Have we done out life wrong?

I was listening to a podcast this morning and the person they had one had an amazing story of hugh student load dept to paying it off quickly to retiring by 30.  This would be an in couraging story, but it seems like every story on the Financial Independance/ Financial Freedom postcast world has this same theme. Grew up Middle class when to college got 50k-15k student load dept, got a job, paid off student load dept within 5 years, bought a house and house hacked, finally retired or at least reached FI in 30s. 

These are awesome and sinsipering, but also depressing and has me wondering what is wrong with my life.

I didn't have the dept.  I 've been working since I was 15, I've been very adverse to building any debt credit card, didn't get a house/mortege until I was 30.  The list goes on. From the outside looking in it seems I made a lot of right choices. 

Before I was married and lived very furgally.  Car the was paid off and I didn't eat out very much.  The one area I failed was my appartment.  I descided I needed to live on my own after graduating from college.  So I got a nice appartment. I think I was paying 400-500 a month for a 1200sqrt ft. appartment.  This is dumb for many reasons. First being the partment was only a couple of miles from my partents house.  The thing was I was comfortable in the area I grewup in and felt like I have a real job now time to move out. I coule go back and look it up, but I believe I was still only living on 30% of my salary.  I didn't make alot something in the 40k range which is good for right out of college. I did 401k and employee stock options. IDK I did well, but not great. Housing!! Housing!! housing!!

Fastford to today. My wife and I both work in a similar field. We have two elementry age kids and a dog.  We have a mortege and a car loan. At very good rates 3.25 and 2.25 repectivily. Yes it is a since to get a new car in the FIRE community.  I have an issue with buy used which I am working to get over. I've owned a new car for every car I have owned except my first one.  I am currently on my third car ever.  This is the same for my wife.  So far we buy new and keep them for a long time.  The current car we bought was for a couple of reasons.  We moved from California to a snowy state and my wife car was rear driven.  We had twins and needed a SUV or something bigger then a sedan.  You are probably telling yourself hey you can make it work with a sedan I do.  We did for 5 years driving a rear driven sedan in the snow and packing in the family in our sedans.  We both had sedans.
I will tell you trying to pack a family of 4 into a compact sedan on the way to the zoo with a double wide stroller take a Tetris master. Luckly I was. :)  My wife also wanted an 7 seater since we don't have family in town, and want to have room so they don't have to rent a car.  She also wanted a hybrid. 


Anyway here we are present day we both have very good jobs. Only dept is the house which was just refinanced and the SUV.   We save a lot and we spend a lot. Our food budget is reasonable arond the $900 per month range. We do have to pay for after school care since we both work, but that is much cheaper then pre-school, but we use an FSA to get some tax advantages. 

IDK it seems like my wife and I have had many more advantages then these people on the podcast, but have missed those small choices to really exceed in life towards FI.

It's not all doom and gloom.  This is the fun part.  Know that you have failed and know where you can improve and start making changes.  We started with out food budget to prevent the "budget" creep that was happening.  I'm starting to write out month food plans to better make bulk meals. Next we will move on the dreaded "Shopping" categroy and figure out whats up with that.

All hope is not lost.  Some of us had hard journies and some of use made our journies hard.  The point is we can do it in our own way. Good luck and keep up the fight.