Mindy: We have Jackie Cummings Koski on today’s episode. Jackie was able to retire at the age of 49 working on a middle income salary. She says she never made six figures in her career, which I think is absolutely fantastic. And the key here is Jackie never forced herself to live in deprivation toplant this goal. I think this is a new approach to the FIRE story, and I absolutely love that she kept her expenses low while keeping everything in her life that she wanted to keep in.
So, what did she do instead? Well, stay listening because Jackie will tell us how she was able to reach financial independence on an average salary as a single mom.
Mindy: Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and I am flying solo today. Scott is off doing his Scott things, so you have me. And as always, I am here to make financial independence less scary. Less just for somebody else. To introduce you to every money story because I truly believe to the very depths of my soul that financial independence is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you are starting. Without further ado, let’s bring in Jackie. Jackie Cummings Koski, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I am so excited to talk to you today.
Guest: Yay, Mindy. I am happy to be here too. I’m glad we made this happen.
Mindy: I want to jump right in to the end and then go back to the beginning and tell the story. You are early retired. Is that correct?
Guest: That is correct.
Mindy: Can you tell us what age you reached financial independence and what your numbers looked like when you retired?
Guest: Yes. So I was about 46, 47 when I reached what I called my FIRE number. And that was 25 times my expenses. I spend about 40 to $45,000, so right at a million dollars. But I was still working my corporate job. just wasn’t quite comfortable yet, had to get my head around it. Worked two more years. I had that one more year syndrome. Worked two more years and I retired officially from my corporate job on December 6, 2019, right before COVID.
Mindy: Ah, great timing.
Guest: I know, great timing. I was looking for every excuse to like proactively get laid off and to engineer my own layoff and they were adding people. And of course a few months later they did a whole lot of laying off, you know. So, so yes, so I was 49 by the time I retired and my net worth had grown quite a bit. I think it was like at 1.3 million. So I’ve been retired for close to five years now. And um, and it’s been great. I mean, I was a little scaredy cat when it came to actually, you know, making that big leap, but probably my only regret at this point is that I wish I would have done it sooner.
Mindy: What does your income look like now? Are you generating income from other sources or are you living off of your portfolio and withdrawing the 4%?
Guest: Yeah, so as far as generating income, that’s been all over the place. So I’ve officially been retired for nearly five years and every year it’s been different. So for the first two years, so this would have been 2020, COVID, and 2021. And during that time, I actually went back to school to get my master’s degree in financial therapy. So I’m spending money and I was drawing down my portfolio through um, like brokerage accounts and things like that, okay? So I was, I didn’t need to touch any retirement money. So that was two years where I was literally spending um, more than what I was spending before I actually retired. But I had, you know, money set aside for that and I had that all worked out.
Guest: Now, the third year, which would have been 2022, I did start doing more financial education, financial literacy, and and I did a little bit of that um in the first two years as well. I was just mainly focused on, you know, finishing up my degree. So 2022 was pretty good. I got um a really great opportunity. I ended up being on the Rachel Ray show, which was totally like nothing I expected. And I had um, a self-published book that was nearly 10 years old that actually sold a ton of copies after that. So that year I did not have to drop, I did not have to drop from my portfolio. I didn’t expect that, but that was nice. Um, then 2023, which was last year. Last year, um, and I would say on average it’s been, I don’t know, maybe like 20,000 worth of like different types of income that came in, but always very unpredictable. So I have not had to draw out or or withdraw that 4%.
Guest: So it’s it’s just hard. Um, I guess I feel a little bit better about my withdrawal strategy for a couple of reasons. The first one is that my net worth has grown since I retired. I had 1.3 million, 2022 it went down like crazy, bounced back up. Now it’s at nearly 2 million. So that was almost five years after retiring and withdrawing money off of my portfolio in certain years. And then the second piece is I was overly pessimistic about social security. But social security is not completely going away, you know, as long as younger people are paying that FICA tax, that is part of what’s funding social security, but I didn’t include that in my numbers. So I think of that as a backstop in my older years because even though we’re retiring early, we still got our 60s, 70s, 80s to think about. So social security doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Even if it got slashed by 25% um, you know, based on, you know, the actuaries. Um, it’s still, you know, a fixed amount that will continue for the rest of my life. That’s adjusted for in inflation. So so not a bad deal. So those are the things that make me feel a little bit more comfortable even aside from doing that math with the 4% rule.
Mindy: We’ll be back after a quick break.
Mindy: Welcome back to the show. In the beginning I said we’re going to go back to the beginning of your money story, so let’s do that. Jackie, where does your journey with money begin and how did how was your uh money upbringing?
Guest: I proudly hail from South Carolina, but it was a little town called Aiken and it was down this long dirt road that I absolutely hated. Um, but I was raised by a single dad with six kids. I was number five out of six. And he worked his butt off. I don’t even know how he did it, but he is like my greatest hero. He’ll always be that. Um, so I just remember that we always had, anytime we couldn’t do something, the reason was always because we don’t have the money to do that. Like there was no summer camp, why? Because we can’t afford it. You know, we can’t get new school clothes. Why? Because we can’t afford it. We don’t have money like that. It was hand-me-downs and and I just never wanted to be in poverty again. I remember as I was getting older, I just kept in my head that I didn’t want to be in poverty again. I mean, we had food on the table, but you know, my dad, he worked two jobs, he made sure, you know, we were we were clean and he just worked miracles and he sure knew how to stretch a dollar.
