immense privilege in being a white woman from a middle-class background who grew up with two working parents who helped me pay for college, here are some of the financial decisions I’m most proud of.
Taking a pay cut
Woah, wait a second. How could one of my best financial decisions be about making less money? Let me explain…
For those of you who know my story, you know that I took a massive pay cut after leaving my “dream job” as an assistant professor at a university back in 2016.
However, you may also know that this pay cut led me eventually into the new (to me) field of medical writing that I now really enjoy (much more so than academia, at least). And this new field and its salary growth potential is fueling my financial independence goal. I’ve been able to increase my salary in a way that feels sustainable to me (in other words, without overworking or being promoted into a role I don’t want, for example).
If I wasn’t willing to take that massive pay cut and take a chance on a new and different, although lower-paying (at the time) field, I’d never be where I am today.
This financial decision to make less money also eventually gave me another gift: so much extra time in my day. With that pay cut came working much fewer hours than I had been working as a professor. In academia, I was always preparing for the next day’s classes and lectures. I felt like I could never stop my mind from thinking about work. But with that pay cut job came working to quota, and I found myself to be so efficient that after my training phase was complete, I could get my work done in about 32-25 hours a week. That left me with so much time. Time I’d never had before. Time to figure out who I was outside of work. Time to discover slow FI. Time to work on passion projects. Time to launch this blog. And the rest is history!
Now, with the rarest of exceptions, I leave work at work at the end of the day. Even though I have increased my salary and worked my way up to more senior positions, my time has been one of my sacred cows. I protect it fiercely.
Automating my investments/paying myself first
Before I had the “dream job” as a university professor, I was in my first job outside of graduate school, as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. They had some great resources there, and so I went to a talk on finances, specifically one for graduate students and early career scientists. This talk is where I first learned about 401ks and Roth IRAs.
This was right around the same time I was being presented with my first opportunity to contribute to a 401k, and so I opened one up as soon as I could. That talk also taught me about 401k matching, how it was basically “free money” and how everyone should strive to at least contribute enough to get the match. So, that’s what I did. My first experience with paying myself first.
Then, when I really thought I had made it in my financial life (with the “dream professor” job), I opened up a Roth IRA in addition to my 401k. After talking to someone at my bank and working through some of my own numbers, I decided I’d put $300 into it every month. I was continuing to pay myself first.
I didn’t know it then, but I was creating this great habit that would help propel me toward financial independence and more and more financial freedom along the way. I stopped contributing to the Roth IRA for a little while when I first took the pay cut, but I went right back to it when I was stable again and knew how much money I had coming in. Because I had created the habit in the first place, it was easy to go back to contributing once I was ready.
What wasn’t so easy was opening up my brokerage account, which leads me to the next financial decision I’m proud of…
Starting to invest in the first place
Even when I started investing in my 401k and Roth IRA, I was scared. Investing in these accounts was one of the first big decisions I was making on my own, with no one else, no parents or teachers or friends, telling me what to do or sharing their experience with me. I was talking to strangers essentially – financial planners who worked for these companies, and following their advice. Even when I discovered and started following the FIRE movement, I was scared. These were people I didn’t know, and while their advice seemed sound and made sense to me, I still feared I would do something wrong, something catastrophic with my money.
Investing in the 401k was one thing, because it was all set up through my employer and was using money that I never even really saw anyway. But choosing to invest in my Roth IRA and then my brokerage was different. When I took those leaps, it was using money I had earned, taking my hard-earned money out of my bank account and trusting it somewhere else.
It took awhile, longer than I like to admit, to open up and start investing in my brokerage account. In retrospect, I wish I had started that account so much sooner. I kept reading and reading that I could do it on my own, that I didn’t need anyone to help me. But I was still scared. What if I did something wrong? I didn’t want anything to happen to the precious money I earned in my paycheck every other week. After all, I’m naturally risk averse, probably because of what happened in my first money memory.
But even though I waited until I felt ready, I eventually did start investing some of that hard-earned money. And I’m so glad I did. I wouldn’t be where I am today on my financial freedom journey if I hadn’t. Sure, I wish I hadn’t waited, but better late than never, right? Everyone needs to start somewhere. And as they say, the best time to start investing was yesterday. The second best time is today.
Marrying someone with similar money values
One of my favorite authors and bloggers in the personal finance space, JL Collins, has a list of key guidelines to consider on the quest for financial freedom. One is “avoid fiscally irresponsible people. Never marry one or otherwise give him or her access to your money”.
I knew I agreed with him when I first read his book The Simple Path to Wealth way back before there ever was a Mr. Dink. And now that I’m married, I feel it even more strongly.
In the case of my parents, who are now divorced, money was their #1 topic of disagreement, at least when they were around me and my brother. I learned from a young age that money was something married couples fought about. As I grew up, I really really didn’t want that to be me.
From day 1, Mr. Dink and I could easily talk about money. We may not have had all the same views, but at least we could talk freely, easily, about this topic that so many thought was taboo. I could talk about money more easily with him than any of my friends or family, which I remember thinking was something special.
