A portrait of Childfree Freedom - Amelia and Matt
Jay Zigmont, PhD, MBA, CFP®
Amelia
29, Female, Married, Colorado
Bachelor’s in Sustainable Business
Sustainability Manager
Sustainability Manager
Matt
33, Male, Married, Colorado
Automation Design
33, Male, Married, Colorado
Automation Design
This portrait is one of 26 real life stories presented in the book, Portraits of Childfree Wealth. You can download a free copy here.
Amelia and Matt have been married for nine years and are
living their best lives with a freedom that most would envy.
Amelia works as a sustainability manager for a pet supplement
company while Matt runs his own business in automation
design. Matt also serves our country in the Air National Guard. They
live with no debt, in a paid-for house with their dog and cat. They
recently moved from Michigan to Colorado and have made sustainability
and zero waste a large part of their life. Being Childfree is just
part of their life, and as they shared:
“I think we were just, we never felt necessarily the drive to be
parents. Like that was never like a goal or an ambition.”
While Amelia and Matt never really wanted kids, they did
consider adopting. Amelia shared:
“From the time I was little, I was in like middle school, and I was
like, I am never birthing a child. I want to adopt. I was all about it. I
wanted to adopt. And then we decided to be host parents for foreign
exchange students.”
Matt was on board:
“I was open to adoption just from an empathetic point of, like, these
kids need homes. So sure, I could do that. But I did not want to be a
dad, which creates a lot of problems. So we ended up hosting
foreign exchange students.”
Matt and Amelia suggest hosting foreign exchange students as a
chance to “try out” having kids. Unfortunately, their experience did
not go well. Amelia shared:
“We gave it a solid go, and we’re really bad at it. Three of them left
before their year was up because they hated living with us so much.”
Matt continued:
“We liked her. We didn’t like being parents. We didn’t like having
rules. We just did not like being parents. That was not fun. At that
point, we were like, all right, this is a real clear indicator that we
could just not have kids, and that’d be great.”
So, do they have any thoughts about fostering now?
“No, I think the only instance that we’ve talked about of ever having
kids is if something traumatic happened. For example, if my brother
and sisters died and my nieces and nephews needed help, we would
take them. We would take care of them. So, it’s almost unrealistic
that that would happen. We said we would be willing, but I think
they know us.”
When I asked what they think the most significant benefit of
being Childfree is, Matt was quick to say it is Freedom:
“I think it’s freedom for me. Freedom, autonomy. It’s on a macro
level, like this evening. If I want to go do a thing, I can just go and
do a thing. It doesn’t matter what the thing is. As long as I’m in
good health, I can do anything. It doesn’t matter. Same with financial
freedom. If we want to ruin our financial trajectory for our
future, that’s fine. It doesn’t affect our kids and doesn’t affect
anyone except the two of us. We don’t even have the responsibility
for somebody else to raise them. So, across the board, it is
freedom.”
They don’t have any regrets about being Childfree and even see it
as a way to prevent regrets, as Amelia explained:
“Growing up, I was an only child. My mom was a single parent. She
was a good mom, and she loved me very much, but she also made it
very clear that my birth kind of ruined her the trajectory that she
had planned for herself. She didn’t get to have the career she wanted
or do the traveling that she wanted or do anything. So, I think that
solidified it for me. I mean, you might have a kid and regret it too.
That sounds a whole lot worse.”
Amelia and Matt are happy with their life and living what I call
the FILE lifestyle. If FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is
an on/off switch for work, FILE (Financial Independence, Live Early)
is a dimmer switch. It means doing the work you enjoy at a pace you enjoy. For Matt, that includes running his own small business. For
Amelia, it means working a job that she wouldn’t quit, even if she had
more money than she knew what to do with:
“I enjoy my job. My career is something that I’ve been passionate
about since I was young. I love sustainability. I love that I get to go to
work every day, and it sounds dumb, but I feel like I’m impacting the
world. It’s fantastic. I’m trying to leave our planet, if not in a better
place, make it less bad than it could be.”
