Why I Left Corporate America Before Achieving "FI"

I'm thrilled to share with you that I've left my corporate sales career!

As I share in the video, I "returned" to corporate sales about 5 years ago so my wife and I could pour gasoline on our savings rate and "early retirement" timeline.

And, while we haven't reached our "FI" yet, we felt like it was a great time to "jump" for the following 3 reasons:

1. Because we could afford to

My wife and I really do "practice what we preach" with all this personal finance stuff. We budget fastidiously, live very frugally and are constantly looking for ways to play both better economic offense AND defense.

We spent the previous five years doing the opposite of what most of our fellow Americans do, which is increase pending as their income increases. No, because we wanted out of that rat race, we did the contrarian thing. As our income rose, we simultaneously tried to reduce expenses and live even more below our means.

This helped us to increase our savings rate (i.e. the percentage of our income we were able to save AFTER expenses) to upwards of 70-80% for 4 of those 5 years and close to 90% by the end of the final year.

I know it sounds extreme, but when you have your eye fixed on the goal, are "close enough" to FI and are super burned out, you become hyper focused. We've been hyper focused for sure.

2. We'd gotten "close enough" to FI 

We'd gotten close enough to FI that we really feel like I can jump full time into developing this personal finance platform for our audience. In other words, we have enough margin to sustain us the rest of the way through this early trajectory, so that we can just focus on serving our tribe by creating relevant content, courses and coaching to help our people reach their own financial goals.

It's an absolute joy to be in this position and we want to continue to pour ourselves into our tribe, even as we continue toward our FI number.

We'll also be keeping you posted as we move toward that number.

3. I was completely burned out

Like I say in the video, I have always found the corporate career space to be a highly exhausting environment for me. As a "type A go getter", it's always been tough for me to operate in environments where my judgement is constantly being over-scrutinized and my actions severely micromanaged.

I don't say this to be a "whiner". In my 20+ years in corporate enterprise sales, the lowest I ever exceeded my sales quota was 109% (with the majority of my years being at 150-200% of quota).

But, like I alluded to earlier, the most important reason I left was to pour all my time and energy into helping our tribe reach their financial and life goals. I'm SO thrilled to be able to do that.

How Can We Help?

So, in the comments section below, let me know the most pressing problem you need help with. That could be a particular budgeting issue, being lost somewhere in the debt snowball or looking at where and how to invest once you've gotten your debt paid off and have your full emergency fun.

Lots of great stuff to come and I thank you for letting me come along side you in your journey to debt freedom and (hopefully) on to "FI"!

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