In my first post, I showed our starting point and I hope this didn’t make people think we have had an incredibly easy trust-fund style life where we can breeze our way to FIRE. I had pulled out all the typical categories that would show up when tracking net worth (and the things lenders ask about when shopping for a mortgage).
While our current loan debt is zero, it was as high as $450,000 in 2016 (this includes the mortgage though). I like to think I am a pretty smart person, but I can use my hindsight and realize I haven’t always made the greatest financial decisions. Today, however I am going to focus on my best investment, EVER!
Finding the One
In 2004 (14 years ago) I noticed one of my classmates in a new light. We’d known each for at least six years already and possibly longer as she was in the same Girl Scout troop as my sister. I can still remember the day in AP US History class when I looked over and in an instant my perspective of this girl that I used to tease about being a vegetarian in 6th grade shifted.
I won’t go into all the details today, but over those next 12 months we went from being just classmates to dating. In those awkward teenage years you never know how long something is going to last, but we invested a lot of time while we finished high school and then went to different colleges.
College Life
During our freshman year we took turns each month riding Amtrak for 7 hours each way to visit each other for the weekend. After that year I made a big decision that my parents tried really hard to talk me out of thinking I was making a huge mistake. I transferred schools to the college Lady Kit was attending. This was a bit of a gamble as things could turned out poorly, but I think it was necessary to keep our relationship strong, but the year apart did give us some experience to future obstacles we would have.
Transferring schools didn’t hinder my job prospects either. I graduated in 3.5 years to get my engineering degree and got a job in Southern California where I worked until January of this year.
When Lady Kit graduated with her degree in Animal Science she moved down to Southern California with me and began work as Vet Tech while she applied to vet school. Vet school would be a tough time for our relationship and we knew this even before she was accepted as there are only two vet schools in California. One was 7 hours away, the other was 1.5 hours away.
Marriage and Vet School
We got married one year before she started vet school. 
Shortly after our anniversary she vet school an hour and a half away which necessitated renting a room near campus. During this time my work had me traveling 30% of the year and her education took up most of her time. I’d visit her every other weekend when I could, but living apart is difficult. Most people couldn’t understand how we did it, but we had some practice early on when we started at different schools. The thing that kept us going was we knew it wasn’t forever, it was only for a set amount of time (which then got extended by 1 year when she accepted an internship and I took a temporary assignment in Washington, D.C.).
We’ve invested a lot of time into our relationship, but if all I was going to talk about was time, why did I bother to mention the amount of debt we had at the beginning of this post? For those of you that don’t know, vet school is expensive, private vet schools are more expensive. During this time we had the mortgage on our house ($400,000), and renting a room near her school ($500 a month), and the cost of tuition ($50,000 a year for four years).
Her grandparents had set aside some money for college (which she didn’t need for undergraduate) so we were able to make through the first year without student loans and without dipping too much into our reserves. The second depleted our reserves, but we managed to make it without student loans once again. Unfortunately we need loans to make through years 3 and 4.
I think we did incredibly well though. Lady Kit graduated in 2016 with her DVM from school that cost $200,000 plus living expense with a grand total of $70,000 in student loan debt. Many other medical graduates (dental, MDs, other DVMs) have student loans in the multiple six figures.
We paid off her student loans last year, a little more than one year after graduating. The time I invested in supporting her, and the money we invested in her education has resulted in joining a profession she thoroughly enjoys (thus making our goal more financial independence and less early retirement) and where she is now the primary income earner. Not to mention all the benefits of understanding the difficulties of living apart and being able to truly appreciate the time we spend together and realizing our goals in life are not purely financial or materialistic.
Financially there was high upfront cost, but she has a career now that pays well and will help us achieve financial independence in 5-10 years.
