Originally this blog post was titled “Debt free by 23…ish” and I had this intro – Okay, so technically I was 25 when we “officially” became debt free (meaning $0 in any type of debt payment – including our house) but 23 rhymes better and was the big year of changing our debt ratio for us (sadly in the wrong direction). Still, debt free by 25 sounds too crazy to be true but luckily we made some decisions early on that have allowed us to be debt free so “soon” in our lives but only after a ton of mistakes and learning curves. 

BUT THEN! I got to the bottom of the post and realized that this isn’t about being debt free at all.. this is about how COVID changed our lives. This is about how we went from almost a MILLION dollars in debt to ZERO in the course of a year. This might should be a short novel and not a blog post hidden on some small corner of the internet.. regardless, I’m re-writing my intro because I felt like it was worth noting that without COVID-19 we wouldn’t be where we are today. I know COVID has stolen peoples lives but it saved ours..

Full transparency, this blog post is long and is detailed with our lives. That means being honest about our upbringing, our families financial situations, our stupid decisions and our smart ones. As kids, we lived in trailers and as adults we’ve owned a 5,000 square foot home.. this blog is about us finding the balance and learning what’s important to us in life all while changing our minds and goals a million times. I hope it’s helpful and inspires you to live a life free of debt. 

Let’s rewind a few years-

2014 – Brianna (18) a senior in high school working full time as a waitress & Jeffrey (25) working full time as an entry level data analyst. Debt = $0.

I was living with my family and Jeffrey was renting an apartment basement for $300 a month (can we go back to those rent prices?!). At this point, we were both making less than $30k per year combined and were considered a low income family. We owned our vehicles, total beater cars but we loved them. Jeffrey paid $500 for his car (I am not kidding – it had around 350k miles on it when it retired). I didn’t get as good of a deal on mine.. I paid $2k. Not owning a financed vehicle was the first thing that put us ahead. 

The only bills we had were dining expenses, cell service and gas for our cars. Jeffrey and I had just started dating a year prior and were dreaming of our lives together. I was getting ready to attend SCAD (a very expensive art school) and felt “lucky” to have earned $20k worth of scholarship money. Tough luck for me was that tuition was around $60k per year so my $20k in scholarships wasn’t going to put a dent in my newfound debt.. I don’t come from a wealthy family, rather a low income household so I wasn’t expecting any money from my family for college. But it was my dream to go to SCAD! I had worked my entire senior year to build a portfolio to get in.. I had all of my favorite teachers write me letters of recommendation.. I wrote tons of essays for scholarship money.. and I had actually been accepted! This was a big deal because at the time, I only had 1 other school accept me. I was really bad at math so my SAT/ACT test scores were terrible (ironic as I’m in Finance now – my financial skills have improved). So obviously, I really wanted to go to SCAD.

This was the hardest lesson I had to learn: I said no. Honestly, it was the best decision I could have made. Instead, I opted for a local community college where my tuition was $6k per year. Since my scholarships were covering tuition, I was actually getting a refund every semester. So I got PAID to go to college. I’m grateful that I paid attention enough in high school to get good grades so I qualified for the HOPE scholarship in Georgia. I was also getting the pell grant due to my low income family (no shame). Jeffrey also didn’t take out any student loans for his college degree. Saying NO to student loans set us up for major success.

You can see that within 1 year, we were already in a unique position with having no student loans and no car payments. Around 70% of peers in my class have student debt according to College Finance Group and Lexington Law says 85% of new cars and 53% of used cars are financed. 

Let’s move onwards.

2015- Brianna (19) and Jeffrey (26). Debt = $120k.

We buy our first house and move in together! A brand new, 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house for $119,900. Quarter acre lot, new appliances and a cute front porch. I’m in college now and working part time making minimum wage and Jeffrey is working as a data analyst at a new company. Household income was around 40k at this time. We are slowly getting into that middle-class America range at this point. We go out on the weekends, spend a lot of money eating out, poorly track our finances and definitely aren’t thinking very far into the future. We both grew up in low income households so having the basics without struggling felt like a win. We continue like this for a year or so. Oh, we also both put on 20 pounds.. each. Yikes!

