I wasn’t a stranger to heatless winters and a hungry belly coming up. My mom would do her best to make sure I ate dinner but I got tired of seeing her scrambling for my crumbs and drinking warm water to try to fill her belly. So by the time I hit seven, I was choosing to skip meals at home so that she could have them.

I wasn’t new to resoling my shoes with cardboard or a stack of paper bags and a plastic grocery bag, or playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe with the utility bills. While I didn’t have to do my homework under a street light, I did go to in local bookstores to access books I couldn’t afford, or visit graduate libraries in order to use their computers for my elementary school homework. When I was done, I went home to crawl under the one lamp we clicked to read my book. See, sacrifice was just what we did. It was a means to an end, and we did it as a family, for one another.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the sacrifice that was our daily life was exactly what would set me up for FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) later on. That struggle was teaching me grit, perseverance and fortitude that would not only save my life, but would prevent me from having to pass my pain on to the next generation.