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The Financial Diet
I Saved Six Figures While Making Less Than $50K Per Year
I Saved Six Figures While Making Less Than $50K Per Year
The Financial Diet
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28:16 · Jun 26, 2026
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Hey
guys,
it's
Chelsea
just
jumping
in
here
with
a
quick
reminder
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0:00
Hey guys, it's Chelsea just jumping in here with a quick reminder
0:03
that if you have been thinking about getting good with money
0:07
and do not know where to start,
0:08
absolutely nothing is more useful in my opinion than the right budgeting app.
0:13
When I was going from my absolute worst financially to just getting good with
0:17
money,
0:17
the first thing I started to do was really seriously track my finances
0:21
and it absolutely changed everything.
0:23
I have been using Monarch for some time now.
0:26
It is what I found when I was looking for a replacement for Mint,
0:29
which is what I used for well over a decade to get good with
0:31
money and I found Monarch,
0:33
I fell in love with it.
0:34
I have been using it ever since
0:35
and then I reached out to them
0:36
and asked if we could work together
0:38
and we are now partnering with Monarch.
0:40
So, if you use our code,
0:41
you get your free trial plus a big discount on your first year.
0:44
It is an awesome app.
0:45
It's great for your own finances.
0:46
It's great for sharing finances with others like a roommate or a partner.
0:50
They do not sell your data to third parties.
0:52
There are no ads.
0:53
It is incredibly intuitive, easy to use.
0:55
You can visualize your day-to-day finances
0:57
and your overall net worth
0:58
and big financial picture
1:00
and in my humble opinion,
1:01
it just makes everything to do with money management so much easier.
1:04
The first part of getting good with money starts with knowing what you have
1:07
and that comes down to the right budgeting app.
1:09
But anyway, that's all.
1:10
Let's get into today's video with Cara Perez.
1:13
>> Hello TFD fam.
1:14
It's your girl, Cara Perez, founder of Cara Explores Money,
1:17
author of Money for Change
1:19
and I know that I'm normally on this channel talking about socioeconomics
1:22
and kind of the bigger economic picture of life in the United States.
1:26
But today we're going to be talking about me.
1:28
We're going to be talking about my financial journey.
1:31
I am 38 years old.
1:33
I've never had a full-time salaried positions.
1:36
I've never had a job with benefits.
1:38
I have never had a 401k.
1:39
My whole career has been side hustles
1:42
or working for myself
1:43
as a content creator.
1:44
And for most of my professional life, I have been extremely low income.
1:48
But as you saw in the title,
1:49
I was able to invest $200,000
1:51
while being pretty low income
1:53
and that's what I want to talk about today.
1:55
I do have to say I'm a little nervous to share this story
1:57
because I've never been this financially transparent on the internet before,
2:01
but I do, much like the TFD team,
2:05
really believe in the power of financial transparency,
2:08
and I'm also not ashamed of my low-income background.
2:12
Class solidarity forever, baby.
2:14
I do want to say at the top as kind of a disclaimer,
2:17
this is a story of extremes.
2:19
Both my income being extremely low
2:21
and the things that I did to move beyond
2:24
that being fairly extreme.
2:25
I encourage you as you're watching this to not necessarily see this
2:28
as a step-by-step plan
2:29
that you have to replicate exactly,
2:31
but to instead take what may resonate
2:34
and what may apply to your life
2:35
and leave the rest.
2:36
So, let's start off with the juiciest part of this video,
2:38
all of my income.
2:40
I'm going to start with the year 2012.
2:42
I graduated college in May 2011,
2:45
so 2012 is the first year of working full-time.
2:49
All of the numbers I'm about to share are AGI, adjusted gross income.
2:53
In 2012, I made $15,257.
2:55
And this is a big year in my life
2:57
because I moved from Massachusetts to Austin,
2:59
Texas.
3:00
I worked as a waitress and I turned 24.
3:03
In 2013, I made $16,183.
3:07
In 2014, I made $28,903.
3:10
In 2015, I made $22,916.