2016- Brianna (20) & Jeffrey (27). Debt = $120k.

Still doing the same thing.. Jeffrey starts reading and learning more about personal finance and real estate (Grant Cardone, specifically). I wasn’t interested and shrugged it off. I felt like we were doing fine, bills were paid, we had groceries, life was good. Jeffrey starts working over-time to make more money. I don’t think much of it. I open my first credit card “to build my credit”. Sound the alarm!!! I’m still making minimum wage working part time. I never had the ability to spend my money on things I *wanted* until now because I was helping out with family expenses. So all of the sudden, I have this plastic thing that I can go and buy whatever I want with my $200 paycheck per week (because our necessities are covered, right honey?!) and suddenly I find myself in a big hole.. It’s the end of the month and I have to pay my credit card. Jeffrey told me that I HAD to pay it off every month because that’s what financially savvy people do, they don’t carry a balance. The issue was, I had somehow spent more on my credit card than what I had made that month.. So my checking account balance was lower than my credit card statement. That’s awkward… how and what did I spend $1k+ on… oh well, I’ll figure it out. I have a few savings dollars to cover it.

I continued like this for a few months before I end up in the same situation again. This time I don’t have any savings to cover my credit card. So I start stressing out, severely. Jeffrey notices and I have to explain what has happened *cue big argument and melt down*. We talk, he explains to me how credit cards work for the first time I’ve ever heard it (another serious issue in America) and how it’s so easy to get behind. Credit card companies give you an option to only make a minimum payment (it’s low.. like $25 low) and if you keep making the minimum payment and don’t pay it off completely, you’ll eventually get to a point where you’ve paid double, triple, quadruple the price for whatever dumb thing you bought due to interest. Luckily, I wasn’t carrying a balance but I was still a month behind.. I would get paid, immediately have to pay my credit card that was due, be broke again, and start putting things on the credit card because I didn’t have any cash in my checking account. So I was ALWAYS broke. It was a vicious cycle. 

What I just described is the norm for 80% of America. I did not like it. It took about 4 months for me to completely drain my savings (around $5k) and lose my mind. I was embarrassed because I didn’t understand how it happened. I was ashamed that I had let it get to that extreme and I was scared that I couldn’t get out of the hole. Now I will give my amazing husband all the fame and glory for being the hero of this story. After my melt down, we agreed to sit down and start tracking our finances together. I agreed to try and read more about personal finances (even though I thought they were extremely boring at the time) and I even watched some of Grant Cardone’s videos (hated the guy at first – sorry Uncle G). I was convinced to get on track! We continue to learn more about saving and learn that we should try to focus on increasing our income instead of our expenses. I stopped using my credit card. We continue to live in this house, saving our extra dollars and saying “no” to a lot of things we had been doing for the last 2 years. This is when it became more difficult for us. Friends and family start to ask why you can’t go out on a Friday night and your response of “it’s not in the budget” isn’t well-received or a fun thing to hear for people that may also be living with debt and not know how to get out. We missed a lot of events, we missed a lot of memories but we kept our heads down and kept saving.

2017- Brianna (21) & Jeffrey (28). Debt = $130k offset by passive income

After a “gazelle intense” year as Dave Ramsey calls it, I started to get a bit stir crazy. At this point, I wasn’t as creative as I am now about finding good deals on entertainment or finding fun, free things to do. Jeffrey was working an insane amount of hours each week to try and make extra money and I was getting burnt out from saving so much and doing so little. I talked him into going on a vacation (which we had never done together). I had heard a lot about Sandals and wanted to have an all inclusive trip that we would pay for upfront and not have any unexpected expenses pop up. This is when we got our first taste of travel and it was also our first time out of the country. We went to Jamaica, which we now love and visit every summer. This was the first time that we had any sort of “luxury” experience and it was so rewarding. We split the trip and I was able to pay for half of it, after saving for the last year (I didn’t blow all of my savings – that would have been irresponsible). We came home and knew that we wanted more out of our lives than to work, pay bills and die. 

