About

Here you’ll find stories about personal finance, one-income family finances, intentional spending, family travel, rejecting consumerism, and our journey to financial independence while raising four kids. Our long-term goal is to downsize, simplify our life, and move abroad.

Hi I’m Chelsie! We are a family of six pursuing financial freedom since 2021. Also known as FIRE (financial independence retire early.) Along the way I’ve become really interested in what I call the art of enough, minimalism, and figuring out when you actually have enough so you can focus more on experiences, relationships, and living your life instead of constantly chasing the next thing. Our dream is to retire in France with our kids to a slower pace in the country and live happily ever after. 😉

I stay at home and manage the home, finances, travel and credit cards. We have always had one income. I don’t consider myself deprived, I am not frugal. I focus on cutting consumer expenses and the art of enough, and I highly value spending on travel and experiences instead.

We currently live in Michigan, but have moved around a lot for my husband’s job (non-military) (Louisiana, Florida, New Hampshire, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana again, Indiana, and Michigan) What moving taught me about the “forever home” trap.

A short financial history

I knew absolutely nothing about personal finance, so we put all our energy into real estate, our primary home. We learned by doing, putting in sweat equity and doing a lot of renovations ourselves. We started at zero in 2013 when we got married. Zero debt, but also zero retirement savings. In 2014 – 2019 we had four beautiful kids, one real estate win, one real estate stupidity, a layoff, several moves to several states and three medical emergencies which threw our finances into a tailspin.

In 2020 we started at zero invested. Though we had a real estate history, so we didn’t start with zero net worth. We came to a crossroads with our dream house that we built and a series of expensive, unexpected costs, and decided to sell, and move. I found The Simple Path to Wealth book, and I committed to spending the entire year reading everything I could about finances while I grieved and let go of our dream home. I committed to learning about finance, and questioned the American dream of building wealth through real estate. Maybe it wasn’t the answer to building wealth like most of society said. Maybe accumulating wasn’t the goal, and neither was chasing, grinding and constantly moving the goal posts.

January 2021 I invested my first ever $100.

We continue to reevaluate our priorities, our goals, and our journey to enough.

In 2025 we explored the idea of not buying another house in the United States, and instead we began to ponder the idea of living abroad. So we made an intentional decision to declutter and downsize. I have tried several times to declutter since 2014… it’s been an ongoing challenge.

I’m glad you’re here, I hope to share candidly and openly, please say hello!