Paying Off Over $200k in Debt with Kim at The Frugal Engineers | Ep. 23

• Kim explains how she and her husband agreed early on to live off one income (the smaller paycheck) so they could direct the other toward debt repayment and prepare for one parent staying home with kids.

We took all of his paycheck and used it to pay off any debt that we had... credit cards, student loans, car payment.

• They maintained a simple lifestyle—renting a tiny house, biking to work, meal planning, and taking road trip vacations—to keep expenses low while paying off $220,000 in debt.

• Kim introduces geographic arbitrage as moving to a lower cost-of-living area to improve financial flexibility. After graduating, they chose Orlando, Florida over staying in expensive California.

We were able to buy a house in our 20s and live pretty well... the difference in the take home pay, you're still coming out ahead in a place like Florida, because you don't have state income tax.

• Later moves to Oregon and then Wyoming were driven by lifestyle preferences and tax considerations, with Wyoming offering no state income tax.

• Kim and her husband realized they could earn more by freelancing directly rather than working for companies that marked up their rates significantly.

If your salary was $60,000, you're taking home $30 an hour and they're charging the client a hundred dollars an hour for your time.

• Kim started freelancing part-time while keeping her day job, then went fully self-employed in 2013 after getting her professional engineering license and becoming pregnant.

• She recommends starting freelancing by contracting back to your employer to leverage existing skills while learning business operations like bookkeeping and health insurance management.

• Kim and her husband plan to retire from full-time engineering by 2020 but emphasize they won't stop working—they'll shift to activities they love like fitness instruction and university teaching.

Make sure you're retiring to something, not from something.

• They value the freedom of self-employment so highly that no full-time job offer could lure them back, despite the initial hard work of building their businesses.