Jeffrey took his first corporate job in downtown Atlanta during this year and I was still working part time while finishing up college. I decided to pursue Finance as my degree with the reasoning of “there’s got to be money in money” (quoted by me). Remember when I mentioned that I used to be terrible at math? I had to take remedial math my freshman year. After my brush up and credit card melt down, I actually became extremely interested in personal finance. We decided to sell our house and rent an apartment in downtown so Jeffrey could be closer to work instead of spending 3+ hours a day driving in traffic (in his very questionable car). 

At this point, we were making a household income of around $70k. With all of the savings from the prior year and the sale of our home, we had managed to save around $100k. We started to learn more about real estate/personal growth/passive income in our free time. The big takeaway from this chapter of our lives comes from our favorite guru Grant Cardone: “You don’t have a spending problem, you have an income problem.” Now let me clarify, you can have a spending problem.. but we had cut down on all of our expenses and were only spending money on necessary bills.

One day we’re catching up with a friend who tells us that he is selling his home in North GA (not listed on the market yet). After discussing it, we decide to buy it from him as our first rental property with some of our savings. We become landlords and are generating passive income from real estate! This was a huge stepping stone for us for so many reasons (that you’ll hear more about in the year of 2020) but mostly because it was our first time generating passive income. For those of you that may not know what passive income is, it’s essentially income that is generated without you working for it. For example, you own a house and pay a monthly mortgage of $100. If you rent it out for $500 a month, then you are making $400 worth of passive income. You still have to pay property taxes and maintenance expenses so you may not be able to keep the full $400 every month but you get the gist. You also still own the asset (the house) and could use it as collateral or as an additional source of income (through a line of credit if needed). 

So now we have some passive income, our 9-5 income is the highest it’s been and we’re still saving as much as we can. Even with all of this, we weren’t enjoying the high price tag of living in downtown nor were we happy with throwing away rent every month when we knew we could be building equity in a home. We decided to break our lease after 6 months to move into a house again. Just before we decided to move, Jeffrey proposed to me after spending the last 4 years together. Onto 2018 and wedding planning!

2018- Brianna (22) & Jeffrey (29). Debt = $310k ($130k offset by passive income, $180k in primary mortgage)

2018 was a great year for us because it’s the year we got married and the year I finally started financially contributing to our household. I was wrapped up in college graduation, wedding planning and entering Corporate America during this year. Instead of spending $40k+ on a wedding, we decided to renovate our house (we thought we would stay there forever- we were wrong) and have our wedding in our back yard. At the time, we thought it made more sense for us to put the money we would spend on a wedding into a home that would continue to build equity. This sent us off on a journey of our first home renovation. We did not realize at the time that we were over-investing in a home that we wouldn’t be living in a year later… nonetheless we spent almost all of our savings making a beautiful home. It was beautiful and I spent every dollar beautifully… but we were really taking a hit to our savings account. We had spent around $180k on the house itself and then almost another $50k on renovations. We weren’t thinking too much of it because we planned for that house to be our “forever home”. We also both sell our old beater cars and buy upgraded used vehicles during this year. They weren’t expensive and we paid cash, but we were clearly on a spending spree. Can you feel the income creep and “American Dream” coming into play yet? 

I then planned our entire wedding. With the help of friends and family we created the centerpieces, made the favors, handmade our bouquets/boutonnieres/flower arrangements and used every resource we had to get discounted or free items. Our wedding cake was free, our ceremony seating was free and I made our wedding invitations for about $20. My dad and grandparents also chipped in for our wedding which we greatly appreciated. We ended up spending less than $10k cash on our actual wedding (excluding home reno) and no one knew it.. *pats self on back*. We did not go into debt for our wedding, this was another milestone in our financial journey. 

We did a lot of research and found a great website called greatvaluevacations.com and booked our honeymoon to Italy (for a darn good price). We spent less than $3k total on our honeymoon and we paid cash. We did not go into debt for our honeymoon. This is another big moment for us because it was our first time traveling to Europe. 