3:14
In 2016, I made $30,492.
3:18
2017, $34,222.
3:22
2018, $34,034.
3:24
2019, $41,154.
3:28
2020, $69,939.
3:32
And 2021, $89,254.
3:35
So, it took me 7 years to hit $200,000 invested,
3:38
and for five of those years, I earned less than $50,000.
3:42
I have to say that even though I lived this,
3:43
it's kind of intense to list out all the numbers at once
3:47
because in the moment,
3:49
it was very chaotic,
3:51
and I was kind of like careening from thing to thing.
3:54
I was dealing with depression
3:56
and I didn't really It's just different to see it all laid out at
4:00
once.
4:01
To help you understand these numbers
4:02
and what I was doing with my money at the time.
4:04
In 2011, I graduated college with $25,302 in student loan debt.
4:09
In 2012, I moved to Austin
4:11
and started working as a waitress full-time
4:13
and paying for my entire life,
4:15
rent, uh car insurance, groceries, all of those things by myself.
4:19
In 2014, I got really serious about paying off my student loans
4:23
and I started a blog
4:24
that was chronicling how I was going to do
4:26
that while being very low income.
4:28
In 2015, I paid off my student loans and I began investing.
4:31
And then in August 2021, I hit $200 invested.
4:34
So, that's kind of the big financial milestones timeline of my life.
4:39
So, the fabulous team at TFD has asked me to kind of explore how
4:42
I was able to do all of these things
4:44
while being extremely low income.
4:46
And that's what I want to talk about.
4:47
So, when I graduated college,
4:48
I had that $25,302 in student loan debt
4:51
and my monthly payments are about $400 a month.
4:54
You get a 6-month grace period after graduating college before you have to start
4:58
paying your loans.
4:59
So, I started paying my loans in December 2011.
5:02
And I always made my loan payments on time,
5:04
but I was not strategic about it.
5:06
I wasn't really trying to hustle through paying it off early or anything.
5:09
I was just like, "Let's make these payments and say la vie."
5:12
Then I moved to Austin.
5:13
I was living as an adult trying to afford my whole life and really,
5:15
really struggling.
5:17
So, in 2013, I took a forbearance on my student loans
5:20
because I literally could not afford the payments.
5:22
I got an 8-month forbearance
5:24
and I have to tell you
5:24
that getting back $400 a month felt like I had won the lottery.
5:28
It was so much money to me.
5:30
Getting that forbearance gave me a little bit of breathing room in my budget,
5:33
but I still was
5:34
so low income that I was really struggling day-to-day.
5:37
Then in 2014, I had my quarter-life crisis.
5:40
This will probably be relatable to many of you.
5:43
I was sitting in my car on I-35,
5:45
which is a highway that bisects the city of Austin, Texas,
5:47
and I was on my way to a catering gig.
5:49
And catering at the time was my main source of income,
5:53
but I was really only doing it on the weekends.
5:55
So, Monday through Thursday, I had a ton of free time,
5:58
and that was just the perfect recipe for spiraling out constantly.
6:03
I was depressed, I was broke,
6:05
I had a ton of free time to focus on all of the problems
6:08
in my life.
6:09
I felt very boxed in.
6:11
I felt like I didn't have the tools
6:12
or the resources to make any changes in my life.
6:15
And at the time,
6:16
I was living with three roommates who had all gone to the same college
6:19
that I went to,
6:20
but did not have to take out student loans in order to attend.
6:24
So, I could literally see the financial differences in our lives.
6:27
They were able to do a lot of things
6:29
that I wasn't able to do.
6:31
And even though in the grand scheme of things,
6:32
I really did not have that much student loan debt,
6:35
my income was so low that my debts felt insurmountable.
6:39
Because when you're making 15, 16,000 dollars a year,
6:43
having 25,000 dollars in debt plus interest just feels like the most money ever.
6:50
So, in 2014, I was making anywhere between like 800 to 1200 dollars a
6:54
month.
6:55
I was having to pay rent, I was having to pay car insurance,
6:57
like every single penny was spoken for.
