Know Your Blogger Series

Financial Chain Breakers

Financial Chain Breakers is a reaction to this suffocating life that everyone tells us to aspire to. Too much is defined by soul-sucking jobs, massive taxes, and societal expectations about how I “should” spend my hard-earned money. Apparently, I’m supposed to live in the best school district, pay for my kids’ college, happily go to fancy restaurants with friends, and fly across the country for freaking weddings. It’s like everyone has their hands in my pockets. It’s no wonder people are in debt up to their eyeballs.
So, Financial Chain Breakers is about overcoming all of that BS, reclaiming our money, and reclaiming our lives.
Check out our Q&A with Financial Chain Breakers here.

Break out from your financial struggles and read this awesome interview of the Financial Chain Breakers.

Each week at Personal Finance Blogs, we publish interviews from amazing bloggers from the personal finance space. This week, we are featuring the blog, Financial Chain Breakers.
During these weekly features, we are hoping to provide a way for you to interact and learn more about different blogs in the personal finance space.
Below, you can read more about the story behind Financial Chain Breakers, learn about the author, and learn personal finance tips from Financial Chain Breakers to help you improve your financial situation.
A big thanks for Financial Chain Breakers for this interview! Now, we will turn it over to the author for this interview.

Tell us about Financial Chain Breakers

So, Financial Chain Breakers is about overcoming all of that BS, reclaiming our money, and reclaiming our lives. I chronicle the ways we’ve gotten smart with our spending so that we have more money left over for the things that really matter to us, like having epic adventures with the people we love! We’re saving up so we can quit our jobs as soon as possible, so we can have even more epic adventures, and I want to help other people do the same.

What makes you and your blog unique?

I try to challenge everything. It’s the lawyer in me. I’ve looked at why military and civilian pensions are often a ripoff, why kids don’t have to be as expensive as everybody says they are, why student loans can be awesome, why there’s nothing wrong with owning designer shoes, and so on.

As a finance major who used to be a personal finance train-wreck, I am allergic to boring financial analyses. Everything I write is aimed at making life as freaking awesome as possible and keeping the money stuff as basic and interesting as possible.

What does “being good with your personal finances” mean to you?

You’re good with your finances if you’re deliberate and disciplined toward reaching a financial goal. Beyond that, I don’t believe in any strict rules, aside from not taking on obscene auto or credit card debt or living beyond your means.

What this looks like in practice totally depends on your on income, interests, and other responsibilities. There’s nothing inherently wrong with student loans, mortgages, going on expensive vacations, or having nice things. What matters is that before doing any of those things you’ve thought long and hard about how they fit in with your larger plan.

Even somebody who lives within their means and has no debt isn’t “good with their personal finances” if they’re mindlessly buying new cars, fancy houses, or the latest Apple products just because it’s “normal.”

What are some habits you practice to keep your personal finances in order?

Hands down, my favorite financial habit is giving myself a personal allowance of “fun money.” It’s like a pressure-release valve for all of the completely unjustifiable things I want. I just used it to buy a $225 sweater that I looooooove, and my husband used his to buy some Bose speaker or something that I have zero appreciation for. We have a strict limit, owe no explanations, and don’t feel guilty. Then, we get on with our super-old car that doesn’t have air conditioning and our old bathroom that we’re too cheap to remodel yet.

Also, we really try—like try hard—to fill our lives up with free and cheap adventures that keep life super exciting without breaking the bank. We hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (and back up, duh) and to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite—making priceless memories for a few hundred bucks. I’ve learned to make amazing pizza, bread, ravioli, and even sushi at home, which all beats restaurant food for a fraction of the cost. It’s so much more rewarding that way too. When life is so full of inexpensive adventures, there’s no time left for expensive ones.

And of course we do the pretty-standard FIRE stuff. Our “newest” car is a 2006 model, our house is modest, we rock older-model iPhones with Straight Talk $35 plans, we don’t have cable, and we maximize credit card reward incentives.

What are your three articles people should read to get to know you and your message better on your site?

When Family and Friends See Money Differently – Some thoughts on handling friends and family members who rope us into expensive dinners, vacations, and other arrangements.

