It begins in the mind.
Before I ever created a system, I had to train my mind. For the past twenty years, I’ve been shaping how I think about money, time, and control. Without that shift, no system would have lasted.
When I first started saving seriously, it wasn’t easy. I still had impulses. I wanted things. I wanted comfort. But I realized something. Every time I gave in to short-term comfort, I delayed long-term freedom. Once I understood that, I began to see spending as a kind of signal, a reflection of emotion, not logic. So I learned to pause. Every purchase became a small decision-point: Is this something my future self would thank me for?
You don’t need a six-figure salary to build freedom, you need consistency. Even small amounts, invested regularly, grow faster than lump sums invested late. That’s the quiet math behind early retirement: it rewards time and patience.
Most people wait until they feel “ready” to invest, but that readiness never arrives. The earlier you start, the easier the journey becomes, even if it’s just small, automatic contributions. For me twenty years ago, that was $50/month into a diversified mutual fund portfolio. Time does the heavy lifting. Waiting until your 40s or 50s means working twice as hard for the same result. The real secret isn’t how much you invest, it’s how long you let compounding work for you.
It became obvious. If I stopped spending $10 a day on small habits — coffee, snacks, impulse buys — that’s $300 a month. And indeed, I was spending nearly that much on cappuccinos and occasional McDonald breakfasts every month. Instead, I invested that steadily. Even at a modest 6% return, that’s almost $60,000 after ten years. Double that timeframe, and you’re past $200,000. Simple small choices, repeated daily, compound into entire years of freedom.
Now think about your own version of that. New car payments. Extra mortgage payments. Dining out. Take-out. New phone. Amazon. Movie tickets. Subscription after subscription. It all adds up faster than you realize. Over the years, I cut my total expenses in half, not by depriving myself, but by choosing consciously. I still had plenty of things to do, but I no longer needed to spend big money doing them. The math showed me how soon I could reach my freedom goal without sacrificing comfort, and without suffering in boredom.
Once you really see that, you can’t unsee it. Math doesn’t lie.
Do I miss my Charger? Absolutely! I loved driving it — but it doesn’t serve the life I’m building now. Do I miss cable TV? Absolutely not. None of those things are relevant to my long-term goal: retiring as fast as I can, with as much as I need, and no unnecessary weight to carry along the way.
Most people do the opposite. When they get a raise or a new, higher-paying job, they inflate their lifestyle to match it — like patting themselves on the back and giving themselves a cookie. It feels like progress, but it’s a trap. The bigger car, the nicer place, the better restaurants, these quietly increase the distance between you and freedom. When your expenses rise with your income, you never actually move forward. You just build a prettier cage. And the longer you stay inside it, the harder it is to escape.
Some people say things like, “You can’t take it with you,” or “Enjoy life while you can.” And I agree, but enjoying life doesn’t mean burning through it. To me, enjoyment means freedom: waking up every day knowing I own my time, I don’t owe anything, and I don’t need to work for anybody. I still enjoy the things I love — good food, travel, time with people who matter — but I do it without debt, without stress, and without wondering how I’ll pay for it later. That’s real enjoyment.
Over time, this completely rewired me. I stopped chasing upgrades. I learned to sit with discomfort instead of numbing it with spending. That’s when I began to understand something deeper, the same lesson Buddhism tries to teach in its own way: that freedom isn’t the absence of suffering, it’s the ability to sit within it without losing yourself.
Financial restraint became a form of meditation. Every time I resisted impulse, I wasn’t just saving money, I was observing my own patterns. The discomfort that used to feel like deprivation started to feel like clarity. I found calm in simplicity, peace in the quiet arithmetic of less. The goal wasn’t just to have money, it was to have control over my behaviour. That’s where the real independence starts.
Without realizing it, I gamified the process. I went a full year testing how much I could not want something. How much less could I spend this month compared to last month? How much could I do without before it hurt? It was like hitting reset on my own appetite for consumption. Just like quitting sugar. When you eventually taste something sweet again, it’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever had. Cutting back didn’t dull life; it sharpened it.
And when I started cutting back on things, I began filling the space with better alternatives. I replaced passive consumption with curiosity. I started reading more. I watched educational content: videos about how things work, how to build, how to invest, how to plan, how to improve. I swapped empty entertainment for growth.
The strange thing is, when I had everything — hundreds of TV channels, movies on demand, endless distractions — I was bored out of my mind. But when I stopped trying to keep myself constantly entertained and instead focused on learning and expanding, I was never bored. I no longer craved the dopamine rush of the next distraction. I had what I needed to feel completely satisfied.
This was also one of the early seeds of Modular Rationalism — a philosophy I’m still writing, built around the idea that life runs in versions, each one teaching you how to build the next. It’s about learning to read discomfort as information, not punishment. Every emotion, every setback, every bit of friction tells you something about yourself, and when you decode it, you evolve.
That mindset became the foundation for SURE-FIRE — a structure that gave my habits direction and my decisions purpose. But it all began here: with awareness, restraint, and the willingness to test my limits.
In the next post, I’ll walk through how that system works – the one that turned decades of habit, discipline, and curiosity into a reliable framework for financial freedom.
Continue to part 3 – the system.
Financial Pragmatism: The path to independence
This four-part series traces how I went from $50,000 in debt to retiring before 50 — not through luck, but through deliberate design. Financial Pragmatism is the system I built along the way: equal parts mindset, structure, and restraint. Each post explores a step in that journey — the trade-offs, the mental rewiring, the system that sustained it, and the freedom that followed.
Part 1: The Trade-Off
Part 2: The Mindset
Part 3: The System
Part 4: Freedom by Design