A Reintroduction and Challenging the Status Quo

I did a fun thing a few weeks ago. I reread all of my blog posts, starting from the beginning. It’s been almost three years since I started writing here, and I honestly couldn’t even remember from week to week what I wrote, so I wanted to make sure I stood by what I’ve said over the years. I’ve also been thinking about sharing this blog with more people I know IRL, so reviewing my posts was important to me.

A couple of things stood out as I read through three years of posts:

• At the time, when I was in the middle of it all (if you’re new here, don’t worry…I’ll elaborate on this), I didn’t realize how DEEPLY unhappy I was. Initially, I thought I was just dealing with a little professional uncertainty, some existential ennui, perhaps. But reading back through everything? Man, was I unhappy. 
• I could also see, slowly at the beginning and much more later on, how this new path I’m on was a long time coming. Which makes this path feel even better. I know that it fit what I was looking for in terms of change over several years.
• Finally, I saw the plot holes and lack of context in a lot of places. I knew what was going on in my head and in my life, but that information didn’t always make its way into the blog until I would reference something out of the blue.

So, I thought it would be helpful to put together a full recap post. Some of this is scattered in past posts (and I’ll link to important ones). Some of this is info I haven’t shared before. Chances are it’s going to be a long post. So buckle up/pour the wine/close the tab now. You’ve been warned.

An Introduction

Hi, I’m Elizabeth, and I started this blog in 2017. I was born in Iowa. I went to college at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and I got a job (almost) right out of college in agricultural policy. More on that later.  I’m an introvert, and I love knitting/crocheting, baking, reading, travel photography, and writing here. I’ve been to 31 countries. I have strong opinions on a lot of things.

The Cast of Characters

• Me, your protagonist. Obviously.
• SunCat, the real star of the show. My 16-year-old cat. For context, I’m 28, so she’s been with me for over half of my life. I got her as a kitten from a family friend when I was 12, right after my grandma died. She’s wonderful and perfect and she rules the house like the 7.5 lb benevolent dictator that she is. Background of her alias: She’s not the biggest star in the universe, but she’s the most important one – the center of my goddamn solar system. Deal with it.
• StarCat. My 6-year-old rescue cat. Also adopted as a kitten because Suncat wasn’t willing to tolerate another adult cat in her territory at the time. Now, he’s literally 2.5x SunCat’s size. Goofy. Confused. Constantly looks startled, and always trying to convince everyone that he’s starving to death. He idolizes SunCat; she tolerates him.
• StarDog. 5-year-old rescue dog. I think he’s a border collie mix. He’s paranoid and easily startled by things (three minutes ago, he went into a barking fit because he decided, once again, that the ceiling fan was out to get us). Basically, he’s the dog version of a conspiracy theorist. He’s fantastic and a sweetheart. He and StarCat are frenemies.
• Lyra: My best friend. We met as freshman-year roommates in college. Now, she’s also living with me in the house I bought when I moved to Cleveland, Ohio. She’s wonderful and empathetic, and she calls me on my bullshit. She wrote this guest post for me last year.
• Comet: Lyra’s dog. StarDog’s faithful sidekick. Comet and StarDog are best friends too – just like us!! Cue a chorus of “awws.”
• Nova: My best friend. We met in our junior year of high school, and I feel like our friendship clicked immediately. She’s crazy smart, and she pushes me to aim higher. She’s a badass law student at Harvard, and she wrote this guest post for me last year.

The Setting

When I first started this blog, I was still living and working in the Washington, DC area (Arlington, VA, specifically). In case you aren’t aware, it’s a very expensive place, and it’s a difficult place to pursue personal financial goals on a single income. Let’s talk about those financial goals.

1) I knew I wanted to buy a house. This was important to me, and homeownership can be a valuable tool to build wealth. The most I could EVER afford in DC (at least for the foreseeable future on my career path and on a single income) was a very sad one-bedroom condo. And even that was out of my reach for at least 5 more years if I didn’t want to triple my commute. No thank you.  2) At some point, I want a family. And I want a family whether or not I have a partner in the mix.

