Growing up, admittedly, I never thought much about finances. I’m pretty sure my parents lived paycheck to paycheck, and I vaguely remember a few tense conversations over money. But otherwise, my early personal finance experience was straightforward. I worked throughout high school and college, spent more than I saved, and, thanks to help from family, graduated from college with manageable student loan debt.

I studied economics in college, which helped me get a rare work study role as a statistical research assistant. This in turn helped me land my first full-time professional job as a database marketing analyst. I immediately bought a new Honda Civic and moved into an apartment in the city with a friend. Soon after starting the new job, I went to a required 401(k) presentation, and distinctly recall the graph showing the savings potential of contributing yearly to a 401(k) over a career until retirement. That began a long, committed relationship with my 401(k).

Soon thereafter, I met and later married Carol, who earned her MBA and made a career working in finance. Fortunately, throughout our marriage, we’ve always shared the same personal finance principles:

• Max out 401(k)s
• Pay off credit cards each month
• Do not own boats or other dead assets
• Live under your means
• Only use debt when it makes sense

We both looked at debt as a tool to take advantage of as opposed to just something to extend our lifestyle. For example, if we bought a car and the available financing rate was below our estimated market growth potential (~6%), then we took advantage of the financing.

As our careers took off, we moved around, including residing in expensive housing markets like Seattle and London. Each time, we selected housing that made sense and was within our means.

But, while we had our lifestyle in check and balance, we did make some mistakes related to investing. Early on after accumulating some assets, we hired a wealth manager at a trusted high-profile company to manage a significant portion of our investment portfolio. And while the investments we managed ourselves did well, our money manager got swept up in the tech bubble of the 90s, putting us into a few high-risk positions. Remember Enron? We do. Thousands of our investment dollars evaporated overnight. While this was not a big part of our portfolio, we did learn a hard lesson. Regrettably, we thought our various managers had our best interests fully in mind and could indeed beat the market over the long-term. This was not the case.

Around the same time, we also learned how short life can be. My father died in his 50s and Carol’s soon after he retired in his early 60s. We of course believed in saving for retirement, but these heartbreaking losses reminded us to live a full life during our lives and not just in retirement. So, while we saved for retirement, we also earmarked funds for life experiences, like traveling extensively, especially while we lived in England, and as our children grew older.

Around then, we also became more actively engaged in our financial planning. Every two years, we met with a trusted professional to outline goals and strategies, and then managed our plans on our own in the interim. Admittedly, while we thought we were doing the right thing, this planning process lacked the necessary insights. At the time, surprisingly, most planners simply calculated compound growth to estimate long-term portfolio and retirement assets. Our process of managing to our financial plan also lacked concrete meaning. While we checked in on our spending and cash flow from time to time, we had no insight into how well our plan was working.

Then I met Joe. We worked in the same division at Medtronic, and collaborated on market analytics and planning projects. I remember being impressed with how well Joe understood market dynamics, and how he used facts – not intuition – to make decisions.

A few years later, after I started a consultancy and Joe had founded Dymedex, we got together to share entrepreneurial experiences. We ended up talking about our philosophies for personal finance. That’s when he mentioned his draft of what later became Manufacturing Wealth. He asked if I’d take a look at it and provide some feedback. Of course, I would – and did. His approach to defining and describing the Personal Finance Machine and the system behind it fascinated me. It made perfect sense to me, because it finally answered the “what” and “why” behind the simple “budgeting how” of the rest of the financial guidance out there. From there, we began collaborating again. The rest is, as they say, history.