Growing up, retirement seemed like a foreign concept. Everyone seemed to work until at least sixty-five and then, if one could afford to retire, they did. However, if they couldn’t afford to, they worked well into their seventies. During my childhood, I worked in a bakery for thirteen summers, and I came from a blue-collar family, who taught me that you work until sixty-five, and if you can retire then, fine. And when I looked around that bakery, I saw a lot of seventy- and eighty-year-old bakers. It wasn’t a life I wanted, but I wasn’t sure then how to change my course It was when I started to provide financial planning for clients and saw how it transformed their lives that I became a real zealot. I realized that transforming someone’s life with a better tax return seemed an unlikely outcome, but I could change lives through financial planning and by helping him or her make better financial choices.

I didn’t know there was a way of life that didn’t involve me working into my seventies –  many of the people I work with aren’t aware how their financial decisions are impacting their current life, as well as their future plans. It’s simply poor financial decisions that keep people from achieving what they wish for in life now and in the future. But without someone guiding them, they’ll never realize how to right their financial wrongs. And I know firsthand. When I ran my numbers, I saw what bad shape I was really in. But between my tax skills and what I had learned from financial planners, I was able to put together a financial plan for myself with a goal to be financially independent by age fifty—a goal I achieved when I was forty-eight.

How did I do it? It was just a question of making better financial decisions, which sounds like a lofty statement. However, most people don’t realize that sometimes the smallest choice, such as whether you should lease or buy a car, can be a multimillion-dollar decision over time. This experience and the realization that I could transform lives by allowing people to live the lifestyles they wished to live now and still be able to retire and/or be financially independent in the time frame they chose thrilled me. I’m living proof of that— and so are my clients.

For more information about on transforming your financial life, visit tswealth.com.