Homeownership seemed out of reach in DC; having children as a single parent felt straight-up laughable. While this isn’t in the immediate plan, I also knew that I wanted to start taking steps so that it would be possible if I chose that route down the road.

Anyway, in my experience, DC has a lot of young professionals and people farther along in their career; there aren’t many people in the middle though. And in DC, it would have taken me much longer to reach my goals, if I ever got there at all. I realized I wasn’t happy there, so I decided to move. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my personal goals for professional success.

Now, I live in the Cleveland, Ohio area. It’s much more affordable, and when I moved, I bought a house. I have a home office, and Lyra (who moved to Cleveland in early 2019) is my roommate. Despite not really getting much of a chance to see the city yet (#COVIDsucks, amiright?), I’m loving it here. 

Some Background

When I graduated from college, I took an internship that didn’t pay enough to cover my cost of living in the DC area. It was stressful, but that internship also felt like a stepping stone to my dream career. 

When I got an amazing job offer 3 months into that 6-month internship, I was elated. I was thrilled, and excited, and over-the-moon happy. A real job! With real responsibility! With a company that I could see myself staying with long-term! I loved the work and the people and the purpose. And all of that is still true. But the things we love aren’t always good for us. And it took me several years before I realized that.

I’ve always been a box-checker. Get good grades and test scores (check); get into a top university (check); pick a “serious” major (check); graduate with honors (check); get an impressive career-track job (check); work 40 years and hope to retire financially secure at the end…*record scratch.* Wait, what?

I always intended to follow all the steps. To work securely in a full-time job with 401(k) contributions and benefits and health insurance. But once I was there, I started to feel like that it wasn’t the right choice for me, especially in a city where checking all of those boxes *still* doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be comfortable or financially secure. A few years in, I realized I wasn’t okay with that. And I think that I have, in part, a grocery delivery truck to thank for that revelation.

Did I Lose You?

Bear with me. This definitely isn’t a connection I saw at the time, or even when I originally wrote about this on this blog (I’ll link to those posts after providing a quick recap). My sophomore year of college, I was hit by a grocery delivery truck when I was crossing the street. It was the second day of classes, the sun was shining, and I was excited for the new semester. And then…BAM. My entire life was derailed. You can read more details about that experience in this post and this one. It remains, hands down, the most pain I’ve ever experienced.

I was terrified, and I had no idea what to do next. For the first time in my life, there were no clear steps or boxes to check. So, because I ALWAYS needed boxes to check, I reached for the ones that seemed the most straightforward. Specifically, do everything I could to keep my life on track to achieve the goals I had already set. Use the same boxes I had already established, despite the fact that my life had changed drastically.

That meant taking classes part-time while recovering at home (I had a total of three surgeries over 2 years) so that I could still claim junior year status. Which then allowed me to 1) keep my internship in Southeast Asia that summer (which is, shockingly, not a very handicap-friendly place) and 2) Keep my prestigious study abroad slot at the London School of Economics. Not ONCE did I stop and think, hey, maybe spending a year in a city where I know NO ONE, after going through this super traumatic experience and having my life derailed and already spending one semester away from my friends, was not a good idea. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t a good idea. I regret that year abroad on so many levels.

Circling back. I almost died in that accident. And the accident, surgeries, and long recovery were all highly traumatic. Of course I shouldn’t have expected myself to jump right back into my life and my previous plans. And now, I 100% think that experience directly led to my complete unwillingness to commit 40 years of my life to full-time, 9-5 employment. Because, y’all, I’ve seen the alternative. There’s no guarantee that any of us make it to the end where we get the (highly uncertain) prize of relaxing on a beach for 20 more years.

I’ve always been highly risk-averse. I like to cover all my bases and choose the path of most security. So it’s telling that I don’t see the most secure path as full-time, traditional office work. There is too much risk of not getting the end reward that I want. 

