The beginning

As with any journey, there must be a beginning. The start of my search for financial freedom began with the birth of our first child. While his birth was a glorious day, it also served as a rude awakening to our then financial state. My wife and I both had decent jobs with decent pay. For that year I believe we had a combined income of around $70,000 dollars. While this may not be a fortune, it definitely put us way above the poverty line.

As with any couple in their early thirties, we definitely lived for the present and always procrastinated our savings for another day. We were by no means deadbeats or bad credit risks (we both have mid level 700 FICOs), we just didn't save anything. If there was an extra dollar after all the bills were paid we would snatch it up as quickly as possible and spend it on frivolous BS.

To make matters worse, we somehow spent more than we were making. How this was possible, I have no idea. We had purchased a house in 2003 before the market really took off. In the years to come, we continued to gain equity in the house, not by accelerating our payments, but by enjoying the rapid increase in price appreciation. When your home is worth more than you owe on it, you have acquired "equity" in your home. This must be a good thing, right? By now you should see what's coming next. We decided, "Hell, we have all this equity, we're rich. Lets take out a home equity loan and really enjoy ourselves." Again, we didn't see a problem with this because we were both still making good money. Even as we increased our debt tremendously we still were able to easily make the minimum payments and have excess cash to waste on more BS.

Fast forward 2 years to 2006. We decide to bring a little piece of heaven into our lives and give birth to a boy in August of that year. This is when the magician could no longer pull the quarter out from behind our ears and the wheels fell off the revolving money merry-go-round that we were riding on. Unlike some new parents, we did not have retired grandparents that lived extremely close which would afford us cheap daycare. We looked around and the choices seemed to be at the extremes. Either the daycare was cheap (approximately $600 a month) and in the ghetto or it was expensive ($1000 a month). Ghetto daycare was definitely out of the question so the only option was the expensive route.

We sat down and crunched the numbers and determined that the peanuts my wife would be bringing home, post daycare fees, was not worth having someone else raise our child. So, shortly after the wife returned from maternity leave she gave her 2-week notice and left corporate America. That meant we were suddenly a 1940's "Leave-it-to-Beaver" family living in a modern two-income world. I immediately took all the off-duty and overtime I could find to keep us afloat. I realized during this time that I was spending far too much time working to survive rather than spending with my loved ones. I wanted to remember when I saw my son reach an accomplishment rather than remembering when my wife told me she saw him reach it.

Now we fast forward to 2008 and we are just months away from the birth of child number 2 and, of course, it's a girl. Now don't get me wrong, I'll be happy if she's healthy, but damn it. It sure would have been nice to go the "hand-me-down" route for many years to come. As No. 1 outgrows things, No. 2 can slide right in and pick them up.

I now see the error of my earlier ways of living for the present and not the financial future. I want to create a way of life that will allow my kids to flourish and even prosper as they follow in their parents footsteps. As cheesy as it may sound, I feel that I am now living more for them than I am for myself. I have begun to set things in motion that I hope will create a life of financial freedom and growth that will allow my family to be happy and wealthy for generations to come.

I realize that time is the most precious of all commodities and you should only spend that time on those ventures that will yield the greatest results. That is why I have created this blog, "Apex Income Investments". I will attempt to present all forms of investments and compare them in both ROI of time and money. In the end, only those that yield the highest returns with the least amount of time input will be utilized to grow our net worth.