My career field [subs] has an extremely high divorce-rate. I have served on subs where the entire crew [minus myself] were divorcees. So I was very careful about who I dated. When I thought that a girl might be wife material, I would tell her about my vision of my future [a small farm in the woods, gardening, raising livestock, selling farm produce, etc]. In most cases that would be the last date that any girl would go on with me. This was the 1970s, when the back-to-land movement was not popular. Then one girl I dated [an accountant very much into Home Economics] responded with "I could see dedicating my life to that goal". We were married in 1981 and we are still together. I served 20-years on Active Duty, out of the thousands of crewmen I served with I saw 3 that had successful marriages.
In 1985 we bought our first Multi-Family-Residence [MFR] a Tri-plex. We lived in one and we had two rentals. The rental income carried the mortgage, insurance and taxes, so my income was not needed for our housing expenses. At our next duty station we bought a five-plex MFR, then another tri-plex, then a four-plex. Any extra cash each month went into extra principal-only payments to buy down the mortgages. Since I spent 7-months a year living underwater, my wife managed the rentals for me, as her career.
Having mortgages kept us from paying income taxes, and I have always viewed the principal-only payments as building our Net Worth.
The only time that my salary money went into any mortgage was via those principal-only payments. Otherwise our MFRs paid for themselves.
Every year, we had discussions about what skill-sets we would need for when we reached our farm. We selected new hobbies each year that we needed proficiency in, with that end goal in mind.
Both of us took courses on budget counseling, she volunteered on-base in a counseling center, and I was assigned that duty as one of the many hats I wore on the boats I served on. We also both became certified tax-preparers, and we taught tax-planning strategies for 10+ years.
We lived on strict written monthly budgets, which complied with our projected tax filings a year in advance.
When I was 42, the US Navy booted me out onto pension, and we cashed out our holdings and used the cash to buy and set-up our farm.
It is a very low COL area, we have been here as 'farmers' for 13 years.
We both hate the stock market, but we have built-up some extra cash, so we decided that we were ready to go back into rentals again. We recently bought a big commercial building on a downtown block and we are remodeling it. We currently have four tenants [a church, a printing company, a day-care, and a residential couple]. We will soon have ten more apartments for university students.
