Has taking control of your money and mastering your personal finances always been your mindset as an adult? Can you share the coles notes version of your financial journey?

I’ve always been interested in learning how money works, even as a kid. I didn’t start getting serious about it until I proposed to my wife though.

When my wife and I got engaged, we started looking into buying houses. I didn’t know anything about the home buying process so I started learning as much as I could about it. I also figured it would be good to learn about money in general, so I started listening to the Dave Ramsey podcast.

We bought our first house and that has been the only real debt we’ve ever had. We’ve never had car payments and I’ve been able to pay my way through community college. My wife didn’t go to college and went to work in the movie industry full time at age 18. She made good money doing that and we were making a combined income of over 6 figures when we got married.

I continued to listen to the Dave Ramsey podcast for a year or so and eventually new every answer to any question the callers would ask. I felt like I knew everything I needed to know about money.

Back at the beginning of this year, I was having a conversation with a friend about money and he asked me if I had heard of Mr. Money Mustache. “Who the heck is that?” I said, thinking he was probably some crackpot internet guru. My curiosity got the best of me though and I read the first post MMM ever published. Over the next few months, I read all 490+ posts on his site so I guess you could say I got hooked on the financial independence movement.

My wife decided to stop working on the movies because it was consuming her life. This cut our income by over half, but we decided there are more important things than money.

Now we’re making an average or slightly below-average income but still saving 30-50% of what we make each month.

My goal is to become a millionaire as fast as I can, while still enjoying life. We’ve got a long ways to go, but I’m sure it will happen sooner than I think.

What strategies and tactics have you implemented in your to life to best set you up for financial success?

There are a lot of things we do, and I’m still learning new ways to optimize our finances. Here are the top things I can think of that have really helped us be successful with money: