- Lawrence Delva-Gonzalez and his wife went from being $150,000 in debt to having a net worth of $1.5 million.
- Raised in Haiti, Delva-Gonzalez faced financial struggles like student loan and credit card debt.
- By budgeting, investing, and adopting FIRE principles, he and his wife became millionaires in a decade.
Lawrence Delva-Gonzalez, 41, was $150,000 in debt in 2012, working a job that paid $27,000 a year. A little over a decade later, he and his wife grew their net worth to over $1.5 million.
Delva-Gonzalez, who was raised in a low-income household in Haiti, incurred thousands in student loan and credit card debt and was unsure how he would dig himself out of his hole.
But budgeting and investing turned his wealth situation around. Adopting principles from the FIRE — financial independence, retire early — movement, he cut back on excess purchases, tracked all his expenses, invested in rental properties, and maxed out his 401(k) and IRA. Despite not having a flashy job, he and his wife carefully crafted their financial portfolio to grow their wealth without sacrificing travel.
"The conversation about FIRE, it's almost like looking at the end, but part of it is looking at the beginning too," Delva-Gonzalez said. "Not everyone starts off rich, and I didn't start off rich at all."
A challenging financial beginning
Delva-Gonzalez was born in the US but raised in Haiti by his grandmother. Growing up, he said most of Port-au-Prince could be classified as "working poor," including his grandmother who would wake up at 4 a.m. working side hustles.
He noted how everyone in his neighborhood shared food, as his grandmother would prepare a large pot of food and serve those in need. He recalled having no AC or clean running water growing up and few books in his school library.
"Those little things taught me how to value not just making money but how to use it to provide a roof over my head and food in the pantry," Delva-Gonzalez said.
When he was a teenager, he moved to Miami with his mother into a studio apartment. His mother never made more than $30,000 a year, he said.
"We were poor. I don't know why people don't like to say it, but it's just what it was," Delva-Gonzalez said. "We got reduced breakfasts and lunches at school. The first time I had tennis shoes when when I bought them for myself when I was 16 because I had to work."
He decided to attend college, taking out $110,000 in student loans between his undergraduate and graduate programs in business and accounting at Florida State University. He also spent seven years in the Marine Corps. Being in debt stressed him out immensely, though he struggled to secure a high-paying job, especially since it took him a few years to become acclimated to American culture.
He suspected his racial and socioeconomic background hindered him in the job search, and he was once told in an interview for a finance role he couldn't work there because he didn't have any investments. His first post-college job as a financial assistant paid him $27,000 before taxes, half of which went toward student loans.
"I started to think about my grandmother, how she was able to make ends meet and feed so many people, and I asked, how was she able to do that?" Delva-Gonzalez said. "I started to incorporate those types of ideas into my lifestyle, such as meal prep, reducing consumption of excess things, and mining the money that I had by being intentional."
Budgeting and investing
In 2012, Delva-Gonzalez, an auditor, began budgeting, and the amount he spent each month surprised him. Between him and his three roommates, they spent $2,400 a month on food, which he said was an "insane amount."
Delva-Gonzalez said he also didn't have a plan for paying off his student loans while investing in his retirement, so he jumped into the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and put more in his 401(k), 403(b), and 457(b) plans. He did this to lower his adjusted gross income, which would lower his tax liability and, thus, his student loan payments.
"The more that you can invest on the front end in tax-beneficial accounts or systems, it will basically have an outsize return for you in the back end," he said.
He used some of this excess money to tackle his credit card debt, and he jumped to auditor positions that paid increasingly more. His debt-to-income ratio fell rapidly.
After a few years of heavy savings and investments, he had enough to purchase a home for $132,000 in 2016, paying about $1,000 each month for his mortgage.
His upbringing in Haiti "gave me an advantage over a lot of my peers because I find that resourcefulness is probably one of those things that you need to have, especially when everybody thinks that things are falling apart," Delva-Gonzalez said.
That year, he met his now-wife Doreen, and they merged their accounts. Delva-Gonzalez still had debts to pay down, though. By 2017, the two of them could pay down debt to the point of having a net worth of zero. They employed various budgeting apps to keep expenditures low and pinpoint the areas where they overspent. Both of them maxed out their 401(k)s and IRAs, and they put thousands in their health savings accounts.
Becoming millionaires
Careful money decisions, along with side hustles in financial coaching, allowed them to grow their combined net worth to over $250,000 by the start of 2020 despite neither working high-paying jobs (his wife works as a community manager).
Their assets included a rental property they bought next to his alma mater, which ensures constant revenue — and is where his cousin may live while attending school.
Their net worth grew to over $450,000 in January 2021, over $650,000 in January 2022, over $800,000 in January 2023, and $1.53 million in August 2024, according to his blog The Neighborhood Finance Guy.
"I think people overthink the process; they think that there's a secret sauce that somebody hasn't told them about or that they have to be masterminds," Delva-Gonzalez said.
To cross the millionaire threshold, Delva-Gonzalez said they closely followed the "financial order of operations," such as the rule that people should not have more than 30% of their take-home pay going toward their total housing costs. While this isn't possible for many Americans living paycheck to paycheck, Delva-Gonzalez said it's critical to not keep up with the Joneses and avoid the larger house until expenses are underneath 25% of gross income.
He avoided frequent higher-cost purchases — such as expensive brunches — without jeopardizing his social life. Still, he estimates in the last five years, he and his wife have dropped over $40,000 on Amazon purchases, which he called "little daggers poking into my ship."
He said after leaving his job once he's more financially stable, his goal is to buy back the time he spent working and pursue travel and volunteer opportunities, such as helping Black Americans through the childcare process or helping young entrepreneurs create and grow their businesses.
"You're really doubling down on the actual freedom to truly be who you want, the freedom of not being beholden to dressing a certain way," Delva-Gonzalez said. "It's the freedom to be yourself without all the excess stuff, without all the noise."
Are you part of the FIRE movement or living by some of its principles? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected].