canyonwalker | (Reply)

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I grew up without much money. In my case, I was the only child of a single-parent grad student of the humanities. My mother was always somewhat neurotic about money, and that attitude was passed on to me. I wasn't an adherent of FIRE--I started working before that book came out, and I didn't have any particular goal for my saving.

Da Boss helped me to better understand this, and her goals have become my goals. We were fairly house-poor for a while, but we understood that we did have some money and that it was OK to use it to help ourselves. I remember once she enlisted you to help me understand that spending money in the short term could produce more money in the long term.

A kind of watershed moment was when my car broke down at a car event in Utah, and I was going to try to fix it myself so I could drive it back through the Nevada desert in the summer. She made me realize that this was the kind of problem that could actually be solved by throwing money at it--so I was able to get the car limping along again, and we hired a truck to transport it back to California while we flew back on frequent flyer miles. It was strange to actually be someone who could actually throw money at a problem to make it go away...

We did retire early, as you know, in our mid 50s. This came as a bit of a surprise to me; I had been laid off and was having difficulty finding another job. But we had actually accumulated enough that I didn't have to, so we both declared ourselves done. And I'm very glad to be out of the rat race.