When we got back home from honeymooning, I started my first “real” job and was commuting every day from south of the ATL airport to North GA for work. By the end of 2018, Jeffrey had taken another new job (also in North GA) and we now had a household income of around $110k. We focused on increasing our income by whatever means necessary (including lots of job changes for promotions). This was very confusing to a lot of people because within a 5 year timeframe, Jeffrey had changed jobs 4 times. There’s a running joke with our friends that he changes jobs as frequently as they change their underwear. However, we’ve both found great success with job hopping for promotions and salary bumps (so long as you are an over-achiever in your work and have the skill to back it up). 

After months of both of us commuting 3+ hours a day we are over it and start looking at homes in North GA. We are realizing now that the $50k renovation on the south GA house maybe wasn’t the best idea. We’ve had it for a little over a year and need to move to be closer to our jobs but the issue is that the house is in a lower class neighborhood that does not appreciate quickly. There was no way we could have sold it and recouped our renovation money plus what we owed on the house so we decide to try and rent it out. We learn a lot during this time and have a lot of “bad luck”. We had so many people try to move into that house that were unqualified and were lying on rental applications. After a few months we finally find renters that are qualified to rent the home and are able to move them in.

2019: Brianna (23) & Jeffrey (30). Debt = $530k ($130k offset by passive income, $180k offset by passive income, $220k in primary mortgage)

The year of bad decisions!!

We find a house in North GA close to our new jobs and I buy my first house (on my own)! This was sort of exciting but also sort of cringe worthy for me because it’s the first time that I have debt in my name. In all of the prior years of our relationship, Jeffrey was the main borrower and I was always second listed. It sounds silly because our money has always been shared, but there’s something scary about seeing your name on a mortgage payment (if you know, you know). Plus, this house just so happened to be the most expensive house that we had purchased so far. The market was booming and we pay $220k for it- eeeek. Again, we see an increase in our income and an increase in our expenses… AKA income creep. I wish I could say it gets better… but I’d be lying. We still make a few more mistakes. Now we own 3 homes- 2 of them are being rented out and generating passive income and we are living in 1.

We live in this house for half a year and are doing pretty well with saving. Our goal was to live on Jeffrey’s income and save my entire income to pay off the house (because we think we will stay here forever…..wrong again). We end up paying an additional $50k off of our mortgage during this time. It’s going well but it doesn’t take long before we find ourselves getting complacent in our jobs and wanting to grow. Jeffrey gets recruited for a job an hour away and I’m trying to get promoted at work but wasn’t having luck. Thankfully, I negotiated a 6 month evaluation at my first job for a pay raise because I was unhappy with the starting salary. This was a tip I learned in college and it’s worked well for me during times that I’ve felt like the salary is below-average for the area. I did get a pay raise (albeit it wasn’t enough to cover a $5 milkshake each month) but I wasn’t being challenged in my role. I had found enough financial and clerical errors at work to cover my entire salary for the year and I felt like I had been tossed a grain of rice as a reward (no offense if my old co-workers are reading this). I continue to ask for more responsibility at work with no results and after 9 months I find a new job in the same town that Jeffrey is working in. Now we’re both commuting (again). 

We are making over $150k at this point and decide that we should start looking for our real dream home closer to the new jobs………. Sound the alarm!! Again!! If there was ever a “what the h***” moment in our story, this is it. I like to think we are smart people, but this part of our story just escapes me. We had 3 vehicles at this point and had a 1 car garage. Part of the “dream” was having a huge garage for all of Jeffrey’s cars. I also wanted a fenced in backyard and tall ceilings (for whatever stupid American dream reason). We talked about how we would need a bigger house for all the kids we might want to have in the future.. so we would need a lot of extra bedrooms. We told ourselves that our parents are getting older.. and we should really plan for their futures and make sure we have enough room to care for them too.. $320k later we now own a almost 5,000 square foot mini mansion in a swim tennis neighborhood…. and we 100% justified it with our passive income. With all 3 properties rented out, our almost $3k mortgage was really only costing us around $2k (which we convinced ourselves was still a good deal). I’d really like to breeze through this part of our story because I’m still ashamed of how irresponsible I feel like we were.. but I want to be real about our journey. We were on a high.. we felt like we had “earned it”. We felt like we had to keep up with others that were making similar incomes because we cared so much about what other people thought about us. We didn’t want our bosses and friends googling our address or visiting on the weekends to see that we were living in a low-class neighborhood.. We wanted to be that power house couple that threw fancy parties and have the kind of house that our unborn teenage children and their friends would want to hang out at. We wanted our friends and family to see us and say “Wow, they made it”. We wanted the life we never had growing up.

