Make the business money stuff easier when you're creative or neurodivergent (plus behind-the-scenes of building a business that fits).
When Lex Roman from Revenue Rulebreaker reached out while writing a story about ways entrepreneurs save for retirement, I got so excited about the topic that I accidentally ended up writing a full story that I’ve turned into the blog post below.
I'm not a financial planner professional so I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone figuring this out over time. I'm very self-educated. I do work in business accounting, which is finance-adjacent but not the same thing.
Context: married, no kids and no plans to have them, and we rent (not homeowners). No major debt (I got grants for college and paid off my used car years ago). We were in Dallas–Fort Worth, TX, and now live in Seattle, WA. I was a freelance interpreter working part-time hours for years before starting my bookkeeping business in 2022.
How I got started
I didn't seriously start thinking about retirement until 2020. I'm not exactly sure what started the journey, but I’d been frustrated for a while of being stuck in this limbo of "I work to live, can’t get ahead" and I felt there has to be some way out of this loop.
And that meant I was ready to listen when I found out about FIRE (financial independence, retire early). I first heard about it through Rashida Dowe from her YouTube channel Shida on the Loose, who talked about it along with the idea of Black women taking career sabbaticals.
Because FIRE talks about preparing for retirement on an accelerated timeline, it was almost like a crash course on what retirement even means and how it was relevant to me. FIRE made retirement feel relevant right away, something I could act on now since it always seemed to be about people with houses and kids (things I didn't have or want). I was a 30-something who'd spent her 20s just trying to keep a savings account and manage what I later realized in 2020 was burnout. Based on my freelance interpreter income at the time, I looked at the online retirement calculator and thought “I’m not going to be able to save enough to retire early but maybe I can retire on the regular timeline.” FIRE kind of gave me some hope. So then the question became: what do I need to do to get started?