They are far enough on the path to financial independence that
they can make different decisions, as Matt explained:
“We’re on a trajectory towards financial independence, way sooner
than expected. So, we’ve been thinking about reaching financial
independence. We’ve been living our life that way. Amelia has taken
job opportunities that she’s had a passion for. We up and moved to
Colorado when Amelia lost her last job. I just quit my job and said,
screw it, I’m moving. I just opened a company. If it fails, it fails. If it
goes great, it goes great… I think Amelia is passionate about sustainability
and the stuff that she impacts on the grand scale. For me, I
love a lot of design work. I just love designing things and being
creative.”
Besides a bit more travel and volunteering at a dog rescue in
Spain, Amelia and Matt are living their ideal life. COVID-19 has
cramped some of their travel plans, but they have a big trip planned
to Mexico with a group of friends soon. That trip was scheduled for a
while. It was a bit of a celebration and reconnection since Matt had
just returned from his second deployment with the Air National
Guard. They don’t need an excuse to travel, however. It is just part of
their life and something they can do because they are Childfree:
“I think travel is tough to do when you have kids. Yeah, they say it’s
possible. I’m in a few travel groups on Facebook, and there’s a women’s travel group. In the group, all the time, there’s somebody
who says: I just got pregnant and I’m not going to be able to travel
anymore. People try to say that you still can travel; you just do it
differently. Then they, like, disappear and you never see them again,
and that’s just how it goes. It’s just so much easier to travel without
kids because you can be more reckless too. When we went to
Colombia, everybody was like, you are going to die. You’re just going
to get murdered. That is not how it went. Colombia was lovely. But if
you had a kid that you were responsible for, you wouldn’t bring your
child to the rainforest.”
Travel is a widespread hobby in the Childfree population. For
Matt and Amelia, travel ranges from road trips staying in hostels and
Airbnb to an all-inclusive resort. They love interacting with friends,
families, and strangers. As Matt shared:
“We love people. We absolutely love people, but we don’t like the
idea of creating people. We love strangers. We’re the kind of people
that love to travel, meet strangers and just chat for hours and have
drinks.”
They can travel and live their best lives because they have the
freedom and the finances to do it. It wasn’t that they were born with
money, far from it. As Matt shared:
“We both grew up in trailers, dirt poor.”
Amelia credits growing up in this environment as part of the
reason they are so driven:
“We grew up in a really small, really poor town in Northern
Michigan. There was a lot of poverty, a lot of drugs, and it’s not a
great place to be, but we got out. So that’s good. I think what makes
us so driven is because that’s where we came from. We grew up
watching our parents struggle.”
Matt shared about his life growing up:
“I heard a lot growing up that you guys are expensive, you guys cost
this, you guys are a drain. We don’t have any money. My parents are
divorced, and my dad made like $70,000 or $80,000 a year, which
would be considered well off, but we lived paycheck to paycheck at
best. He was in mountains of debt. He had six kids he was feeding.
He was terrible with money to start. So there was a lot of that
growing up where you saw irresponsibility. I mean, you either have
role models, or you have people that you don’t want to be like, right?
So, he was an example of somebody financially that I didn’t want to
be. Then my parents, on the other side, my mom and stepdad, had
no money. They weren’t necessarily great with their money, but they
started getting a little bit better. You could see the impact of your
financial decisions, and I liked that a lot better. With my dad and as
far as having kids plays into finances, it looked like there was no win.
It was never helpful in any way.”
Growing up poor, in poverty, or lower class is a recurring theme in
my research on the Childfree lifestyle. I don’t know if it is a correlation
or causation relationship, but it is common enough to be a trend.
