Audience Reaction/Other

I am. I am.

Wow.

$600.

Hey, guys. Can you hear me okay?

It's approximately $1.25 million.

Well, I'm at an age that I don't care anymore. I'm 55 and my husband's 58.

Sure. I have approximately $689,200 in retirement, and that is broken up into a 403B, two Roth IRAs, and two traditional IRAs. Awesome. And what else? I have a non-retirement brokerage account with about $50,000. Checking account is about $1,000. I call it savings account. Very liquid number one is $4,400.

And savings account number two, which is a high-yield savings account, which is about $51,000. Our primary home is worth about $2.25. That's paid off?

everything's paid off yeah um let's see i have i'm i'm in the process of getting rid of my whole life policy and once i do that that will add in another thirteen thousand dollars that's cash value good for you wow way to go and you guys have a couple cars i imagine um yeah and those are paid off what are those worth Those are paid off.

We have an 09 Hyundai Sonata that's probably worth about maybe $2,000 if I'm lucky.

And I have a 2015 Jeep Patriot. I'm just going to guess around $8,000.

I love my Sonata. It has 198,000 miles on it, and it runs real good.

Okay. Let's see. Worst year was $22,600. Okay. And then our best year, which was in 2024, was $126,000. Awesome. And any of this money was inherited? Let's see.

So it did not cause you to become a millionaire? No. That is correct.

Yeah, I have a bachelor's in education and a bachelor's in biology. And my husband has a bachelor's in computer science.

My husband never got into the field of computer science. He actually worked for an insurance agency.

I am actually using both degrees. I spent about 23 years working as a medical technologist in a hospital laboratory. And the medical technology school that I attended, I later became an instructor for. Oh, nice. So I kind of did both. And in 2018, I managed to land a management position that required my expertise.

Um, so basically I was thinking about the answer to this question and basically you have to have the right mindset first. You have to not care what anybody else thinks. You have to work hard. You have to have discipline. Um, that's the first thing you got to get your mindset first. And then the second step is going to be the KISS principle.

Keep it simple, stupid, pay yourself first, save first, save often and save early.

Um, actually funny story. Well, not funny story, but, um, back in 2017, my husband was diagnosed with partial seizure disorder and he had to turn in his driver's license. So, um, that was the same year my daughter went off to college. So I was the only driver in the family family. So, um, we would carpool, you know, obviously to work and to doctor's appointments and everything.

And, um, you know, it's boring sitting in a parking lot waiting for someone to come out of work. So, um, I started flipping the radio station and lo and behold, I heard Dave on one of his rants and I'm like, this is cool. So I listened to the show and podcast for about six months and then we jumped on the plan.

And then about a year later, after the circus came to town during that famous year, I joined every dollar to tighten everything up. So basically, we were already almost there. We kind of did Dave Twisted instead of Dave In.

Well, you just have to have a mindset, and it doesn't matter how much you're saving. As long as you start early and put anything in, whatever you can save. And I do have to add a little bit to my story. Fourteen years, I was part-time. Most of my career, I was part-time. And we paid for private school for our daughter. preschool through college. We cash flowed a wedding.

You know, we did all that. And our average salary, I calculated it because I'm a math nerd, sorry. Our average salary was like $69,000 throughout our life.

Yeah, we never made six figures until 2019. Wow. Way to go. So anybody... Anybody out there listening, you can't tell me you can't do it because if I can do it with all that stuff and all those circumstances, then you have no excuse.