I am currently 25 and work as financial analyst at a large public company. My journey started when I left for a big state school, and had no real idea of the concept of debt or how hard it would be to get rid of. As I went through school I amassed about $27k in student loans (all housing related, I secured a free ride for tuition) and when my car broke down senior year I signed up for a $13k car loan for an inefficient small SUV because "I deserved it" (Total debt upon graduation = $40k)
It was a short while after this I noticed the "work until 65 then die" path I was on and had a mid-life crisis at 23 (I have always been told I am an old soul!
). It is at this point that I discovered ERE. It is now 2 years after graduation and I will pay off my $40k of debt next month which means I will finally be able to start getting ahead instead of paying for past decisions. For the numbers people: I did this making $53k a year, but I work in a very cheap area so have been saving half of my income for the past two years to put towards debt.My ultimate reason for pursuing ERE is to have enough money to begin farming on a very small but intense scale. Over the next year I will save up another $30k or so and then buy bare land in cash, hopefully at least 5 acres, here in the midwest. The following year I plan to design and build my own passive solar home (I am currently researching best design practices for my part of the country) which I anticipate will take year of both time and money to build. After the house is built my monthly expenses should be around $500 to $600 which means I will only need to work 3 more years to amass enough money to get by without a need to ever work again (4% withdrawal). It is at this time I will begin farming my five acres aggressively, making most/all of my own food needs and selling off the rest for extra income. All in all I deeply crave a much slower pace to life with natural cycles of work and rest with no deadlines and spend as much time in and around nature as possible.
Anyway I think that is long enough for a first post haha. Thanks to all of you whom I read quite often and get a lot of motivation/inspiration from on a weekly basis.
