Year End Wins 2025 (Part 1)

After becoming obsessed with learning about personal finance in 2022 I devoured anything I could find on the subject. Naturally Dave Ramsey was one of the first voices I heard and though difficult to listen to, listen I did just for the nuggets I could glean.

Later in 2022 I discovered the ChooseFI podcast with its upbeat and positive take on FI and all the incredible resources and actionable takeaways it included. I absolutely loved the additional resources I discovered by listening, specifically Quit Like a Millionaire, The Simple Path to Wealth, The Psychology of Money and Frugalwoods.

Starting with virtually no savings in 2022, I crossed the $100k mark last December! And now have just broke the $150k mark. It’s absolutely incredible.

I try and tell anyone who will listen about the power of learning about personal finance but few seem to care. Coming from poverty and a non traditional upbringing to a trajectory towards FI is beyond incredible! We literally had a dirt floor for part of my childhood and from what I can tell I predict I’ll achieve my FI goal by 2030.

This community has absolutely showed me the path and I can’t thank you enough for your hard work and continued dedication. You truly are changing lives. The FIRE is spreading

— Crystal

My biggest financial win this year has been the freedom to step away from work completely stress-free during my pregnancy and now into parental leave. I became unexpectedly pregnant in January 2025, and while Canada offers 12–18 months of parental leave at up to 55% of your income (capped around $1,300 a week before taxes), it’s still a significant drop from my full salary.

From day one, we knew we wanted to be proactive instead of anxious, so we set a clear goal: build a $20,000 emergency buffer in a high-interest savings account to protect us during my leave.

What we didn’t plan for were the health complications that came up during my pregnancy, which forced me to start my leave earlier than expected. That meant less time to save at my higher income—but thankfully, we were already well on our way.

Now, two months postpartum, I can honestly say we haven’t felt financially strained at all even with additional baby related living costs. We haven’t had to touch our emergency fund, and our net worth is still growing thanks to years of consistent investing and strong financial habits. The peace of mind this has given me during such a vulnerable and life-changing season is something I’ll never take for granted.

So many people we know feel forced to work right up until delivery out of financial pressure. For me, being able to rest, heal, and prepare without that stress has been an incredible blessing—and it’s a direct result of years of intentional money management. This season has truly shown me that financial planning isn’t just about numbers, it’s about buying yourself freedom when it matters most.

— Leah

I've been learning about FI for almost two years now, and naturally, it comes up in conversations with friends and family. I try not to be overly zealous in those conversations, as I remember when I first learned about FI I thought "There's no way I'd be able to retire early".

It wasn't until I looked into it further that I realized it could be possible. And now, after making several changes in our lives, my family and I are on the road to FI in about 12-15 years and could be Coast FI in a couple.

The win I'd like to share is that through little conversations here and there sharing with friends and family, within one week of each other, I had a friend and a cousin reach out to me asking to set up a phone call to discuss their finances and help them come up with a plan to get on track with paying off debt, saving and investing.

It's been great to learn the tips and tricks of FI to get our own finances in order, and it's even better to be able to share that knowledge with other people and see it help them too.

— Christian

My win this year is not waiting until we, my husband and I, and our family reach financial independence to start making a meaningful difference for the world.

Earlier this fall, I started a free community where busy families can come and learn about common sources of environmental toxins so they can take their own personalized, proactive action to protect themselves and their children, and I'm super excited about it. And I think before learning about Choose FI and about financial independence and being empowered in that way, I would have thought I needed to wait until my kids were grown.

They're both under the age of four, so I would have thought I needed to wait until that time or until my husband was retired or until we were both working, and I have the great gift of not working, but through this community, I've been empowered to realize marginal gains really matter, and the compounding effect of marginal gains really matters, and that doesn't just imply to investing, although thank God it applies to investing.

So yeah, my win this year is starting the Hello Toxin Free community and empowering people to make healthier decisions that fit their life. Hooray!

— Hanna

We have been long-time listeners of Choose FI all the way back when you launched Episode 13, 'The Unfair (FI) Advantage of Teachers', which sparked our pathway to FI, which we reached back in 2022. Our life has become more flexible, intentional, adventurous, and whole because of both the principles we have learned through FI and the incredible community of friends we have built.

Strangely, this is not a financial win, but rather a few words of gratitude for our second-favorite Choose FI episode of all time, Episode 516. We have always considered ourselves pretty fit and healthy. But over the past few years, we started to feel stagnant in our at-home workouts — going through the motions, hitting our usual 12-rep goals, and moving on. We stayed in shape, sure, but we weren’t seeing real muscle growth. About six months ago, we delved deeper into fitness and longevity, realizing that while we were proud of the time and variety we invested in our workouts, our actual strength progress had a lot of room to grow.

Then we stumbled upon your Muscle Growth Masterclass episode with Dean Turner, and it honestly felt like you were speaking directly to us. That episode was a wake-up call. We went on a long walk and listened to it twice — and by the end, we were fired up. We pulled up Dean’s recommended workouts, joined a local gym, and started tracking everything.