In 2019, we had a lot of that. We became foster parents. We had our record year of traveling and went to Florida, New Hampshire, Maine, Boston, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Germany and Ireland (we still paid cash for all of those trips – I have to revive us somehow…). We hosted Christmas, which I actually hated and will probably never do again.. we were living large! We were also eating sandwiches and ramen 3 meals a day to afford all of it and be able to sleep at night. We knew we had the passive income offsetting a chunk of our mortgage but what we did not expect was the increase in our bills.. heating a 5k square foot home is not affordable. We also started having issues with the rental properties and were spending a lot of time working on repairs after work and during the weekends. All of this started to wear on a us a bit. We were stressed out all of the time but didn’t know why. We had everything we wanted.. but didn’t exactly feel happy. But we are resilient people! We pushed all of this to the side and looked into 2020 optimistically. 

2020: Brianna (24) & Jeffrey (31). Debt = $850k, be right back while I go throw up. ($130k offset by passive income, $180k offset by passive income, $220k offset by passive income, $320k in primary mortgage). 

Welcome to the year of COVID. The year no one expected.. and probably the year that saved us. We just finished off one of the best years of our lives in terms of traveling and seeing the world and we had that “uh-oh” moment when we realized we had barely saved any money in 2019. So one of our first goals at the beginning of 2020 was to pay off our $320k house. We immediately started saving as much as we could again, pushing out any vacation plans or crazy ideas that we had (minus the annual Jamaica trip that had already been paid for). Jeffrey got promoted at work and our household income was around $180k. Things were going well although we noticed that it was harder to save as much money for some reason (maybe our $400 electric bill!?). We were getting annoyed with how much money we were spending to maintain this dumb big house that we were starting to resent.. so we decided to turn off our multi-AC house unit (we had 2 of them….) and install a $20 window AC unit in our master bedroom. We went into every oversized bedroom, bathroom, closet, bonus room, bonus bonus room and turned off the air vents. This was probably the moment that we should have looked at each other with concerned expressions. When people would come to visit, we would quickly run to our thermostat and cut it down to try and cool off the rest of the house. We’d go into whatever room we were expecting guests in and open the air vents and dust off the pillows. What were we doing?? Why did we buy this house? It was empty. It did not have the overflowing love that I thought it would bring.. aside from my disastrous Christmas party (it was fun, just very exhausting and expensive), it wasn’t full of happy smiling faces. It was filled with 2 confused and slightly sweaty humans that had no idea what they’d done. 

*Enter COVID-19*

All of the sudden, we no longer have to go in-office. We’re told to work from home and not leave our house unless it’s a medical emergency. Our first thought? FINALLY! We had longed for the days of not waking up at 4:45am, commuting together in an hour of traffic while one of us was typing emails rapidly in the passenger seat and snapping at the driver when they spoke aloud because we were too busy to listen or talk.. This is coming across a little harsher than I thought, but we were really stressed out at the beginning of 2020. That’s basically how our mornings would go.. Jeffrey would come and pick me up for lunch at 11am sharp because I was starving myself at work all morning and couldn’t make it till noon to eat. We would go park in the CVS parking lot across from my office and eat our less-than-appetizing ham and cheese sandwiches (if we were feeling really bougie, we’d buy chips too). We would stare at the trees for 45 minutes and talk about our dreams and how we wanted to be anywhere else than where we were, then he would take me back to work. I’d avoid eye contact with every breathing object in the office and nod my head in meetings until 3pm sharp and he’d be back in the parking lot waiting for me. I’d get in (sometimes angry and late because meetings ran over) open my laptop and start responding to emails again. I love my job and what I do.. but we both have very demanding and sometimes stressful jobs and commuting is not fun. At least once on the drive home, I’d snap at him for cutting someone off in traffic that was dead stopped in the left lane for no reason.. and an hour later, we’d be home. Every. Single. Day. So when they told us to not come back, we were ecstatic.