7:00
And I was really not doing well mentally.
7:02
I was crying myself to sleep at night.
7:03
I was having a really difficult time in my social circle.
7:06
It was just really dark days in my life.
7:08
And I found myself kind of obsessed with this question of what would make
7:11
my life better.
7:12
I kept asking myself that over and over and over again.
7:15
What do you need to change your life?
7:17
What do you need for your life to get better?
7:19
And I always came up with the same answer,
7:21
which was pay off my debt.
7:22
Pay off my debt.
7:23
Pay off my debt.
7:24
Living with my friends who didn't have any loans was giving me
7:27
that front row seat to life in the debt-free zone,
7:30
and I was loving what I was seeing.
7:32
And also, 400 dollars a month was so much money to me.
7:36
It was I was paying 500 dollars a month in rent at the time.
7:39
And so, to have my student loan payments be almost equal to my rent
7:43
payment just was like calculus I could not wrap my head around.
7:46
So once I identify paying off my student loan debt was the thing
7:49
that would improve my life the most,
7:51
I then asked myself what do I need to do to make this happen?
7:54
And the answer was very simply, I needed to make more money.
7:58
So in fall of 2014 I decided this is it,
8:00
I'm going to pay off my student loan debt,
8:01
I'm going to change my life.
8:02
I need to find a way to bring in more money.
8:04
I also got much more strategic about how I was making my loan payments.
8:08
I started using the debt avalanche pay off method,
8:10
which is where you make the minimum payments on all of your debt except
8:14
the debt with the highest interest rate.
8:16
And that's the one that you make extra payments on.
8:18
So I started doing
8:19
that and I started picking up literally any job
8:22
that would pay.
8:22
So that was fall 2014.
8:24
By spring 2015 I had five different part-time jobs.
8:27
I was working as a freelance writer,
8:28
I was working as a receptionist at a gym,
8:31
I was working as a caterer still,
8:33
I found a part-time job at a non-profit,
8:36
and I was working two different seasonal jobs at a high school.
8:40
One as a lacrosse coach and one driving the high school golf team's van.
8:45
So I wasn't a golf coach, I just drove the van.
8:47
And usually I would work three to five jobs per day.
8:50
So for example, I was the morning receptionist at the gym
8:54
and so I had to be at the gym at 5:00 a.m. to open
8:56
it for all those early birds who like to sweat at 6:00 a.m.
8:59
So I would wake up at 4:30,
9:01
I would go do three or four hours at the gym,
9:04
then I would come home,
9:05
I would do some freelance writing or maybe some work for the non-profit,
9:08
then in the afternoon I would go to the high school
9:10
and coach lacrosse or drive the golf van.
9:13
And then in the evenings and on the weekends I would do my catering.
9:15
And on top of
9:16
that I did earn some money in a few other different ways like I
9:19
did occasional babysitting jobs,
9:21
one time I waited in line for 150 bucks for this dude who wanted
9:24
to buy special edition posters.
9:26
But as you can tell, I was on the hustle.
9:28
My whole life was devoted to trying to earn more money
9:30
and I was using
9:31
that money to make extra debt payments.
9:34
I was making four or five payments a month towards my student loans.
9:37
And these were not necessarily huge payments.
9:39
Like sometimes it was just $30, sometimes it was $100.
9:42
It was literally, what did I get paid this week?
9:45
What do I need to put aside for bare minimum living expenses?
9:48
And then what else can go towards my student loans?
9:51
And at the same time that I was doing all of these jobs,
9:53
I was living extremely frugally,
9:55
which I'll talk about a little bit more in a second.
9:57
But all of this effort paid off
9:59
and I was able to pay off my last $18,000 in student loan debt
10:02
in just 10 months.
10:03
So by June 2015, I was totally debt-free, which felt amazing.
10:08
I have to say, shout out Austin,
10:09
I went to this bar that I don't think exists anymore.
10:12
It was called Shangri-La.
10:13
It was on East 6th.