I get the mentality that you “put in your time” and “do the work” and then you end up comfortable and successful at the peak of your career in your 50s. But I’m not willing to wait. I’m not willing to struggle and stress for 20 more years to get that. To juggle personal and professional commitments in a work environment that creates so much tension between the two. I didn’t make the connection to my accident and its aftermath right away, but regardless, I did realize that. And I jumped off the damn bandwagon.

The Role of Mental Health

Let’s pause here to talk about mental health in my journey. I have always been an anxious person. My mom can recount the time I almost had a nervous breakdown because of standardized tests in 4th grade (tangent: not because I was worried about doing well, but because my teacher and school administrators put so much pressure on me to do well and bring up the average for the class. That’s fucked up. But that’s a whole other soapbox). 

For the first part of my life, I did okay managing that anxiety. Not in a healthy way, but I did manage it. Namely, by pretending I had control over ALL THE THINGS or that I could gain control through sheer force of will. Shockingly, that doesn’t actually work. 

But take a baseline of anxiety (and accompanying depression), and throw something in the mix that you actually have a reason to be anxious and depressed about (like a major traumatic accident). That right there? A full-on recipe for disaster. I’m going to write more about the mental health aspect and the way it’s influenced my actions in another post, but I think it’s important to highlight it here in broad terms because it’s an important part of this story.

Another thing I realized? My life trajectory, my choices, my career, my productivity levels–those are all going to be affected by my mental health. Burying my feelings so that I can achieve some society-mandated measure of success is just about the worst thing I could possibly do. And that success was useless if I wasn’t happy when I got there.

It doesn’t matter that I loved my job in DC. That I cared about the subject matter, and my coworkers, and the people I was working for. I wasn’t healthy, and I wasn’t happy. So I had to leave, for my own well-being. 

Finding a New Path

When I started this blog, I did so because I was just starting to figure out my own financial shit. I was dealing with credit card debt, and I wasn’t saving enough. I vaguely realized I didn’t want to work for 40 years, and I stumbled across the FIRE Movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). The FIRE concept is that you save as much as you can as quickly as possible, and then you retire well before 65 and live off of what you’ve saved and invested. There are a lot of nuances in the movement, but that’s the basic gist.

I was still figuring out my own philosophy with work when I started writing. The idea of being able to not work a full-time job was really appealing, but I thought I was too risk-averse to switch to entrepreneurship or self-employment, which made some sort of FIRE path a potential alternative.

I pretty quickly evolved past the FIRE Movement. I love the idea of being Financially Independent; the emergency fund I saved once I started getting my act together is what allowed me to quit my job last year. But I’m much less focused on the idea of Retiring Early. And that distinction is pretty common for others in this movement as well. I am so grateful for the movement in helping me find my new path, and I’ve made so many great friends already – the personal finance community is pretty wonderful.

This blog has always been about the PERSONAL much more than the FINANCE. Money is a tool to achieve goals; it should never be the goal in itself. And, in fact, that concept is what inspired my blog’s name. As I wrote about my own financial journey, it became more and more apparent that for so many people, money is less of a tool and more of a giant obstacle to their goals. And, slowly, it dawned on me that this was something I wanted to help people with.

Getting from that general “want” to a clear action plan was a messy, circuitous route. I applied to a lot of regular, full-time jobs, thinking that if I got out of DC, I’d be happier and could then reassess things. I toyed with the idea of starting my own business, but I also realized the significant regulatory hurdles to doing that (if I wanted to give out investment advice, which I think is a pretty important component of money advice).

Finally, and very serendipitously, I met a wonderful woman (let’s call her “Luna”) who was already running her own financial planning business. And who wanted to expand that by taking on associates. And who wanted me to join her.

So I Did

In early 2019, I passed the Series 65 exam, which was necessary for me to give investment advice to clients. I then started working part-time with Luna, and I started seeing my first clients. This was while I was still working my full-time job, and in fact was taking on more responsibility there. But I loved starting with clients, and I was GOOD at it. Which is a great feeling.