We started sleeping in an hour later and still had time to eat breakfast before starting work at 7am.. we were able to wait until 12pm to eat lunch because we actually had breakfast and weren’t so darn hungry. We cooked real food for lunch and had an extra 15 minutes to walk around our fancy neighborhood to stretch our legs. I started doing yoga and pilates. Our heads felt clearer. Then we thought “what if we worked from somewhere else???” and our brains pretty much exploded. We had all sorts of crazy ideas. Jeffrey’s company at the time had decided that they wouldn’t be going back to office at all, that the company would be 100% remote. My company said it would last at least a year. I talked to my boss and was told I could work remote permanently if I wanted to. We suddenly had a choice on how and where we wanted to live our lives. We weren’t tied down to a location and wouldn’t have to move again just to start the next job, just to make more money. We may not change jobs ever again if we can be remote! Should we move to Florida? Should we buy a van and drive around to visit family that we never get to see (because we only have like 12 days of paid time off in a YEAR)? 

We had so many ideas. After learning that we could permanently work from home, we almost immediately listed our house for sale. It was the largest debt we had, all of the other rental properties would pay for whatever house we wanted to buy (we knew we wanted to downsize at this point). All we had to do was sell our house and we were already getting offers..

And then everything hit the fan with all of our rental properties. It was like clock work.. June 1st we had our first tenant give us a 1 day notice that he was moving out because he lost his job. A few weeks later we find out that our second tenant is moving out because she took a 40% pay cut at work and had to move home. Then a month later, our last tenant called us to share the sad news that the primary tenant of the house had randomly passed away and that they would be moving out as well. Suddenly everything felt like it was crumbling to the ground. Our worst fears of being over leveraged and losing everything were about to possibly come true.. we were thinking “if we lose our jobs, this is it for us”. We had enough savings to ride it out for about a year but that wasn’t very comforting at the time.

We drove over to the first rental property we ever purchased to assess the damage. The place was an absolute disaster.. roaches, bugs, stains in the carpet, pet odor, smoke stains, damage to doors, windows, etc. We were so overwhelmed and I honestly could have just given up and fallen apart. There was no way we could sell this place without cleaning it up unless we wanted to take a massive hit on the price- which we didn’t. Initially we decided to clean it up and put “lipstick” on it (fresh paint, new cheap flooring and minor decorating). At this point, we didn’t know that our other rental properties were also about to become vacant.. so we still had plans to sell our big house and move to Florida. We were sitting in our old living room in the big house and I asked Jeffrey “what if we moved into that house?”.

That’s pretty much when everything changed for us. It just made sense to me.. I was so stressed out living the way we had been living. I always felt like we were living above our means (our definition of “living within your means” is very different than most peoples) and if all of the STUFF wasn’t making us happy, then what would? We always talked about living in a tiny home, traveling and being a minimalist and somehow we ended up in a massive house that we resented. Moving into the rental house checked so many boxes I had in my mind.. it was the cheapest house we owned, it was tiny and I knew our bills and maintenance expenses would be lower. It was also the house that we were cash flowing the most on, so I knew our passive income would be gone soon and I wanted to have lower expenses. Jeffrey was very confused when I asked the question. We had been looking at properties from $500k and up in Florida with private pools and within walking distance to the beach and now I was asking him if he wanted to move into a low-middle class neighborhood in what was currently a dump of a house. I definitely win the award for craziest ideas in our marriage. 