10:14
And I just got hammered with all of my friends and my partner.
10:19
And it was just an amazing, amazing night.
10:22
So definitely recommend having a party after you pay off your debt.
10:25
But unfortunately for me, that just got me to zero, right?
10:29
Like not having debt is a fabulous thing,
10:31
but it doesn't mean that you suddenly have money.
10:33
It just means that you don't have debt.
10:35
But because I was already in this hustle mode
10:37
and because I already had these jobs,
10:38
I decided I'm going to keep doing exactly what I'm doing,
10:41
working all of these different jobs, living extremely frugally.
10:44
And instead of putting this money towards my debt,
10:46
I'm going to start saving money.
10:48
I'm going to start investing money.
10:49
Because at this point, I was reading all the personal finance blogs.
10:52
I was talking to people about money all the time.
10:54
Like I was eyeball deep in money nerd world.
10:58
And I knew the important thing was to get my money making more money.
11:02
So I started saving because I wanted to buy VTSAX,
11:05
which is the Vanguard um S&P 500.
11:08
And you need a minimum of $3,000 to buy the Admiral share of
11:11
that.
11:12
And so I think I hit that somewhere around October, November.
11:16
I was able to save
11:16
that first $3,000 and start investing in my Roth IRA.
11:20
But it's important to note here that there was no breathing room.
11:23
Like I went out
11:24
and had that great night at Shangri-La
11:25
and then it was just back to the grind.
11:28
I was intensely focused on trying to create financial security for myself
11:32
because I knew how hard it was to live without any money.
11:36
You know, just a year earlier I had been crying myself to sleep
11:39
because I was convinced Sally Mae was going to follow me to the grave.
11:42
And not having debt felt amazing,
11:44
but being at zero also felt very tenuous
11:47
because one wrong move meant
11:49
that I would be back in debt.
11:51
And that filled me with a lot of fear.
11:53
So at this time,
11:54
all of my financial decisions were being made out of a place of fear.
11:57
I was doing absolutely everything I could to push myself away from the financial
12:01
instability I had been in
12:03
and try and create financial stability for myself.
12:06
And I know it sounds weird and extreme and it was.
12:08
I'm not trying to hide that.
12:10
I was really and truly a machine about this.
12:13
And that's because when you're low income,
12:15
you have to be really precise about everything.
12:17
I didn't make over $50,000 a year until 2020.
12:21
That was just six years ago, y'all.
12:23
Like I was into my 30s before I broke that 50k income mark.
12:27
And I'd like to expand on this a little bit with some numbers,
12:29
but I was not tracking my net worth in like 2012, 2013, 2015.
12:33
So I'm working backwards here.
12:35
So from 2014 to 2015 was my intense debt payoff period.
12:39
That's when I sort of made the decision, learned about the debt avalanche method,
12:43
and then started working all those part-time jobs.
12:45
But I did start making those debt payments in December 2011.
12:48
And then from 2015 to 2019,
12:51
I had that same energy and fervor just for saving and investing.
12:55
So my net worth went from roughly $3,000 in 2015 to $110,000 in 2019.
13:01
Now, of course, I did not save $110,000.
13:05
I was investing that money.
13:06
So that money was earning more money.
13:08
And you have to understand that in 2019,
13:11
the S&P 500 returned nearly 29% for just that year.
13:16
So if you had any money invested in the market,
13:18
it was making a bunch of money.
13:19
And that really helped my net worth grow.
13:22
So basically, if you're invested in the stock market,
13:23
you're kind of like a dual income household
13:25
because your money is making money
13:27
and you're making money.
13:28
So, every penny that I put into the stock market was making me more
13:31
money pushing me towards
13:33
that $110,000.
13:34
Also, by 2019, I had saved up an emergency fund.
13:38
Um I had a little extra cash saved for like car repairs and emergencies,
13:42
but I was running really lean still on savings.
13:45
I was intensely focused, especially from 2017 to 2019,
13:49
I was really intensely focused on investing.
13:51
So, how did I get from $110,000 to $200,000?
