I’ve always been the guy at the office everyone asks for financial advice, coupons, deals, credit card rewards, selling stuff, reading legal documents, proofreading, etc. I love getting a good deal and knowing all the gritty details. Outside of reading instruction manuals and legalese, I’m a huge basketball fan. Specifically, the San Antonio Spurs, BYU, and Duke. Growing up, I lived in Houston, then Denver, back to Houston, Philadelphia, and finally settled in Salt Lake City in my 20s. Upper-middle class, white collar, educated family.

My wife (married in 2010) grew up in a much different setting. Until college, she lived in the same house in a small, coal-mining town in Utah. Her home was a one hour drive from a Walmart or even a stoplight. We met while we were both working summer jobs in the Washington, D.C. area, during college. Despite our different upbringings, we grew up with similar interests in sports, food, and adventure. She also knows how to sniff out a deal just as well as I do. She doesn’t quite share the same passion for juggling a stack of seldom used credit cards like I do, but enjoys when we can use the points for flights and room upgrades.

We currently live near Salt Lake City. In 2016, we both quit our jobs in the same month to pursue something new. We took a couple months to reset and decide what was next for us. My wife switched companies, but continued her career as an executive assistant in a much less stressful role. I started my career as a real estate agent, which I’d been talking about doing for about 7 years. I think these decisions helped us both realize that we didn’t want to be obligated to work for a salary/wage for the rest of our lives. Just recently, we realized that if we are smart and ambitious with our finances, we could reasonably “retire” from full-time work in just a few years. At that point, we can dedicate more time to travel, family, hobbies, and whatever challenges we would prefer to tackle if working for money was no longer a necessity.