Gwen, welcome to Radical Personal Finance.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So we're up here in Gainesville, Florida at Camp Mustache, Southeast 2017.

So it's providing me with an awesome opportunity to get together with other people who are pursuing financial

independence, some of whom have websites, some of whom don't, etc.

So tell us a little bit about your story,

especially as it relates to money and financial independence.

So my name is Gwen, and I run the website Fire and millennials,

and I started my journey back in high school actually when my parents sat me down and told me that I was not getting any help for college.

And so I needed to figure out how I was going to pay for it myself.

When did they do that? Did they like spring it on you on your high school graduation or was this something that?

No, thankfully they did it at the end of my sophomore year of high school.

So I had two years to come up with everything and they gave me a deal. They said we'd pay for two years of community college. You can live at home, pretty cheap. Or you can go and do a four-year university by yourself.

And unfortunately, our relationship freight over time

and staying with them was no longer an option.

I ended up briefly homeless for a little bit.

And so I had to figure out how to pay for college myself. So I worked really

hard at academics and extra-calcalators and sports and just had a very robust resume as it were and had good grades.

So I submitted for a lot of scholarships and got a few but they wouldn't help everything

and I didn't want to get loans because I was broke and I didn't want to be in debt.

So I joined the military and was in it for six years and they helped pay for some of it.

What age? Like right at 18?

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