13:55
Well, I want to clarify, too, when I say $200,000,
13:57
I am talking net worth, which is assets minus liabilities.
14:02
Since I had paid off my student loan debt,
14:04
I didn't have any other liabilities.
14:06
I didn't have credit card debt, I didn't have medical debt,
14:08
I didn't own a house, so I didn't have a mortgage.
14:11
My car was paid off.
14:12
So, my student loan debt was the only debt that I had had,
14:15
and that was gone.
14:16
So, all of my money was in assets,
14:18
and that was cash savings in an HYSA,
14:21
and then money in my Roth IRA invested in the market.
14:24
And so, as you'll remember, I started investing in 2015,
14:27
and I maxed out my 2015 IRA by April 2016,
14:32
and then I've been able to max out my IRA every single year since
14:36
then.
14:36
In terms of cash savings, I can't totally remember.
14:40
Again, I wasn't really tracking super intensely in those early years,
14:43
so I don't have hard numbers to go back to.
14:45
But, I want to say my fully funded emergency fund was like $5,000.
14:50
It was not 20,000, 30,000,
14:52
which you see a lot of people talking about now.
14:55
And that's because my expenses were extremely low.
14:58
So, I didn't need a huge emergency fund cuz I didn't have high costs.
15:01
So, I guess I had saved $5,000 by like 2017, 2018,
15:05
and then I stopped saving in my emergency fund,
15:08
and everything else went into my investments.
15:10
And then, like I said, the stock market really went on a tear,
15:12
you know, it returned 29% in 2019, it returned 16% in 2020.
15:17
So, all of my invested money was making more money.
15:20
Then, in 2020, obviously with COVID,
15:21
a lot of my spending went down because I wasn't leaving the house.
15:25
And by mid-2021, I had hit $200,000 in net worth.
15:30
So, coming back to my income numbers,
15:31
the two questions I get most often are,
15:33
"Why didn't you just find a full-time job?"
15:35
And really, truly, how did you do this?
15:38
Regarding the full-time job, look,
15:40
if someone walked into this room right now and said, "Hey girl,
15:43
you want a W-2 job
15:44
that pays you 150k per year
15:46
and comes with benefits?"
15:47
I would take it in a heartbeat.
15:48
It's just that nobody has ever offered me a job.
15:52
>> >> It's not that I thought, "Oh,
15:54
you know it would be
15:54
so great to work these five different part-time jobs
15:58
that don't pay that well individually
15:59
and really try to string this together to make my life work."
16:02
That did not sound appealing to me then,
16:04
it does not sound appealing to me now.
16:06
It's just that when I applied for full-time jobs,
16:09
which I did from 2012 to like 2017, nobody hired me.
16:14
So, you know, you kind of got to like make it work.
16:16
Like if no one was going to hire me for a full-time job,
16:19
I knew that I had a lot of free time
16:21
and I could string together all these part-time jobs.
16:23
So, it was kind of like, if not that, then this.
16:26
But on the topic of how was I able to do this?
16:27
You have to remember two things.
16:29
One, I was completely insane about money.
16:32
And two, costs were lower.
16:33
Let's start with my insanity, because that's really where the bulk of this happened.
16:37
I cannot stress that enough.
16:38
I was so over the top devoted to my financial life.
16:43
I was super intense about my debt payoff,
16:45
and then I was potentially even more intense about my saving and investing period.
16:49
Money was the singular driving force in my life from 2014 to 2021.
16:55
And everything in my life was either about trying to earn more money
16:58
or control my costs.
16:59
I easily could have been on that show, Extreme Cheapskates.
17:02
Like, I definitely would have made a great episode.
17:06
So, I was working and part and kind of like,
17:08
I don't know if I would say it was a hidden benefit,
17:10
but something that ended up being true is
17:13
when you work a bunch of different part-time jobs,
17:15
you have very little free time.
17:16
So, I was working all of these jobs,
17:18
I was really focused on saving and investing,
17:20
and I didn't have a ton of free time to even go out
17:22
and spend money.
