Nearly a decade came and went. She turned 30 and was still an employee. She figured her path would end up looking like that of most of her peers: settling into a steady job until retirement in her mid-60s.

About a year later, while stuck in hours of traffic on her commute home from work and seven-months pregnant, Souffrant reached the breaking point.

The next day, she Googled “how to quit my job” and “how to retire early.”

That’s when Souffrant first learned about the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement. She started reading blogs about the topic, listening to podcasts on her commute, and felt compelled to make lifestyle changes that would help her and her husband save more. They traded in their luxury cars for more economical ones, gave themselves a spending cap when they ate out at restaurants, and crafted a budget.

Shifting her focus from budgeting to investing

After two years of tightening her finances, Souffrant was 33, pregnant with her second child, and felt ready to set another ambitious goal: quitting her job by age 40.

She crafted a seven-year plan to hit financial independence and decided to document it through a blog she would call “MrsBudgetFab” and later rename “Journey to Launch.”

Courtesy of Jamila Souffrant

A key component of her seven-year plan was putting her money to work.

“I realized that, while saving is good and important it’s not going to get me to wealth or financial independence,” Souffrant told Business Insider. “I was losing out by not investing.”

She understood that she could gain an edge by investing, thanks to the power of compound interest, but she didn’t know how to invest her money or even what her options were, so she turned to Google once again.

Souffrant learned about target-date funds and started investing in one through her company 401(k). She also found JL Collins’ blog and book, “The Simple Path to Wealth,” which sold her on index fund investing.

She learned that investing isn’t as complex as it’s made out to be.

“You may think that to be an investor, you need to be sitting in front of a computer and day trading and reading the newspaper and analyzing stocks,” she said. “But if you have a 401(k) or a Roth IRA, you are an investor.”

After she figured out how to invest, her next step was calculating how much to invest.

Courtesy of Jamila Souffrant

Souffrant and her husband looked at their combined income and expenses, and then figured out how much they could invest once all of their fixed costs were accounted for, she said: “After we paid for our mandatory expenses, like our mortgage, groceries, and transportation, then our focus was on how much we could save and invest: What is the max we can do to where we are still comfortable as a family?”

Then, they set up automatic contributions from their paychecks or checking accounts to their investment and retirement accounts. That “really set us up for success,” she noted. “It was like, we already transferred, the money is already going, and so now we have to make the rest work.”

In two years, she and her husband were able to save and invest $169,000, said Souffrant, who quit her corporate job in 2018 to focus on building her personal finance brand and business, Journey to Launch.

A key takeaway from her financial independence journey is that it’s never too late to make substantial financial or life changes, she writes in her book: “Sure, I’d ‘missed’ my goal of not working for anyone after thirty, but it wasn’t too late to turn my life around.”