I’m a 20 something single female living in Denver, CO. It’s funny, I had been so proud of myself recently. Financially, I thought I was doing so well (at least compared to most of my friends). But after stumbling on Mr. Money Mustache (MMM) blog, I feel pretty embarrassed of how I’ve handled my money. And slightly devastated. But now that I’ve seen the light so to speak, I hope to turn things around and reach the goal of financial independence. My “aggressive” goal is to get there in about 10 years, but there can be a lot of different variables like having kids, changes in income, etc. that might change the time line a little. I do really love my current job so I might not necessarily want to leave after reaching financial independence, but I could definitely see myself asking for shorter hours or no longer being fearful of a boss that hates me or layoffs. I would be able to work because I wanted to, without knowing I had to or I couldn’t survive. There have been so many weeks in my life I had a horrible boss or project I hated, but I knew I couldn’t quit. I don’t want to always feel like that… I would want to be able to always walk away. I wanted to start a blog to have an anonymous place to document the journey, and hold myself accountable.

A little about my current situation… For income, I earn around $100,000 working in IT. I paid off all my “bad debt” recently (student loans, credit cards) and have continued to remain debt-free ever since. I own a small condo downtown that has 161K left on the loan and the condo sold for 176K, and have stashed away about $35,000 in my 401K at work. That’s about it. Before reading blogs on FIRE movement, I really had been proud or even cocky about how I’d been doing. But I’m so glad people out there blog about how to really handle your savings aggressively and how it can pay off.

I don’t know yet if I’ll jump into this lifestyle right away, or just gradually take small steps until close to 50% of my income is being saved. My first big step I took today was to change my 401K contribution to 20%. It had previously sat around 6 to 10% during the year, meeting my company match but not anywhere near maxing it out. I won’t max it out this year, but at 20% I’ll be at the point where over the next 12 month period I’ll continue maxing it out from now on. I plan to just leave this on auto-pilot regardless of what else I do for savings. I also took $1000 out of my savings account and opened a new Traditional IRA. Looking back on this one, I’m not sure if this was my best move or if a regular Vanguard Mutual Fund would be better. I’m going to do some more reading… I’m thinking by maxing out the 401K now, it would be better not to use another retirement vehicle. I don’t really know. I plan to save another $2,000 in August when I get my next paycheck, and I’ll decide then where that money would work best for me.

My win for today I’d like to celebrate: taking the free 16th street mall ride to get to my friends apartment to go swimming instead of $6 on Ubers both ways! My big loss today was spending $10 at Starbucks… cringeworthy after all the things I’m learning.