Finally, halfway through 2019, I realized that I couldn’t continue growing this business while also giving enough time and attention to my full-time work. So I decided to take that leap from the bandwagon of full-time, regular employment.

I’m not going to lie and say that jump was easy. The bandwagon was cushy. With a mirage of stability and security that was so attractive when I started out. The road is rocky, and it’s filled with potholes and washed out sections. And I’m not even a mile in.

Checking In with Myself

Since quitting my job (and moving to a new state, and buying a house), I’ve been checking in with myself. Do I regret my decision yet? January: No. February, with client growth not coming as quickly as hoped: Nope. March, with the world unsettled and a pandemic rearing its head: No. April, with everything shut down, minimal clients, and full-on weeks-worth of existential dread: STILL NO. May, with no longer feeling like I have to silence my views about racial inequality for professional reasons: hell no!. June, with more of the same shit that has made 2020 so freaking long: Definitely not. July: with a backyard that I can garden in, and flexibility in my schedule every day: Nope! (duh). August: Well, August just started, and the world seems to be one disaster after another. So I guess we’ll see. But so far, not yet.

Ok, do I wish that I had somehow been able to pick a more stable time to take this leap? Yes. Of course. But I STILL DON’T REGRET IT. I cannot imagine dealing with that existential dread while also attempting to be fully productive in a 40-hr-a-week job. I can’t imagine isolating myself away from other people in a dark, 600 sq ft apartment. Or not being able to take the time I need to come to terms with this “new normal.” I’m so glad that I ended up unintentionally giving myself the space I need to deal with this absurdly stressful time in our world.

The Present

Okay, now you’re all caught up. That is the insane Cliff Notes version of my life since (and before) starting the blog. I love the work I’m doing, and I’m proud that I’m helping people in a very direct way. To be clear, I was proud of the work I did before, too, but it was helping in a much more esoteric, DC policy way. Which sometimes took years and where progress could be intangible and/or fleeting. And it was exhausting. I’m hopeful that this new path will allow me to balance my mental health and professional goals in a much more sustainable way long-term.

If you came to this blog for actual concrete money advice, I’ll probably disappoint you. That’s not what I’m here to talk about. If you’d like to talk to me about my work in financial planning, send me an email at owningthestars@gmail.com.

And don’t worry; the internet is vast! There are SO MANY wonderful bloggers out there who are giving out much more concrete advice online. And so many of them are badass women writers (which is a label I aspire to). Rather than reinvent that wheel, I have been (and want to continue) spending my time writing about the intangible side of this equation. Money is important, but understanding our own relationships with money and our professional lives? That’s equally important.

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As I continue to muddle through this journey, I hope some of what I write here will be helpful. And I hope it will empower you to break out of whatever status quo is holding you back. If you’re a return reader, I hope this clarified some things (though it probably just added more confusion). If you’re a new reader, welcome. Rather than go through all of my past posts, here are some of my favorites/the ones I consider more important (it’s about ⅓ of the posts I’ve written so far):

Annual Recaps

• 2018 in Review
• 2019 in Review

On My Mental Health

• Mental Health, Part 1: The Dangerous Fallacy of Invincibility
• Mental Health, Part 2: Sanity and Financial Security
• The Value of Happiness: Why I Walked Away From $40k
• When Optimization is Suboptimal
• Slowing Down

On My Move/Career Change

• The Tyranny of Monotony at Work
• New Year and New Goals
• A Spreadsheet and the Paradox of Choice
• It’s Official: I’m Moving To…
• I’m Buying a House!
• So…I Guess It’s 2020 Now?

General

• The Origin of a Name
• Beware of Financial Baobabs
• Write Yourself a Financial Love Letter
• Delaying Gratification and the Art of Sourdough Bread
• Breaking Free of Assigned Identities
• Why I Don’t Buy Organic
• Charitable Giving in My Budget
• The FIRE Movement’s Fatphobia Problem

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Til next time,

Elizabeth