This is a huge reason I think that we are so compatible. As you can probably guess from this blog, money is an incredibly important topic in my life, and it spans so many other topics as well.
Being able to talk so freely about money allowed us to learn much more about each other than we may have otherwise. We learned that we share many similar values when it comes to money, for example that we don’t like spending on things we don’t need, and these shared values became our financial foundation. As our relationship developed, we were able to come up with a household money strategy that works for us, and not necessarily fall trap to what everyone else thought we should be doing. Our household money strategy may be different from most, but it works for us.
We also decide to revisit our money strategy often so that if it ever stops working for us, we can make changes, because we’re not afraid to do that. What matters most to us is that we create a safe space for us to talk about any concerns, and we address those concerns even if it’s hard, rather than mindlessly going about our days spending money in ways that aren’t aligned with our values.
Planning our meals
Similar to our money strategy, Mr. Dink and I are also on the same page when it comes to cooking and planning our meals. We lucked out that this also was really clear practically from day 1. It was apparent that we both liked to cook, and we enjoyed eating in and cooking for ourselves more than we liked to go out.
Because of this shared interest and value, when we moved in together, we immediately started talking about what this would look like. Who would cook when, how often we would go out. Because we talked about this stuff, we naturally started planning our meals several days in advance.
Our meal planning schedule started slow and basic enough, with planning just a few days at a time, but it really took off during the pandemic. In the early early days of the pandemic, when neither of us would want to go to the grocery store, we would plan for 2 weeks at a time. Since we had already set the foundation for meal planning, it didn’t feel like that big of a stretch to plan for longer lengths of time.
We liked our rhythm of planning so much that as the pandemic crept on but restrictions got looser, we kept it going. Now, we plan for about a week at a time, which feels like the sweet spot for us. It gives us so much peace of mind. I know that after a day of working full-time at a sometimes demanding job, I don’t need to think about what’s for dinner or who’s going to cook it. It’s already been decided, and so it’s one less thing to think or worry about.
Planning meals also helps with our finances. Because we plan everything out and make a list before Mr. Dink goes to the grocery store, we’re less likely to be tempted to buy anything that’s not on the list (a big reason Mr. Dink likes to shop over me is that he’s better at this). We’re also not just going to the store and planning meals while we’re there, which we’ve found in the past to be a recipe for disaster when it comes to buying things we don’t need (and forgetting things we do need).
Planning our meals also helps us prepare for the unexpected. We know what we like to eat, and we cook a lot of the same things over time, so we have many staples on hand to be able to make things in a pinch. This helps on the rare occasions where something does go wrong, like we forgot an ingredient or they didn’t have something at the store. For example, the other night we planned to make one of our favorites, fried rice, but both of us had neglected to make rice ahead of time (we forgot to “assign” it as a task to one of us, and so it completely slipped our minds). Never fear. Although we didn’t have any quick rice, we had some stir fry noodles in the pantry that we could use instead to make a similar dish. Being prepared in this way also helps us avoid having to order takeout when these things come up, which saves us dollars and calories.
Perhaps our meal planning has even eliminated some fights that may otherwise have happened. Many of our friends who are part of a couple say that dinner is the #1 topic they fight about. Who’s going to cook, what they’re going to have. Whenever they tell me this, it reminds me that planning our meals is one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. At this point, the only aspect of dinner we’ll argue about is the timing. I like to eat early, Mr. Dink likes to eat late, and so we’ve compromised on a time that we (almost) always hit.
And finally, yet relatedly…
Learning to tune out the noise
The older I get, the easier it becomes to tune out the “noise”: the family members, friends, news stories, click-bait articles, basically any voice that’s not my own telling me what I ought to be doing.
It’s not easy, and it takes effort, which is why I consider it a decision. A decision to make it a priority to listen to my own inner voice rather than others’ opinions. Deciding to choose myself and trust that I alone know what’s best for me and my family. This has been instrumental in all aspects of my life.
With my finances, part of it was learning to tune out the noise of the stock market. I’m in it for the long run, so I don’t need to be worried about what’s going on right now, today, this week, this month, or even this year. If Warren Buffet’s strategy is to tune out the noise of the market, it will be mine as well.
Another part was letting go of what other people might think of me. When I was a professor, some thought I should have a better car. When I got raises, others thought I should “treat myself” to some nicer things, some lifestyle inflation. But I never wanted any of those things people thought I should have. What I want is financial freedom, and I’m no longer afraid to go against the grain to get the things I deeply desire.
What about you? What are some of your best decisions, financial or otherwise, that have led you to where you are today? I love to hear from you!
P.S. I’m not sure what my holiday posting schedule is going to look like just yet. I may try to write one more post next week before the Christmas holiday, but only if I’m feeling up for it. I’m giving myself the permission to rest if needed. That said, if I feel so moved, I will write! So just in case you don’t hear from me before, Happy Holidays and a Blessed New Year to all!