We decide to move into the dump of a house! Under a few conditions of course.. I knew that I wouldn’t be comfortable if we just lipsticked the house so we decided to do a reno on it. $40-$50k later we were finished and it was basically a brand new house. We did everything that we always wanted to do, but were too scared to because of re-sell or rental concerns. Anytime you’re renting properties out, you want to be very neutral with your design decisions. Since this house was so small we decided to do everything we wanted so we could enjoy it. We did patterned mosaic tile, black grout, we painted the exterior a grey color and painted our trim black. With the help of our friends and family, we tore down walls and rebuilt them, ripped out concrete, re-ran plumbing and turned the place into something beautiful. We learned so much on this reno and had so much fun.

In the middle of this renovation (around August 2020) we found out about the other 2 rentals becoming vacant. Although it was a really stressful summer, we were suddenly thrilled that we were moving into the rental house. We were having issues selling the houses on our own because other realtors don’t like to work with for sale by owner houses.. we literally had our house under contract by ourselves 2x and it fell out of contract due to financing issues with the buyers. During this time, we had so many bad experiences with agents coming in and immediately treating us like we were idiots because we didn’t have a realtor. After talking to a few of our friends who are realtors, they explained that there’s a bad stigma with FSBO and a lot of realtors try to avoid working with those houses.

There was a sense of urgency to sell because we didn’t want to re-rent (COVID wasn’t allowing evictions and a lot of investors we knew weren’t getting paid). We decided to list with the highest rated realtor in our town. At the end of it, we were able to sell all of our properties by February 2021. At closing, we walked away with pretty hefty checks but after considering all of the money spent on renovations, repairs, selling fees and our initial investment we ended up making a total of $10,000 profit across all of the rental properties.. for 3 years of stress. I go back and forth on whether or not I think it was worth it.. we gained so much knowledge that we otherwise wouldn’t have so I think from that perspective, it was worth it. From a financial perspective, you’re better off finding a different investment for that short of a time frame. It did however allow us to have a surplus of cash (that’s important for 2021). 

For Jeffrey’s birthday in September, I bought him an introductory Cessna flight with the local airport. This led us to both getting our private pilot’s license together. This was the coolest, most difficult thing we’ve ever done and we absolutely loved it. With our reduced expenses we were able to pay cash for our private pilots licenses and build some amazing friendships (like our flight instructor)! In November, I got promoted and Jeffrey took another new job at a different company.

2021: Brianna (25) & Jeffrey (32). Debt = $0

Finally debt free!

We had a significant wave of peace roll over us at the start of 2021. We had just sold all of our rentals plus the big house and had a nice stash of savings. We were living in the rental house and our bills were to the level that if we lost our jobs, we could work a minimum wage job and still pay for everything. The mortgage on this house had been paid down from $130k when we bought it to around $100k once we moved into it. This was the first time we saw our net worth swing in the positive direction. Our assets were higher than our liabilities! We weren’t sure what we wanted to jump into next but we knew we wanted to be financially free which means $0 in debt to us. With my recent promotion and Jeffrey’s new role, our household income was around $250k. We decided to figure out what true debt-free peace felt like and we paid off our house.

I think it’s important to mention that if we hadn’t invested in real estate when we did, we wouldn’t have been able to sell those properties for a profit and have the cash as quickly to pay it off. We’ve saved $100k before with much lower incomes, but it takes a long time and a lot of daily sacrifices. For the first time in our adult lives, we had $0 in debt. At first, it didn’t feel much different. We were thinking “ok… what now”? We knew we still wanted to have some sort of passive income, so we decided to invest in dividend paying stocks. Neither of us are big stock market fans because when you simplify it.. you’re putting your money in the hands of a typical consumer with a lot of bad spending habits who makes impulsive decisions. However, investing in the stock market is a long haul move for us. It’s money that we don’t need right now and that we’ll tap into at retirement. We put some of our cash into the market and decided to start over from ground zero. We both invest in our 401k’s at work but we know it’s not enough.. we also can’t expect social security to be around when we’re 60 and let’s be honest.. we don’t want to work that long. Our plan now is to continue to save and build up enough cash reserves to start our own business or purchase another investment (not residential real estate) to attain financial freedom. We’ve talked about storage units, RV parks and online businesses as opportunities for this.