Guest: So, um, he actually, when I was in high school, right before I graduated, about three months before I graduated, he got sick and he he had cancer and he it it took his toll pretty quickly. So he passed away. He was 49 at the time and it was three months before I graduated from high school, so he never got to see me graduate. So I decided to go to college, you know, after um, high school. And I was one of those people that, you know, I didn’t have mommy and daddy holding my hand. I didn’t have anyone showing me how to fill out the financial aid forms. I didn’t I didn’t have anyone telling me how much I should get or anything like that. So I got through college and that was the one way I thought, okay, if I get a college degree, I’m less likely to be without a job, maybe I can find a better job that pays good and has benefits, which is what I was told what you do as far as um, being successful and and being good with money. You know, get a good job, good benefits, at the time, get a pension. And so once I was done with college, you know, I I did get, you know, a decent job, wasn’t high paying. Um, but I had a steady job. I probably got paid more than I would have if I didn’t have a college degree. And I ended up getting married shortly after college.
Guest: And that was the point where I moved to Ohio. I lived in Ohio now. And soon as I moved to Ohio, I uh discovered that I was pregnant with my daughter, Amber. And so I was married for about 12 years and ended up getting a divorce. And that was my eye opener and one thing in particular just stuck with me. And that was where when we looked at the retirement accounts, I had about $20,000 in my 401K and my husband had $120,000. And we were making about the same, um, we were getting a similar match. And I could not figure out what the disparity was and why on earth there was such a big gap. But it made me feel really stupid. It made me feel very ignorant and I vowed from that day that I never wanted to feel that financially ignorant again. Now, I’ve since gone back and done some sleuthing and figured out it was a lot of little things. So it was things like, um he worked for a very large bank. This was like 2003, 2004, and banks actually were performing very, very well. So that was one of the things inside of his 401k that I didn’t have. He was invested in different things. He was starting to make more than me slightly. But if you add all those things up and you compound them over 10-ish years, then that gap just grows. So it wasn’t any one thing.
Guest: But I came out of that, after about two years, um, because I believe that that the mindset and the psychological part of money is the biggest deal because there’s nothing that’s moving forward until you in your head or me in my head decided that, okay, I am ready to do something different. I am ready to move forward. And for anyone that has, um, you know, been divorced or know anyone that’s been divorced, it’s devastating. It takes a toll on, um, your your energy and um, there’s a lot of like stress surrounding it. So once I came out of that, it was about two years, I started doing so many things different because it’s ringing in my head that I did not want to be in poverty and never wanted my daughter to know poverty the way that I did.
Mindy: You said it made me feel stupid, it made me feel ignorant. And I just want to tell you, stop. And anybody else who is feeling stupid or ignorant about their financial information and education, stop. This isn’t taught in schools. It’s starting to be, but it isn’t right now. And if you’re listening to this, you’re probably out of school anyway. And it wasn’t taught when we were in school. And it’s okay to not know something that you weren’t taught. Anyway, back to the beginning of this story with um your dad passing away right before high school. How did that affect your financial situation? You’re said you’re the fifth of six kids. Did your older siblings help? Did they, were they there to like kind of help raise you or I mean, you’re three months from high school graduation. I’m sure you felt grown.
Guest: Well, I mean, my older siblings, um, especially my oldest uh, sister, Marilyn, she kind of took on a role as um, helping with the kids because my dad worked all the time. He worked a regular full-time job and he worked a part-time job. So she was sort of that motherly figure as we were growing up. And once, you know, once we hit high school, you’re kind of on your own, right? You have a bed to sleep in, you have a home to go to and things like that. But I I felt on my own. Like I was the I was the first in my family to graduate from college with a four year degree. So none of my siblings was able to really even, you know, guide me with that part. So I’m going to the guidance counselor and trying to just do all this stuff for my own when, you know, looking back, you know, my counterparts, a lot of times, you know, they had their parents, their family, other people really sort of holding their hand and guiding them. And that’s great. And and that’s something, you know, I I was able to give to my daughter, but um, I didn’t have that. So when it comes to like things like student loans and and and all this college debt and things like that. For me, I had no idea and I know that there’s a lot of people still out there that really don’t understand the process, that just didn’t have the tools and at honestly, at that point, you’re a freaking teenager. How are you supposed to make all these decisions yourself? You know, I did the best I could with what I had, but um, you know, I honestly, the biggest thing that I learned and the main way I got through college was that my dad taught us to work hard for what you have. He was pretty much debt averse. So I didn’t get a student loan not the first year, not the second year, not the third year, but by the time I was a senior, I know. I was just doing what my dad told me to do and I was probably working way a
