Today my wife and I were sitting in the kitchen having a cup of coffee talking about things in the news when I sprung the “are you happy” question on her.

She was definitely caught off guard with this one. You see, we *are* very happy with our lives and we say it to each other all the time. We feel we are very much in control of our circumstances so when something good happens, we take credit and when it’s bad, we blame ourselves. And because we feel directly responsible for pretty much everything that occurs in our lives, we are very proactive in making sure things turn out the way we expect them.

But we are by no means control freaks. We just plan things out a little. For instance, we have a budget. Not a strict budget that says how much I can spend on my regular afternoon trip to the vending machine, but instead a high level *realistic* budget to make sure we aren’t living beyond our means. So when we make a big purchase, we know exactly how much we need to spend (so those crazy salesman tactics generally don’t work on us).

So when I asked her if she was happy with our life, I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t working on an answer to the question I had just asked her, she was instead wondering how *I* could possibly be unhappy. After all, things are just as we had planned them.

The thing that prompted me to ask this question was the lottery the other day. It was up to 180 million dollars and she had bought three tickets. It was the middle of the week and I was at work when she called me to tell me she had just bought lottery tickets. The funny thing was, before she had a chance to ask the question, I asked her if she had bought any tickets to the lottery. This was a weird coincidence because we *never* play the lottery. We just see it as a waste of money. But since we had both been thinking of it, there must have been a reason, right? We finished up our morning coffee, agreed to talk more about this topic later, and went about our day.

Later that day, after eating a quick dinner, we sat down to figure out why we both wanted to play the lottery. I explained to her that although our day-to-day finances were exactly as we had planned them, I couldn’t help but think we might be stuck in roles that were less than perfect for us. She mentioned how nice it would be to have that kind of money and to never have to worry about having enough money for college or emergency medial bills or whatever. We also talked about how great it would be to be able to make a difference in the world (for the good of course!) and how working to pay our bills (for the most part) got in the way of that goal.

My wife and I talk to each other a lot. She’s my best friend and there is very little we don’t know about each other. But when we talk, it’s usually about the events occurring or about to occur in our life. Rarely do we sit down and discuss what things will look like in five or more years. We go with our instincts and by working hard and thinking things through as best as we can, we do pretty well.

So that is just what we did. We decided that on a regular basis, we would sit down and work on a plan to meet the goal of obtaining financial freedom as quickly as reasonably possible. Our initial goal was to do it in five years. Financial Freedom in Five Years.