17:23
On top of that,
17:24
I devoted a huge amount of energy to controlling my cost.
17:27
From 2012 to 2016, I lived with three roommates,
17:32
and I paid $500 a month in rent.
17:34
Bargain deal.
17:35
Hell of a deal, you know?
17:36
Like, after I turned 26 and I got kicked off my mom's health insurance,
17:40
I did not have health insurance for 6-7 months um
17:44
because I couldn't afford it,
17:45
and I didn't want to pay that.
17:46
I wanted to put whatever I was going to pay towards health insurance towards
17:50
my loans.
17:51
So, I also took some risks, you know?
17:53
Like, I don't necessarily think it's a great idea to not have health insurance,
17:56
but it was a decision I made for myself.
17:58
And during my debt payoff phase, I was not spending any money.
18:02
I mean, zero.
18:04
It was bare minimum living costs and debt, nothing in between.
18:08
No streaming services, no going out to eat, no going out to drink,
18:11
no vacations, no new clothes.
18:13
I mean, I was barely even spending money on food
18:15
because one of my jobs,
18:17
as I've mentioned, was catering.
18:18
I worked in catering for 5 and 1/2 years,
18:20
and one of the things
18:21
that I would do after every single catering event was take home leftovers from
18:26
said event.
18:27
And I don't mean like leftovers scraped off of people's plates.
18:30
I wasn't like raiding half-eaten steaks.
18:33
Instead, I'm referring to the backup food that we would keep in the refrigerators.
18:37
And because I was catering so often,
18:39
I was catering like two to four days a week,
18:41
I was bringing home a ton of food.
18:43
And so, my grocery budget was routinely like $20 to $70 a month for
18:48
a 2-year period.
18:50
And I even had several months where I spent $0 on groceries
18:53
because I had so many catering leftovers to eat instead.
18:56
I'd like to read you some of this blog post
18:58
that I wrote on December 10th,
18:59
2015, called Frugal Autopilot, Maintenance of a Frugal Life.
19:03
Sitting in the car today,
19:04
I thought about how I feel now
19:05
that my spending is at the lowest it's ever been.
19:08
I spent money so infrequently
19:10
that I had to check my credit card statements to find some non-essential purchases
19:13
I've made.
19:14
I couldn't just summon something off the top of my head.
19:17
How does this lack of spending make me feel?
19:19
Awesome.
19:20
I love being frugal.
19:21
I love knowing that by not spending my money, but saving and investing it,
19:25
I'm making my whole life better.
19:27
I love that by not keeping up with the Joneses,
19:29
I feel more content with my life.
19:31
Not spending has made me happier, more secure, and a stronger person.
19:34
I'm at the point where not spending is my default.
19:37
As I said earlier, I was depressed, like clinically diagnosed, in therapy depressed.
19:41
My therapy was $10 per session, by the way,
19:43
because I was so low income.
19:44
I was at a point where I needed structure in my life,
19:48
and I hyperfocused on personal finance,
19:50
and that became the kind of guiding light for me.
19:53
Controlling my spending to the point where I knew where literally every single penny
19:56
I earned was going was a way to kind of put me back in
20:00
the driver's seat of my life.
20:02
Now, with the gift of hindsight,
20:03
I can really see how that is just like mental illness manifesting,
20:08
and how that very intense hyperfocus um does not speak to me being,
20:14
you know, the happiest and healthiest I've ever been,
20:16
but at the time it really did give me something to organize around.
20:19
I will say around 2019-2020,
20:21
I did get a little less intense with my hypercontrol around my spending.
20:26
I did start spending like slightly more money,
20:29
but it was still extremely low for my peer group,
20:31
and it was still extremely low for what I think the average viewer of
20:35
this video would define
20:36
as spending.
20:37
And I also kept my main costs really low.
20:40
Like I'm 38 years old right now,
20:42
and I lived with my partner
20:43
and a roommate until I was 34 years old.
20:46
My partner and I have been a one-car household since 2020.
