I realized I never introduced myself and the more personal reasons I want to talk about money. I don’t like defining myself or my roles as that seems to put a narrow box around who I am, what I value, and a somewhat undue focus on what I do that actually makes me money.
As an alternative, I thought it would be better to paint a bit of a picture (with a story and an adjusted gross income timeline) to at least give an idea of where I/we (once I got married) have been on our financial and philosophical journey so far.
I grew up in a big family that managed to have enough, even though it was sometimes scraped together. We lived with my grandparents for a year. I clipped coupons for our family’s groceries. I bought my first car in cash I earned from odd jobs ($3000).
I’d like to think I’ve always been a responsible person, but really, I am cautious. I am cautious about doing the right thing and not letting my ignorance come back to haunt me. Money is one of those places that I knew I needed to be cautious with. I also knew it was figureoutable.
In college, I lived on various scholarships, financial aid, work-study, and, again, those odd jobs (my senior year, I got paid $20/day to pick up one of my boss's kids from school). I worked full-time every summer to save up (though it’s hard to save on minimum wage, $7.25/hr, which I got paid for my internships - but at least they were educational!) I applied for and had my own Medicaid plan. I had food stamps when I lived off campus. I made it work with little coming in and little going out. That didn’t mean I didn’t have a great time. Six of us shared one somewhat sketchy hotel room for spring break so we could visit New Orleans. I applied for a grant so I could study abroad. I graduated without any debts, leaving me ahead of many of my peers.
2015 $1,500
Not knowing what kind of job I would do after graduating, I applied to grad school, thinking that if I got in, with funding, that would be a good option. I loved (and love) science and learning, but I wasn’t about to pay for a program when there were funded ones out there.
I got into a fully funded program in California and moved across the country with my then-boyfriend (now husband) and dog without ever visiting.
2016 $15,000
In grad school, we first lived in a converted garage studio apartment where I could bike to school. We eventually moved into shared houses with friends where we could split the rent. My tuition was paid for, and I got a small stipend for doing research. I sometimes drove Lyft on nights and weekends in our shared car. My boyfriend found an entry-level job he hoped would set him up for med school.
2017 $22,469
We got married back home two years later. It was a fantastic wedding. We spent <5k for everything. We rented a house for the week (granted, it was an old boarding school in the mountains of Tenessee with no air conditioning), had the ceremony on the property with everyone sitting on hay bales, and paid for everyone to go mountain biking the next day.
My husband started medical school that Fall, and we began to take out student loans to pay for the tuition. We didn’t want to take out more, so we made it work. We lived with four other people in a house. I had one of our roommates (granted, who had done one surgery rotation in med school) give me stitches so as not to have to go to the hospital.
2018 $37,000 (married filing jointly from here on)
I got a real, full-time, benefits and all job for the first time. Three months later, I convinced the bank to give me a loan, and we bought a house. They didn’t know we were planning to move our roommates into it and rent out the rooms - but they gave it to me anyway, and we made it work. We (meaning my husband, mainly since I had an asthma attack) scraped off all the popcorn ceiling. I got five quotes for every repair. The neighborhood wasn’t the safest; the neighbors had a Pitbull that we called animal control on every few weeks, but we made the best of it. We had roommates who brought their pythons into the house and great, quiet roommates who were fun to talk to.
Still, we slept in our car when we traveled for our anniversary. We packed all our lunches. While we came from families who treated money quite differently, we worked hard to be on the same page, make the most of what we had, and set ourselves up for the future.
2019 $50,900
The pandemic changed our lives, but as a med-student and an agricultural researcher, we didn’t get much of a break. That meant we could still pay our bills and rack up student loans. We could still hike and play board games with our roommates. We didn’t get a chance to spend much more money since things weren’t open.
2020 $53,100
The highlight of 2021 was adding a dependent to our family. Thankfully, we had good insurance, and I had saved up a bunch of sick/vacation days (since there wasn’t parental leave with my position).
2021 $51,700
After a wonderful six years in California, my husband matched at a residency program in North Carolina. We saved up points and miles to afford to move across the country and fit in some National Parks along the way. We sold our house for a nice profit and, by a stroke of luck, had enough (by about 1k) to pay off all the student loans.
I kept working remotely part-time but also had a baby at home.
2022 $69,400
We both made and spent the most money in 2023. We started paying for childcare, which came in a close second to our rent (since we didn’t have roommates anymore). Then there were medical bills as prenatal care on not-as-good insurance adds up (that labor and delivery bill in 2024 is going to hurt). I pieced together some remote work while I searched for a new job, did some soul searching, and started to work on building my own finance business. We visited Florida twice and Denver on our points/miles.
2023 $71,500
We have never had full-time jobs simultaneously. We don’t have any debt. We have a small emergency fund and some retirement savings.
We still budget hard. We shop sales and thrift stores. But we also pay for quality childcare, don’t live in a sketchy part of town, and don’t get stitches from our roommates anymore (so progress?!).
So why do I want to talk about money and help people with their finances?
I was listening to an interview Tim Ferris did recently that resonated. The gist of a good part of the conversation on success and productivity boiled down to choosing the right thing to work toward.
One of the tests of knowing if you were choosing the right thing to work towards was - If you fail by conventional standards, will it still have been the right decision? Will you still have learned, made connections, and enjoyed yourself? In that case, you are still moving forward toward success.
The other main one was choosing something that gives you energy (rather than taking it away), something you are uniquely suited for and sometimes ‘need’ to do.
Right now, that’s personal finance for me.
I started thinking about personal finance to keep myself above water. Then, I used it to move the needle and pull us ahead. I went down a rabbit hole as I kept researching (really me-search, as they call it). I found so many things that are wrong in the industry, so many things that could help everyday people but are underutilized. I know both on paper and in my everyday life how to make financial decisions (not to mention that my academic background/work has been a lot of statistics and applied decision-making).
Really inspiring and informative! Also I’m so proud my picture made it into this one!