Financial freedom and what it means to us.. 

With having higher incomes and lower expenses, we’ve been able to save significantly in 2021. After paying our house off, we purchased an RV with cash and decided to hit the road to travel the United States while we work remote. This has been a dream for a long time and to finally be in a financial situation to do it has been so rewarding. Ideally, we’d love to live this lifestyle forever. However, with offices re-opening and both of our careers being more “office based” we knew this was really our only chance to take this adventure. With minimal expenses, our goal for 2021 and onwards is to buckle down and focus on generating new passive income to achieve real financial freedom.

Jeffrey and I have discussed what financial freedom means to us, and while we have small disagreements on the larger definition.. our general description of financial freedom is “having enough passive income to pay for whatever we want to do.. without having to work.” Most of our differences are around the “whatever we want to do” part. He tends to like nicer things than I do and would love to generate enough passive income to buy a brand new Porsche with cash, versus I would prefer to travel full-time for a few years and not worry about working a full time job. Our lifestyle now is generally somewhere in the middle. There are things we splurge on and things we are super cheap about. One thing that we’ve learned through all of this is that we want the freedom to do whatever we want. Debt is the largest barrier to freedom because you HAVE to work (usually a stressful, demanding job) to generate enough money to cover your expenses.

With no debt, you can easily say “what makes me happy? what do I want to spend my time working on?” and you’ll usually find out, it’s not the job you have.. and it’s not the big house or shiny jewelry. It’s experiences, it’s new places, it’s meeting new people and learning about new cultures. With no debt you have the freedom to work a more flexible job that you may enjoy more or start that passion project you’ve been dreaming about for years or take a 2 month road trip! Honestly, one of my passion projects has been this blog. Who knows if it will ever generate income (it doesn’t now), but I enjoy doing it. I enjoy talking about traveling and personal finance and I think you can have both! 

In summary, 

There are few things I’ve highlighted in this blog that have helped us along the way. Things like not having student loan debt or car payments.. avoiding debt from your wedding and honeymoon.. staying away from credit cards and minimizing your expenses. In all reality, it took all of those things PLUS a global pandemic for us to finally wake up.

COVID really did change our lives. We went from almost a million dollars in debt and worrying about the wrong things in life like what people think of us, or what society tells us is “normal” to be doing at “our age” to $0 in debt and finding happiness in something as simple as the sunset or finding a safe place to park at night. We realized a lot of the things we were chasing weren’t making us happy. We had all of the nice things and something was still missing… and we’ve found out it’s the small things in life that bring you the most happiness. The things that have been making us happy lately are-

1) Seeing each other laugh and smile after jumping in the freezing water at Glacier National Park 

2) Watching our dog Raven roll around in each new place we stop at 

3) Seeing our 12 year old Siamese lay on the van floor enjoying the 90 degree weather when we’re broke down and working on the motor

4) Waking up every day with a new view of the world 

5) Making fresh coffee every morning the old fashioned way

6) Meeting new people from all over and sharing stories about our lives 

7) Reducing our footprint and becoming more aware of how our actions affect the planet

8) Seeing the stars at night without all of the smog and light pollution

9) Eating healthy and exercising more than we ever have before

10) Spending more time together doing things we love without the demands that society pushes on us

11) Oddly enough, cleaning up trash from the places we visit and leaving them better than we found them

We still have a long way to go to achieve financial freedom.. but for now we’re enjoying this slice of simplicity and the ability to live the life we dreamed about for so many years. None of this would have been possible without the events occurring exactly the way they did for us.. always remember that no situation is permanent. If you’re unhappy with your life, you can change it. If you feel trapped by debt, you can change it. Manifest the life you want and chase after it at full speed. It will not be easy, but it’s so worth it. In the words of our Jamaican friends, “in life there are no problems, only situations”.

If you made it this far, I truly appreciate it. This is sort of our life story so it’s deeply personal to me and slightly uncomfortable sharing it on the internet. I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not I should publish this (and I’ve worked on it for months!) but I believe that everyone has the ability to make a positive impact on the world.. even if it’s just for one person!