20:49
You know, so from 2019 through now,
20:52
I am still someone that I think most people would describe as very frugal.
20:57
Not as intense as I was,
20:58
but still much more frugal than the average person.
21:00
So, all of this is just to kind of paint you the picture of
21:03
during my debt payoff phase,
21:04
I was living off of like $10,000-11,000 a year,
21:07
and then in my saving and investing phase,
21:09
I was living off of like $15,000, $16,000 a year.
21:13
So, everything else went into savings and investments.
21:17
And the second thing that I mentioned is that life was cheaper.
21:19
It just was.
21:21
I remember so clearly being able to go to bars
21:23
and get a $1 beer,
21:25
a $2 cocktail.
21:26
I lived in Austin for 11 years
21:27
and I never paid more than $585 a month in rent.
21:31
Now, as I said, I also really advocated to keep costs low.
21:33
I moved five times years chasing lower rent.
21:37
I negotiated rent every single time I moved.
21:39
I hosted clothing swaps so I didn't have to buy new clothing.
21:43
I mean, really my whole life was built around trying to save money.
21:45
But also, since cost of living was lower,
21:47
it just meant that if I did decide to go out for a cocktail,
21:51
the cocktail wasn't going to be $15, the way it is now.
21:54
It was going to be, I don't know, like $5.
21:57
So, with costs being cheaper
21:58
and with me really designing my life around keeping costs
22:02
as low as possible,
22:04
I was able to free up a lot of my salary even
22:07
though it was extremely low.
22:09
I think something else worth mentioning in my strategy of this time was
22:12
that I accomplished financial goals one at a time.
22:15
So, I was really focused on debt payoff
22:18
as my main goal
22:19
and during that time,
22:19
I was not saving money, I was not investing money,
22:22
I was just paying off debt.
22:24
And then, once I paid off my debt,
22:27
I worked really hard to max out my IRA for the first time
22:31
and that was the only thing I was doing was trying to save.
22:33
I think it was $5,000 at the time trying to invest $5,000 into my
22:38
IRA as quickly as possible.
22:40
Then I moved on to saving my emergency fund and I wasn't really investing.
22:43
So, I did everything one at a time
22:46
and that allows for goals to get accomplished faster.
22:49
And when I say this was my life,
22:50
I really mean this was my life.
22:51
I I was not visiting Japan.
22:53
I was not saving for a house.
22:54
I was not trying to make upgrades to my life in any way except
22:58
for getting more money behind my name.
23:00
And just to continue on the financial transparency bandwagon here,
23:04
this is my 2019 monthly spending budget.
23:08
At the time I was living with my partner and one other roommate.
23:11
And on the note of my partner,
23:12
I do just want to say he never paid for my life.
23:15
Um sometimes when I talk about the fact that we lived together,
23:17
people are like, "Oh, well,
23:18
maybe he like paid rent while you were paying off debt."
23:20
No.
23:21
Uh that never happened.
23:22
He never paid for living expenses
23:24
so that I didn't have to
23:26
and I could just focus on debt pay off
23:28
or saving or whatever.
23:29
I always paid my own rent.
23:30
I always paid my own car insurance, etc., etc.
23:33
In fact, shout out my partner,
23:34
he paid off $69,000 in student loan debt.
23:38
Though, he would want me to tell you
23:39
that he did get a little bit of help from family paying off
23:41
that debt.
23:42
And I think that's important to be transparent about as well.
23:44
So, now here we are, it's 2026.
23:46
This is a very different economy from even 2021.
23:49
And I think a good question to ask is,
23:50
"Do I think that other people can replicate this?"
23:54
Largely, no.
23:55
I don't think that this is super replicable.
23:57
I think maybe in certain parts of the country
23:59
and maybe if you are
24:00
as devoted as I was,
24:02
you could probably live extremely frugally and still save a bunch of money.
24:07
But in general, I think
24:08
that cost of living has gotten too expensive too quickly for this to be
24:12
a replicable plan for most people.
24:14
Another question that I get a lot anytime I talk about this in detail
24:17
is,
24:17
"Would you change it?
