Finding the FI Community and the Start of my Financial Independence Journey

If you are like me, and most of my peers in BigLaw, you graduated from law school with impressive credentials and fingers adorned with brass rings, which allowed you to land a coveted job at a large firm with a generous salary. Unfortunately, it is also likely that you graduated with an impressive amount of student loan debt too—over $145,000 on average. Add to that mountain of debt the common lifestyle inflation that occurs immediately after receiving an offer letter with a six-figure starting salary and, by the time you are a mid-level associate, it is easy to find yourself deeply in debt and approaching an uncertain inflexion point in your career. Even if equity partnership is in the cards, there is a very real possibility that a salary decrease is looming in the near future.

That essentially is where I found myself a couple of years ago. I remember distinctly the overwhelming sense of dread that came with every pay period and trying to juggle minimum credit card payments, car payments, normal expenses, and forking over cash to a contractor who had massively overrun the time and budget for our kitchen renovation. Luckily, the situation never got too dire. I never missed any payments or fell into bad standing with creditors. However, one evening, I realized that I had essentially no cash and no available credit left. I was terrified of not being able to weather even the smallest of financial storms and was frankly embarrassed that, as a highly educated person with a good job, I had found myself in that situation. That is when I finally decided to take action. I was going to stop lamenting my situation and actually do something.

I dove down the rabbit hole of traditional personal finance online. My initial web searches led me to the popular Baby Steps promoted by Dave Ramsey in The Total Money Makeover and other various articles on paying credit card debt. None of it was particularly exciting to me and a lot of it struck me as unnecessarily austere, overtly religious for no reason, and not realistic for a BigLaw associate who’s peak earning years very well could be now.

Don’t get me wrong, paying off debt methodically and creating an order of operations for your financial goals is obviously important but, I think personal finance is way more nuanced than a lot of the mainstream content lets on. For example, waiting to start investing in my 401(k) until after that mountain of sub-4% interest student loan debt is paid off just seemed like a great way to leave a pile of money on the table and to guarantee that I would be the 70-year-old partner wondering the halls after 7:00 p.m. whose retirement plans appear to involve a coffin. 

Still, I got my financial house in order. We cut some entertainment spending from our family budget, threw the next bonus entirely at credit card debt, and started hacking away at the debt using the snowball method. It was slow going but it seemed like we would eventually start actually accumulating wealth and be set when it was time to retire at 65.

Then, one morning, as I pressed the elevator button in the lobby of my office building, I had a terrifying thought: I have to do this for another 30+ years….

Then, one morning, as I pressed the elevator button in the lobby of my office building, I had a terrifying thought: I have to do this for another 30+ years. I had been up until 3:30 a.m. finishing a draft summary judgment brief for a case I was certain would end up settling before the court ever even glanced at the motion. I had groggily rolled out of bed and compulsively checked my phone only to be greeted by a snarky e-mail from the partner on the file about the brief being late, even though the filing deadline wasn’t for another nine days and the unsophisticated (non-lawyer) client would have no comments. Motivated by that textual pep talk, I had hurriedly got ready, made the daycare drop off, and rolled into the parking lot at 9:30—delayed slightly by a stop to grab a Red Bull. Even though I had already billed 3.5 for the day, I could just sense that I was behind and that I was facing a sleep-deprived, caffeine-jitter filled, day full of conference calls, meetings, e-mail replies, and hurriedly assembled discovery responses copied and pasted from other discovery responses—themselves hurriedly cobbled together by associates of yore. All of that would eat up the bulk of the workday and I would find myself back in my home office at 10:00 p.m. attempting to marshal the brain cells needed to actually do some brief writing.

So, at some point after midnight, I mumbled a bunch of four-letter words to myself and started searching things like: “how to retire early” and “passive income” hoping that I would find some kind of magical solution that would allow me to shave that 30-year horizon down to maybe 25 years, or maybe allow me to pursue a job with less stress or more fulfillment. What I found was just a bunch of landing pages for various brokerage firms’ retirement calculators. So, I closed the tab and got back to work. But as the weeks went on after that night, I couldn’t shake the idea that there had to be another way.

I stumbled upon the Stacking Benjamins podcast a while later as part of my ongoing search for good personal finance content. I like that podcast and it was a great jumping off point but, it is not really intended to be a F.I.R.E. podcast. I listened regularly for a few months and heard the occasional mention of the “F.I.R.E. Community.” However, my conception of F.I.R.E. was that it was something for single 20-somethings living in a “van down by the river,” who would eventually need to come back to the real world after burning through their savings. Then, Paula Pant made one of her regular appearances on the show shortly after her interview with Suzie Orman, in which Ms. Orman excoriated and declared her hatred for the movement. The counterpoints later presented to Ms. Orman’s tirade against the early retirement community finally clarified for me that F.I.R.E. was actually much more about “independence” than “retirement” and that all of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles (e.g., health insurance) were not actually anything beyond the scope of the problems self-employed people have been dealing with for decades. 

After that realization, I decided that financial independence was a valid concept worth pursuing. Armed with the information gleaned from Mr. Money Mustache and the Mad Fientist, I started to optimize further and we were able to increase our net worth by nearly $100,000 within 12 months. But, I also started to enjoy work a little bit more on occasion as the overarching fear of financial ruin started to recede. It turns out that when you approach work from a position of financial strength, you are way more comfortable telling a partner that he will get a draft brief the next day instead of pulling an all-nighter to meet a semi-arbitrary internal deadline.

I also came to grips with the notion that “lean” F.I.R.E. espoused by the old guard of F.I. is not for me. I realized that one can still save a large portion of a Big Law salary and occasionally order takeout or go on a European vacation without first amassing 500,000 Ultimate Rewards points. There is a large area of middle ground between the lean F.I.R.E. folks and the excessive spending that characterizes most of the attorneys I see. With this blog, I hope to explore the ways that I, and others similarly situated, can make smart, intentional choices that can break the golden handcuffs and provide a much greater level of freedom and control over life—whether that means goin in-house, working for a smaller shop, or a complete career change. Thanks for joining me.