Meet Ali and Alison Walker | Personal finance bloggers at All Options Considered

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ali and Alison Walker and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ali and Alison, have there been any changes in how you think about work-life balance?
Work life balance was always an issue for us during our careers. It was pretty common for us to work 50 and 60 hour weeks, which was not satisfying or healthy for us. Ali worked in marketing for firms specializing in engineering and environmental science, and Alison worked in image retouching for firms supporting the catalog printing industry. Our phones rang at night and on the weekends so we felt obligated to take our work phones and laptops everywhere we went. It became clear that we both needed to change our career paths in order to prioritize our health and our marriage. Instead of changing to new careers we focused on retiring early at ages 44 (Ali) and 54 (Alison) so we could prioritize our personal lives over our employer’s bottom lines.

Now that we are retired we blog about personal finance and financial independence at All Options Considered. We want to share as much as possible about our own experiences and offer our support to others who are looking for people to talk to about those topics. Early retirement is not for everyone but we want to encourage people to design the life that’s best for them, considering their real circumstances and goals. And we want to help break the taboo that discourages people from talking about money and gaining control of their personal finances.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
We love talking about what we would do if we could go back in time and create our careers all over again. Maybe we would be entrepreneurs, maybe we would work in personal finance, maybe we would have started blogging much earlier. But we don’t have a time machine unfortunately.

Ali worked in strategic marketing for an international architecture and engineering firm for 14 years, helping her teams win major projects. She spent her last two working years with a small environmental science firm helping her team break into new markets and design their first strategic plan.

Alison worked in image retouching for a series of firms, including one that was global and one that had only a handful of employees. She started in the print industry when plates were assembled by hand and finished her career as a Photoshop Expert digitally retouching images to meet the catalog requirements of some of the biggest retail companies in the USA.

What we had in common during our careers was a love of mentoring and teaching other team members, which helped motivate us to start our blog, All Options Considered. We love it when other people reach out to us through our blog looking for someone to talk with about their plans and goals, as well as their fears and concerns. Our main goal with our blog is to spread information about financial independence and personal money management to more underserved communities – because financial success should not be the private domain of only a select few!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
We moved to Arizona from Seattle and we love having friends and family visit us in our new home state. Some of our favorite things to see in AZ include visiting the Desert Botanical Garden, checking out Taliesen West, and having a wine tasting at Page Springs Cellars. And when it’s too hot outside we enjoy visiting the Phoenix Art Museum. We also love visiting state parks like Riordan Mansion, national monuments like Sunset Crater and Walnut Canyon, and of course national parks like the Grand Canyon (the south rim is easier to reach but the north rim is better!).

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
While we were in our 30’s and 40’s the idea of early retirement still seemed a bit mysterious to us and though we were making progress on our own, we needed help turning our hopes and dreams into a real plan. The challenge was finding other people we could talk to about our goals and other lessons we could learn from.

We weren’t finding people we could talk to about money so we joined an investing club through Better Investing. Our investing club met every weekend and those conversations really helped to demystify the stock market and made us feel welcome in the investing world, regardless of our backgrounds and our creative career paths. That gave us the confidence we needed to keep working our plan so we want to give those women from our investing club a big shoutout!

The bigger challenge was deciding how much money we needed to have saved in order to live off our investments forever so we could pull the plug and quit our jobs. Thankfully, we found an early version of the FIRE (financial independence retire early) movement online in 2014 and that sped things up for us. We read Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin which helped us settle into our own financial independence mindset. And we read the Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins, which helped us design our own investment portfolio and confirm that we are fully capable of managing our own money. Vicki and JL are the early retirement mentors we needed, and we will always be grateful to them. Our recommended reading list grows every year but their books are always our first recommendations for anyone interested in financial independence!

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