24:19
Do you regret doing what you did?"
24:21
And I think it's a good question.
24:22
I think it's an interesting question.
24:24
Because if I'm being honest,
24:25
I feel so much pity for my mid-20s self
24:29
because I firmly believe
24:31
that money should not be
24:33
that hard for anyone.
24:35
But I especially think money should not be
24:36
that hard for anyone living in the wealthiest country in the history of the
24:40
world.
24:41
Like this country is flush with cash.
24:44
We just continually funnel it to corporations and like 18 white dudes.
24:49
I don't think that anyone should have to live the way that I lived.
24:53
It's weird AF.
24:54
We don't have to live like that.
24:55
And I think what's even weirder is sometimes I tell people this story
24:58
and it almost makes them like me more
25:02
or admire me more cuz they're sort of like,
25:04
"Look how hard you worked.
25:05
Look at the punishment that you survived.
25:08
That means you're a good person."
25:10
And I'm like, "The morality
25:12
that we are tying to people's financial statuses is
25:16
so gross in the United States
25:18
and I wish we could move away from
25:20
that."
25:20
I do also look back
25:21
and there are specific things
25:22
that I said no to
25:23
that I do really regret.
25:24
I wish I had had a better understanding
25:26
that like spending $500 on a group trip with some of my friends was
25:32
not going to be enough money to throw off my very careful financial plan,
25:37
that I would still be able to pay off my debt and start saving.
25:40
But I really I was not mentally capable of understanding that at the time.
25:43
But do I regret becoming debt-free by 27?
25:46
Absolutely not.
25:47
It is the single most impactful thing
25:49
that has ever happened to me
25:51
as a person.
25:52
I mean, paying off my debt by age 27 has set up my 30s
25:56
to be so much more financially stable.
25:59
I almost struggle to find the words to describe it.
26:03
My 30s have been thus far an entirely different experience
26:08
because of what I did in my 20s.
26:11
I am so much less anxious in general, let alone around money,
26:15
because I don't have debt, because I do have savings,
26:18
because I do have investments.
26:20
I feel so much more secure in my personal skills
26:23
and in my work ethic.
26:26
I do know that there are situations that if God forbid I get into,
26:30
I know I can get out of because look at what I've already done.
26:34
So I can't say that I regret it,
26:36
but I can say that I wish it hadn't been so hard.
26:39
I can say that I don't think anyone should have to do that.
26:42
I can say that I don't think it makes me like a better person.
26:47
It was needlessly hard
26:48
and I wish that we had different economic
26:52
and financial systems in this country
26:54
so that people don't have to go through what I did.
26:56
I would never wish this on anyone else.
26:59
And I hate when people hear my story and they're like, "See,
27:03
we don't need to change anything cuz like you were able to do it."
27:06
You know, if anyone's hearing this and saying like,
27:08
"What a good example of pulling yourself up from your bootstraps?"
27:11
Like, please no.
27:12
That is not That is not what I ever want anyone to take away
27:16
from my story.
27:17
I want people to understand
27:18
that it simply does not have to be this way in the richest country
27:22
in the history of the world.
27:23
But personally today, I have more than $200,000 invested.
27:27
I was able to buy a house by myself own name without any help
27:31
from my partner.
27:32
Outside of my mortgage and a little bit of medical debt,
27:35
I don't have any debt, no student loans, no personal loans, no credit card,
27:39
no auto debt.
27:40
You know, my personal finance business is successful.
27:43
It pays all of my bills and I like where I'm at now.
27:47
The financial lessons and the financial effort
27:49
that I put in in my 20s really has paid quite literally dividends in
27:54
my 30s.
27:55
So that's my financial story thus far.
27:56
Thus far, I guess.
27:58
You know, I'm still still working on some things over here,
28:01
but I would love to hear from y'all in the comments,
28:03
especially if you have kind of a non-traditional financial background
28:07
because I think it's very important to share these types of stories
28:11
and really highlight how many different people are living in the US.
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