My wife and I forgot it was payday last week. That was unusual. While she and I both have occasional bouts of forgetfulness, this wasn’t an occurrence borne of absentmindedness or the result of harried living. It was something neither of us had experienced before and it left us grateful for the realization of what financial freedom actually feels like.
Some explanation is probably in order. While we are certainly better off financially than the average American couple, we didn’t get here by accident. We started off our life together without many assets and entry level wages. The following three decades were filled with a lot of hard work, some good decisions, and more than a couple of really bad ones. We didn’t arrive where we are by accident. Our financial lives are, if anything, intentional acts.
That’s why it came as a surprise that we’d been paid a few days prior, and neither of us had even noticed.
Early in our marriage, we’d sit down together and pay bills on payday after depositing a check with the ink barely dry. We’d slice and dice to make too little money attempt to cover too much budget. Later, as our discipline and incomes improved, we’d make a plan to pay off debts and see if we could perhaps afford to stash a little away for emergencies. Later yet, we’d track our progress for saving and investing and monitor the budget for any variances.
Our cash savings and emergency fund grew as well. From wishful thinking as newlyweds, to the $1000 on Ramsey’s ‘Baby Step 1’, to the 6 months recommended by almost everyone. Later, we’d keep a couple of month’s expenses in the checking account as buffer between us and the expectedly unexpected. It was the end of living from one paycheck to the next.
We had three decades of giving every dollar a job as soon as it hit our hands.
A couple of years ago, we automated our finances. While savings and investments had been automated for some time, we automated our routine bills like utilities, mortgage, and insurance. A portion of the paycheck went into an account just to pay bills and those bills were paid when due without any input from us at all. Our biweekly payday meetings started taking just a couple of minutes, then we held them maybe once a month. Finally, we didn’t hold them at all unless something unusual happened. We had turned our intentional biweekly effort into an intentional system that ran automated in the background of our lives.
That’s when we got paid and I didn’t even notice. While I had tracked our net worth and other factors of our financial health for years and studied the principals of financial independence, that knowledge was all academic- it lived in spreadsheets, brokerage statements, and W2s. It was all charts and graphs and projections that a finance nerd like myself finds irresistible. I could tell you what sort of income my investments could produce and how much money my estate might be worth when I died. I could have a lengthy discussion about the optimal time to collect Social Security. But I didn’t know what financial freedom actually felt like.
But I felt it last week for the first time… and it feels amazing.
Getting to this point was anything but easy, but it’s not impossible. We aren’t high earners and our lifestyle, while not opulent, isn’t a ‘beans and rice’ existence either. We invite you to follow along as we share our journey with you and tell you what worked for us and what didn’t. We’ll explain away some of the complexity of personal finance and help you cut through the clutter that surrounds any topic as personal as your life and money.