Your Kids Might Actually Be a Financial Bargain – I’m no parenting expert, but I have successfully raised one to adulthood without spending a fortune. So I’ve written a few posts that challenge the prevailing wisdom about kids and money.

The Food Hike: Exercise and Food? Um, Yes – One of our favorite ways to get some unrushed, undistracted, and inexpensive family bonding time.

For someone looking to improve their financial situation, what’s your best advice?

Just get started! It’s super easy to get discouraged when you only have $10 left at the end of the month to pay down debt or invest. And it’s super easy to get intimidated by all the money gurus who are throwing around numbers in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But we all started there too.

Financial improvements are really just about persistence and patience. I know, it’s not as sexy as a get-rich-quick infomercial. But it’s also not rocket science. Absorb information from books, blogs, and podcasts. Figure out how to cut expenses, make more money, and invest regularly.

And then just keep at it. What starts as little trickles of investments eventually become streams and rivers. As Bill Gates has said, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

What’s an area of your life which has benefited from improving your personal finances? Have there been any areas of your life which have suffered?

The benefit to my marriage and relationship with our kids has been priceless. Having clear parameters for our spending has helped us all be on the same page, without any concerns about who is getting the biggest piece of the pie. And having better control of our money has actually helped us have more fun. Our hikes and camping trips have been far more memorable than the pricey amusement park days that used to be our go-to.

I wouldn’t say our relationships with friends and extended family have suffered, but there has been some realignment. We seek out our likeminded friends without reservation. But the ones who prefer $50-per-person Fourth of July fireworks shows? We proceed with caution and lots of behind-the-scenes strategizing.

What are your favorite personal finance books?

The Millionaire Next Door, by Thomas J. Stanley. The data about how real rich people got that way blew my mind. It ran completely counter to everything I had learned about money from my parents and society.

Honestly, every book and blog I read after that just helped fill in the finer points, but none reordered my thinking like The Millionaire Next Door did. For anyone who grew up with new cars and going shopping every weekend (or anyone who aspired to), it’s the best place to start.

If you received a $5,000,000 windfall tomorrow, what would you do with the money?

First of all, I wouldn’t tell a soul aside from my husband. Nobody.

Then, I would quit my job and strategically outsource some parts of my life—household chores, managing rental properties, and all those random annoying things like making doctor’s appointments—so that I could focus my energy on causes I’m actually passionate about.

Finally, I’m sure I would give a chunk of it away before investing the rest in real estate or index funds. I sure don’t need $5,000,000, and there’s no way in hell I’m leaving that much money to my kids!

What’s a non-money related interest you have and what do you love about it?

I looooove cooking! I struggled to really embrace it, because I used to have an irrational fear of turning into a stereotypical 1950’s housewife. But my stint in the military shooting guns helped me prove to myself that I could do any number of other things if I wanted to. I just didn’t want to.

What starts as a random assortment of vegetables, grains, and herbs on a grocery store conveyor belt turns into a mouth-watering meal. It’s an amazing transformation, and I’m the magician who did it! And, bonus, it brings us together to actually look at each other and have a conversation, rather than texting each other from separate corners of the house. There’s something about the act of creating something, and creating something so satisfying, that has me completely hooked.

It’s also a challenge and an adventure! I had many from-scratch tamale and gnocchi failures, but both felt like such an achievement when I pulled them off!

Why do you believe learning about money and caring about personal finance is important?

If we don’t control our money, it will control us. Eating, putting a roof over our heads, and going anywhere all cost money; that’s a fact that holds true whether we’re young and healthy or old and sick. If we never have enough of it, life is going to be extremely stressful and inwardly focused, especially as we get older.

If we have control of our money, we can look outward. We have more freedom to pursue activities and causes we actually care about and that make a difference to more people than just us.

Who wants to spend the best years of their lives beholden to a soul-sucking job? To me, it’s a no-brainer.

How You Can Contact Financial Chain Breakers for More Information

You can learn more about Financial Chain Breakers at https://financialchainbreakers.com/ and follow them on Twitter at @financialchain1
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Thank you for reading this interview, and thank you, Financial Chain Breakers, for providing us with some great personal finance tips!