Back in Jan 2017, I experienced a near over-whelming feeling of inspiration.  Not knowing where this feeling of angst was coming from, I felt a little unsettled but knew it was something related to finance but I could neither pinpoint the source or the destination of where this would lead me.

Within the previous four months, two significant events occurred. Event one was the elimination of about $90k is personal debt that had accumulated over several years.  In order to achieve this debt-free status, it wiped out all cash reserves but the time had come to get this “monkey-turn-King Kong” off of my back.  It was a great feeling until the next event occurred.  It seemed within weeks of wiping out the debt and becoming cashless (meaning no emergency funds), my employment contract was in renewal and other co-workers were being asked to take pay-cuts (like 20% pay-cuts). This is not where you want to be with no cash reserves.

In the final hour before my pay-cut meeting with the boss, I was informed of the meeting cancellation and that my salary would remain the same going into a new three year contract.  While much relieved, that was my wake-up moment that I had to take control of my financial life, well, my whole life.  At this point of my life, comfort and certainty have clouded my view whereby I had developed a false sense of security.  Change must occur and occur immediately. It took another four months for the urge/motivation to do something different to kick-in.

Sometime in Jan 2017, I decided to do a personal financial statement whereby I listed the value of all our assets and subtract out the liabilities (no personal debt) and to my great surprise, our net worth exceeded one million dollars.  I could barely contain myself as we had reached the holy grail of financial success.

While its true that I had some extra pep-in-my-step, fundamentally, nothing had changed. I was still the same person with the same life, except I now had a different perspective of the world and the people who are contained within. Now comes the the heavy burden. The realization that only a small minority of people ever reach this level of financial success or financial stability, I need to understand why and do something to effect change.

Well, I did not have to go very far to understand why the financial roadblocks are so insurmountable because just looking at my own life typifies the average American. No deep research required to get answers because the success and failures of my own journey would likely contain lessons that could help many others achieve the millionaire status.

So here’s the question that I had to ask myself: “Why did it take over twenty years to reach millionaire status?”  In answering this question, I will put pen to paper or electrons to screen to share my journey with the world. To provide a short answer to the the twenty year question, it is my overall assessment that in my “workaholic-mind”, I have covered a lot of ground and all was not helpful. The advice to my former self would be to simplify your life to three key areas (finance, fitness, and faith) to achieve more with greater balance. The birth of the F3 millionaire mindset is hereby born.