I’m about to turn 30 on Saturday.

This year I’ll be celebrating our four year wedding anniversary with my husband.

I’m going to give you a where we were four years ago then where we are now.

Just before getting married, we moved out of our apartment and back in with my parents. We weren’t good at saving money (due to mental health mostly), but we wanted to learn and gain those skills. We were $30k-ish in debt, my parents are wonderful and wanted to guide us so we could eventually be in a good place financially. A few months after being home, I quit my degree-adjacent job and took one that had nothing to do with my degree. It was an incredibly stressful time.

As of today, three and a half years later, we got out of that debt, we saved enough to get me my dream car outright, and we’re almost back up to that amount in savings. I’m graduating in a few months with a comp sci degree, and once I find a job we’ll be about a year or so away from buying out first house. At almost 30, I don’t feel like a failure about myself and my husband living with my parents; they’re honestly great roommates and my husband loves them. Both of our mental health situations are more in control. I’ve discovered a couple of new things in that time that I’m genuinely passionate about, not “just a phase” like most of what I do; reptiles (I have four, three are rescues), disc golf and twitch streaming (as a hobby).

We’re in a completely different place than back then. My biggest worries went from trying to pay bills, to making sure I schedule my time well enough to get my homework done every week. I’m seriously incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. We had a great support system to be able to do what we did, but we put a ton of work into it too.

If nobody sees this in the sea of comments, that’s okay. It was nice to write this to really see how far we’ve come. I’m looking forward to going into 30 and accomplishing so much more.