Imagine you’re on a plane flying to Oregon, siting next to a crying 22-yr old woman. She’s frantically scribbling notes, with tears running down her face. She’s smiling but crying and doing small fist pumps in the air. It’s odd behavior, but not the worst thing to see on a plane.

This is a real perspective of the man sitting next to me on a Delta flight in the summer of 2022. I was heading home from a business trip, listening to a book called, “Playing with FIRE” by Scott Rieckens. The tears were tears but of joy instead of sadness and the fist bumps were absolutely necessary.

You see the thing is, I hated my job and life at the time. The business trip I was coming back from was cool but the mind-numbing, toxic, and completely isolating work environment I was going back to was eating me alive.

While in college, the corporate world felt like a cruel soul-sucking level of hell that I would be stuck in it for the next 40 fucking years of my very beautiful but very short life.

You ever lay awake at night, thinking what the fuck am I doing? Me too! That was me most of my last semester of college.

I didn’t want to join the rat race. I loved college, I loved learning and I loved working on projects I found fascinating. Everyone thought I would kill it in the corporate world. But doing meaningless work for a corporation that didn’t give a shit about me felt like a betrayal to myself. And I acknowledge it’s a privilege I even got to go to college in the first place but the point still stands. The corporate world was a future I was blessed to have but not one I wanted.

I did reluctantly step into the corporate world after college and I had to gaslight myself into thinking I was happy. I told myself I shouldn’t question things, that there’s no other way, and I should just suck it up and deal with it. I was lying to myself. I wasn’t happy. I was simply going along with what everyone around me was saying was the “right choice”.

The job itself was agonizing and all of my worries I had in college about the rat race were coming true. The job being inherently terrible was the primary catalyst to my self-fulfilling prophecy.

I will say not all jobs are like this and I sincerely wish that everyone has the opportunity to work at a place where they feel valued and respected and that they’re having a good time! I now work for a company where I do enjoy my job and I don’t hate corporate American as much as I did, so yay for progress!

This first job out of college just wasn’t it.

I looking back that job as a double edged sword. My boss was an ass, but I had automated a lot of my job and in my down-time I had gotten really into personal finance. I stubbled upon the world of F.I.R.E, financial independence retire early. It was the answer I was looking for. The F.I.R.E movement promised me a different ending to the story.

If I were to save and invest enough money, I could use my investment earnings to cover my living expenses. That meant I would never have to work again. I like to joke that this how you turn yourself into a trust fund baby.

As I was on the plane back from my business trip I listened, “Playing with F.I.R.E.” In summary, it covers this couples’ journey with F.I.R.E. This couple cut their expenses as much as possible, and invested the rest. It drastically lowered how many years it would take them to retire.

After some quick and dirty math, I calculated I could retire within the next 8-12 years. At 22, if I played my cards right I could be done with this shit in my mid-thirties, maybe even sooner. That meant, hypothetically I could retire before I even have kids.

That’s why I was crying in the full view everyone on that plane.

If I got married to someone that also understood the F.I.R.E. vision, both myself and my partner could spend every day with our kids if we wanted to. Neither of us would miss milestones or any of our events our kids had.

Hitting financial independence also didn’t mean I necessarily had to stop working. It just meant, I would never have to work at a job I hated again, and at that moment nothing sounded fucking better.

Thankfully, I was already crushing it with my personal finance goals. I had a budget, an emergency fund, no debt, and I had already starting investing in my 401k and Roth IRA for a normal retirement at 65. Hitting F.I.R.E. was already in my realm of possibility, I just didn’t know it about it yet.

The thing is, no one taught me about any of this. No family member, no teacher, no professor. In the media, retiring early was exclusively for rich people or tech bros who sold their ground-breaking app for millions of dollars. I unfortunately, will not be inheriting a large amount of wealth and I could maybe make an app one day but it wasn’t really something on my horizon. No one had mentioned to me that an average person could hit financial independence and retire early. But you can.

The F.I.R.E movement has been around for awhile now but it’s not as accessible as it could be. Side note; I can acknowledge that F.I.R.E. as a financial plan is inherently not accessible for a lot of people.

But for those that could implement F.I.R.E., the knowledge, access to resources, and strategy is also not that attainable. My knowledge of F.I.R.E. comes from the few books on the topic, podcasts that mention it in passing, and spending hours on Reddit forums to see people posting fake salary charts and budgets that feel more like a circle-jerk and not actual advice. Reddit forums like r/FIRE and r/FatFIRE are filled with complex jargon and discouraging Reddit posts asking, “iS 7 MiLliOn eNoUgH fOr Me tO rEtIrE???”

Like shut the fuck up dude.

The reality is, it shouldn’t be this hard. There needs to be a shift in the movement. I haven’t hit MY F.I.R.E my number yet, and I won’t for many years. But I’m on my way and I want to show people, especially other women, that it is possible.

And it is possible.