If you’re anything like me, you’ve made mistakes. So, so many mistakes.
In love, life, school, work, and most of all – with money. When I cast a look back at my working years of life, I shudder to think of how many dollars I earned – that have evaporated between then and now. Hundreds of thousands cumulatively earned – and poof! Gone. It’s like I logged into the settings of my videogame of life, and intentionally set it to “Hard Mode”.
My top 5 fattest failures in finances have famously been:
5. Working for free as an intern in my teens and 20’s for entirely too long, because I did not know how to value my time or skills.
4. Leaving a well-paying job in advertising to run away and teach motorcycle riding because I was still in my 20’s, and that seemed like a great idea at the time.
3. Working as a public servant far too long, which put a chokehold on my income for nearly a decade.
2. Missing out on investing in the stock market for 15 of the best years of my life for potential compound interest and growth.
- Marrying someone not on the same Financial Page as myself, which eventually resulted in divorce.
Nice. What do they say about mistakes? It’s nice to learn from your mistakes, but even nicer to learn from someone else’s. So I’m hopeful you can learn from mine!
As a divorced 40-something woman, I realized that I’m going to need to figure out a way to support myself financially for the rest of my life. This reality face-punch knocked a dose of sense into me, and fortunately introduced me to the FIRE / FI movement. FIRE is short for Financial Independence Retire Early, and FI stands for Financial Independence. And with that awakening, this blog came into existence.
Initially, my head swirled with the discomfort, pain, embarrassment, and overwhelm of embarking on this journey alone. The good news is, I can’t possibly imagine I’m the only one. So, dear reader, I’m here to share my lifetime of mistakes with you, and hopefully share and inspire with ideas, tactics, mantras, HOO-RAHs, or whatever else it takes to get this financial jalopy across the finish line of FI.
So, what mistakes have you made with your finances? What did you do to overcome them?
Love ya,
The Cheapness
The Cheapness 
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