financial independence / early retirement

My wife and I are on our path to FI. We are in our 30s and we were a bit late to realize how money works. Although we just started, the thought of achieving something big, that never even crossed our minds before is very powerful and promising.

We are three years into our marriage and we made some bad decisions the first year which put us in a lot of debt and that eventually pushed me to know more about FI and how money works. Since then we have recovered and I can proudly say that we became debt-free 3 months ago. We have been trying to save as much as we can to build an emergency fund and once we achieve that, we will start to invest.

My only concern so far has been that my wife is not a math person. She has been 100% supportive of me taking charge of the finances and budgeting but when it comes to me showing her numbers and graphs, she freaks out and cannot comprehend. Its like she is scared of graphs and math. She told me she has been traumatized by her math teacher in class and she even fears calculators now. Keeping this in mind I never pushed her to learn about numbers and percentages and extrapolating graphs but I always wanted to teach her how investments work just in case I am incapacitated and she can take care of herself.

Yesterday, as I was thinking of ways to at least show her how our budget works, I remembered a diagram (sankey diagram) but I didnt know the name of it so I turn to you guys and tried to explain what I was looking for. I am so thankful to those that replied and told me it was Sankey diagram. I went ahead and make the Sankey diagram for my wife thinking it has no graphs, its very visual and easy to understand. And, when I went home and showed her that, she loved it! She understood everything listened to me with 100% attention while I was explaining everything to her on the diagram.

I just want to emphasize on the importance of your spouse being on-board in the FI journey and that you have to find ways of making it easy for them to get onboard and not push them to do it if they do not know the concept. For those of you who are still single, keep this in mind that once you are not single anymore, the most important thing in FI journey will be your spouse supporting, understanding and working towards your shared Financial Independence goal.

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financial independence / early retirement

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