The challenge with poverty is that it can be tough to get out of. Matt
and Amelia have worked hard, graduated college, and now are in a
great financial situation early in their lives. They are goal-driven
people. The challenge comes once you have achieved your goals, as
Amelia shares:
“I think we’re at an exciting spot right now. Matthew just got home
from deployment last week. My goals were to graduate high school,
and I wanted to graduate college. The minute I graduated college, I
wanted to find full-time work in my field, which frankly was not the
easiest thing to do and took a few years. And by the time I got
full-time work in my field, I was like, just kidding. I don’t like
Michigan. I want to move to Colorado. And that took quite a few
years. And then, by the time I came out here, we knew he was going to be leaving in a couple of months. So, that was looming. And then
he left, and I was like, okay, I just have to get through this. He’s got to
come back home…
The point is that now we’re finally at a point where the next goal
is retirement, which is about ten years away. I’m excited about it. But
for the first time it feels, it doesn’t feel like life is going to start. This
week has been the first week where I still have financial goals and
want to retire, but it’s not something that I’m chasing hard. If retirement
gets pushed out a couple of years, I don’t care. My goals are
more around having meaningful friendships and developing those
relationships. Also, traveling more and being a well-connected
member of my community that can give back and be a good
resource to people I mentor. They’re not really like, oh yeah, I need
to do X.”
Matt sees the goal of FIRE as easy and just a matter of going
through the steps:
“I mean, we’re both goal-oriented, and we have met a lot of our
goals. A lot of the FIRE steps are very achievable, straightforward
goals. Paying your house off is like literally just putting money in,
and the house is paid off. Right? It is just a lot of achievable goals. I
think we’ve achieved a lot of the goals we’ve set for ourselves up to
this point. We are to a point where our goals now are much loftier.
Like a goal of retiring early, we’re going to do that. We’re hitting
milestones and stuff to do that.”
So, what financial plan did they follow to get there? As Amelia
says:
“I’ve got a spreadsheet.”
As Matt explains:
“We’re Excel nerds.”
It isn’t about following a strict spending plan for them but
tracking their progress, retirement accounts, and the like. The key to
them is that they are completely debt-free, including their mortgage.
While growing up, the most significant advice they got was to keep
their credit score up. It may have been the example from their families
that convinced them to get rid of debt altogether:
“I think it was for me at least a hundred percent how I grew up. My
mom was always in so much debt, and everything was on credit
cards and racking up a ton of interest. I know it stressed her out a
bunch, and it just made me nervous, and it was not how I wanted to
live my life. So we made sure not to get into debt. We did have
student loans. We had a car loan once, and we had a mortgage for a
few years. Debt just made me uncomfortable. I understand that it’s
not always the most financially smart thing to pay off debt. I mean,
our mortgage was like 3% interest, and it’s not necessarily the
smartest financial move to pay it off. I know that, but it was just like
the psychological relief of not being in debt was important to us.”
Amelia’s story is familiar. The vast majority of Childfree people I
have talked to who achieved FIRE (or FILE) did two things: they paid
off all of their debt and maxed out their retirement accounts. To
Matt’s point, it isn’t complex. It is just ticking off tasks. Pay consumer
debt first, then invest in retirement and pay off your house. Paying off
all of their debt was just another tool, like being Childfree, that gives
Matt and Amelia freedom to live their best life as she shared:
“It worked out for us. When COVID hit, I lost my job. The entire
sustainability department at my company was eliminated. Because
we didn’t have any debt at all, it was fine. Like, okay, I lost my job.
Cool. And I looked at Matt and said we’re going to move. I lost my
job, made him quit his. We moved across the country. Because we
owned our home outright, we had options. We wouldn’t have been
able to qualify for a mortgage as neither of us had income at that
point. But because we own our home, we could sell it and take that money to buy our home here. We would never have been able to
make that move if we had a mortgage. There was way more freedom
to make a move when the opportunity presented itself. So, it was the
right choice for us.”
About the Author - Jay Zigmont, PhD, CFP® is the Founder of Childfree Wealth, a life and financial planning firm dedicated to helping Childfree and Permanently Childless people. Dr Jay is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, Childfree Wealth Specialist, and author of the book “Portraits of Childfree Wealth.” His Ph.D. is in Adult Learning from the University of Connecticut.
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