I Achieved Financial Independence At 33… Here’s How (The Truth)

if you don't know what you spend on a monthly basis then you're kind of like aiming for a moving target and therefore you're never gonna get there so the way the math works is and i'm gonna actually need to pull out my calculator for this [Music] hey everyone it's your girl rose welcome back to my channel and today i want to talk to you about the five things i did to retire early at 33. i cannot believe i'm saying that but honestly it really struck me the other day just how different my life is from say eight years ago i mean there was a point in my life where i had to wake up at 6am every single day monday through friday i was a slave to the paycheck i lived paycheck to paycheck i was a hundred thousand dollars in debt i had no idea what was going on with my finances and living the life of freedom that i so wanted just seemed like this pipe dream like this remote possibility and today i'm actually living that dream i get to travel the world with my dog jupiter in my cute camper van and maybe you can hear in my voice i'm a little bit congested right now because i got sick yesterday and yesterday when i woke up sick i didn't have to show up to work i could wake up whenever i wanted i didn't have a boss to call and have to call out of work none of that my time is my own and i'm honestly so grateful for that and i really wanted to share with you the five things i did to get here because eight years is not that long of a time and so think about it for you in eight years your situation can be completely different from what it is now so let's have a heart-to-heart chat about what it really takes because i don't think enough people talk about this and you're just in time because i'm about to whip up some lunch in my little van kitchen so come join me while i make something healthy and delicious and let's sit down and have a chat so i'm gonna make us a healthy grilled shrimp salad with orange vinaigrette i'm gonna make the orange vinaigrette from scratch and it's gonna be so fresh and delicious i think it's about 100 degrees right now in california so this is going to be a very refreshing and light lunch okay so let's start off by making the orange vinaigrette dressing but basically i'm gonna jump right into the first thing that i did to retire early at 33 which is what all of you need to do in order to drastically transform your finances which is that i got my head out of the sand and what do i mean by that well when i first graduated college i was 100 000 in student loan debt i lived paycheck to paycheck and my student loan payments were almost 1 000 a month and then living in new york city with you know new york city rents and all the high living expenses i was barely keeping afloat and instead of actually facing that reality i just avoided you know kept my head in the sand i self-medicated by going shopping a lot going out to nice restaurants hanging out with people who spent a lot more money than i could afford to spend in fact i'd be so in the dark about what was going on with my finances and i would even offered to pick up the tab at brunch for my friends knowing that it would overdraft my debit card like that's how bad it was and you keep going like that until you reach a moment one day when you just decide to make a change you hit rock bottom and that moment came for me in the winter of i can't remember which year exactly but i was about 25 26 and i had gone through a really rough breakup i hated my job and i didn't have any friends and i never saw the sun because i had to wake up so early and then leave the office so late at night i mean it was just bad so there does come a moment when the fear of continuing on the path that you're on of extrapolating your life five ten years out doing exactly what you're doing now of living paycheck to paycheck not um making a plan for financial freedom spending everything you make not looking at your numbers when the fear of continuing like that becomes greater than the fear of taking action and really from a practical point of view what i'm talking about is taking stock of where you are financially which means um calculating what is your net worth meaning what's your assets minus liabilities so everything you own whether it's stocks bonds you know ira accounts 401k accounts savings accounts checking accounts real estate crypto minus your liabilities which is everything you owe which can be mortgages student loans credit card debt um tax debt unpaid phone bills things like that so that's the first thing you need to take stock of and this might seem like a really basic step but a lot of people don't even know what where their 401k account is so keeping track of your assets is is a big step it's a lot more than many people do i will say that and same with liabilities keeping track of how much exactly do you owe and just knowing like exactly where you stand and what the numbers look like that is actually a huge empowering step so what was glaring back at me that winter was minus 100 000 net worth it wasn't a pretty number to look at but it was actually a huge moment of relief and empowerment because now that i know where i stand now i can do something about it the other thing to take stock of is your income versus your expenses like what are you actually spending on your credit card every month and is that more than what you're bringing in because that's valuable information that means maybe that's why you are always in this cycle of paying off your credit card every month maybe that's why you never have money left to save at the end of the month because you spend everything on stuff that you don't really need the key part of when you do this exercise is no shame no blame there is no shame in how you spend your money yeah maybe you spent thousands of dollars a month on eating out in the last few months maybe you spend an obscene amount of money on dog stuff because you love your dog and you buy him dog clothes that cost a hundred dollars per hoodie who cares the point is it's just information it's spending is just spending like it's just information and with information you can empower yourself so that's kind of i think the key point i really think like self forgiveness and self-compassion are really underrated in the world of personal finance like that's not spoken about enough so that was a key turning point for me because that's when i really started taking massive action towards paying off my debt i threw everything that i could i really like cut down my expenses and threw everything i could towards my debt and honestly like the numbers go down really fast when you're that focused on it but it really all started with that first step of getting my head out of the sand all right i've been talking too much so i didn't even get a chance to start on the dressing but i'm going to juice this orange so that we can have freshly squeezed orange juice for the orange vinaigrette [Music] okay and now that the salad dressing is done i'm ready