Camp FIRE Finance
Take 40 hours per week over a 45 year career, throw in one hour of commuting each working day and you come up with 105,300 hours of your life that you give to your employer.
That’s 13,163 work days where you’re slaving away 9 to 5, taking orders, giving orders, punching clocks, playing office politics, and slowly being worked to death.
Unless you can do something to break the cycle, you’re part of the working dead.
Nearly half of adults claim they are inadequately prepared for retirement; with consumer debt again rising to historic levels; and with fewer than one in 10 adults able to come up with $1,000 to cover an emergency expense, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that America has a financial literacy problem.
Young adults especially are unprepared when it comes to making important decisions about credit, borrowing and saving. This is why more economists, educators, and parents are demanding that we begin to teach personal finance in high school.
Do you ever feel like you’re doing the Financial Two-Step? Two steps forward, two steps back.
You’re able to get by each month, but unable to get ahead. If so, you’re on the proverbial financial treadmill: running, but going nowhere. And you’re not alone. Nearly one-half of all Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, just one misstep or unexpected expense away from financial disaster.
So how do you get off that treadmill and begin to take control of your finances? There are so many things you can do to start to improve your situation, but what’s the right first step?
Knowing where you want to go is not the same as knowing how to get there. Even if you know exactly where you want to end up, you’re going to get lost along the way if you don’t know how to get there.
This same principle holds true with your personal finance goals. I know exactly where I want to be, but when I first started my journey I didn’t know how to get there. I do now thanks to my personal financial workback schedule.