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Recently, one of my family members gave me a copy of the wonderful book The Nighttime Novelist. It was a little more than an obvious hint – this family member really believes that I have some interesting novels inside of me and she wants to read them.

While the book has a lot of good writing tactics, the part that really made it stand out for me was the overall sense of career encouragement. After all, many of the people who would read a book like this one are people who dream of becoming writers but find it difficult to make room for it in their busy life. The Nighttime Novelist focuses quite a bit on that problem – I mean, the title itself is a big hint – but the advice goes way beyond merely being a novelist.

Let’s start by looking at the core problem and then move on to solving it.

When you’re facing a giant mountain of debt, it feels almost impossible to overcome it. When your total debt exceeds your household income, it can feel like debt is just going to be a part of your life. It can seem as though, in order to live your life, you’re going to have to constantly hand money to the banks until you’re old and grey.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Sarah and I paid off more than $10,000 in credit card debt, two car loans, several student loans that totaled more than $30,000, and a home mortgage over the course of about five and a half years, taking us to complete debt freedom. We did this with three children and with a car replacement cycle right in the middle of that five year period.

Snowflakes were a big part of that success. What are snowflakes? Well… let’s step back from that a bit first.

Kayla writes in:

I’ve never really understood how you could suddenly make the switch from way overspending to actually living on just one of your two incomes and saving half of your income. How does that even happen?

As I thought about Kayla’s question, I started writing a list of things that I felt played a real role in this turnaround. It’s easy to point to one single thing – my “financial bottom” – but that actually only tells a little bit of the story. It wasn’t just that one painful day – it was a series of things that happened both before and after that moment. All of these things pointed my life in a different direction than before.

Let’s walk through them.

Sarah and I Had a Child

Our first child arrived in late 2005, about six months or so before our financial turnaround began in earnest. Unsurprisingly, it triggered a bunch of changes in many different aspects of our lives.

The “Books with Impact” series takes a deeper look at specific books that have had a profound impact on my financial, professional, and personal growth by extracting specific points of advice from those books and looking at how I’ve applied them in my life with successful results. The previous entry in this series covered How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Why Early Retirement Extreme?

The biggest drawback that most personal finance books seem to have is that they don’t really ever discuss making significant life changes. Sure, they discuss lots of small tactics like stopping at Starbucks less often and things along those lines, but they mostly focus on how to organize one’s debts and so on.