More importantly, we completely changed our approach to lifting — now it’s all about intentionality: having a consistent plan, focusing on each rep, pushing our muscles to true exhaustion, and progressively increasing weight, while tracking to hold ourselves accountable in the future.

The metrics and structure you and Dean laid out were clear, practical, and easy to apply. Dean’s workouts are straightforward yet incredibly effective, and his cues just clicked for us. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed this new phase of our strength journey and look forward to seeing where it takes us in 2026 and beyond. Huge thanks to Dean for sharing his expertise so generously — and to you for creating the space for conversations on a finance podcast that go beyond the investment accounts.

Decades from now, when we’re playing sports with our grandkids at 90, we’ll be grateful we made these changes — all thanks to Choose FI Episode 516.

— Paulina and Justin

This is the year things started to click, after a decade of saving in investments and real estate. Our net worth is climbing at a rate faster than our salaries with little input needed from us. Just know that the early scrimping is worth it because you’ll reach a snowballing of your investments. It’s pretty cool and freeing!

— Jules

I started my FI journey over a year ago. Even though I am not at FI, the mindset and small emergency fund we’ve built allowed me to have minimal stress when my husband was furloughed during the federal shutdown. It felt good knowing we could cover expenses we paid from his salary and not have to rely on credit cards.

My other 1% win is I recently accepted a new job. By advocating for myself, I was able to secure an extra $8,000 per year starting salary. This, and the remainder of the raise will be invested in my 457 account to help me reach FI in 5 years!

— Valerie

Hello, ChooseFI! My family and I celebrated three years of full-time travel in 2025, and part of what we did to celebrate that, in a way, was we bought a little vacation home in our favorite country, Japan. We had sold our house a couple years ago and had set aside some of the money for something like this, and we finally found something that was right for us. It's been a huge change for our family, a huge goal that we've been looking forward to for a while, and we can't wait to get back over there and enjoy the cherry blossom season. Thank you for an amazing year of inspiration and great advice, and see you in 2026!

— Anthony

I recently found the FI community at age 44 and - while I feel super "behind" - I am so energized by the the ethos of the FI community and have been devouring the episodes of ChooseFI in deep learning mode.

I have experienced many early wins already - opening a SIMPLE IRA for my business and beginning pre-tax contributions, getting my wife contributing every paycheck pre-tax to her 403b (yay teachers!), vastly cutting our household expenses and getting our savings rate up to a previously unthinkable level.

We have so much to practice and so much more to do on our path to FI, but one of the wins I wanted to share is that this week I did a deep dive on our life and car insurance and was able to reduce our monthly expenses by $150 through a few small, well-informed adjustments. Grateful for this community!!

— Sonya

This year my big goal was to pay off my student loans which sat at a little over $70k. My wife and I were able to pay off $65k of student loan debt while maintaining a small cash savings of around $20k. We are having a baby in December and cash flowed the IVF for that which was about $30k. We are feeling really good about where we're at so far but there is still a long way to go. I'm thankful for this community and find a lot of motivation from others' stories. Thank you!

— Jessalyn

Hi my name is Cailin and I’ve been a listener for a few years now. This year’s biggest win is that I’ve just celerbated my 7th month of a self-provided sabbatical. Meaning I walked away from my position in order to take it. I worked in analytics and technology for more than 15 years and took no more than two weeks off work (which I did only once) at a time during those years, even when changing companies and roles.

My husband and I are both 38, have no kids, and have been saving for retirement since we started working and got married, but got more serious about financial independence around four years ago. This timing happened to coincide with my highest earning years thanks to company stock options, a signifcant promotion, and moving to a lower cost of living area, so we were able to hit an average save rate of 50% the last three years.

With these high levels of investment and strong market performance we’re on track to reach FI in 7 years or so. But, we decided it was ok to potentially lengthen that timeline and instead follow in the footsteps of the Fioneers and try to build a life we’re not be so desperate to retire from now. Somewhere between CoastFI to standard reitrement and Financial Independence to full retirement early. So I quit my job, and bought myself some time to figure out what’s next. I still don’t know but thanks to my husband’s continued employment and access to afforable healthcare plus the current growth of the market, our net worth has significantly increased since I quit working.

Even if that changes, this has been such a huge step for us and has had signficant positive impacts on our life. With me not working and not being so burned out, I’m able to contribute more to household chores and projects, I’m in a much better mental state, and I haven’t been nearly as likely to impulse shop online. So we’ve actually seen our spending decrease wihtout feeling connstricted while improving our home life simultaneously. I did recently turn down a girls trip which I’m sad about, but it felt like a reasonable trade off to not feel the pressure to get back on the hamster wheel before I have clarity about what I want to do next.

So, thanks for all you do and for showing us the many ways financial independence and the journey towards it can bring fulfillment way beyond purely monetary goals.

— Cailin