Sometimes I get obsessed with songs. I can play it on repeat for an hour straight and be totally ok with it. Some examples of this are This Year by The Mountain Goats, I Wanna Get Better by Bleachers and Funky Little Baby by Here Come the Mummies. One of my latest song obsessions though is One Foot by Walk the Moon.

If you haven’t heard it:

I sort of considered it a circus theme song this year. We had a lot of struggles but by putting one foot in front of the other, somehow we made it through the season.

This week I started my awesome six weeks of working at home summer. On Monday I sat down to make a to-do list and two hours and three pages later, I was done. I had actually thought that summer was going to be way easier than the rest of the year, but between what actually does still look like close to 5 – 40 hours work weeks of work and trying to cram in real vacation time and visits with friends in the evening… I was feeling a little overwhelmed. But I took a deep breath and just started on the first item on the list – one foot in front of the other.

One of the items on that list is an OSHA 30 hour course online, which is incredibly boring. But as I plod through each lesson, I remind myself that though I’m on the far end of the 30 hours now, I’ll be way happier I tackled this task an hour here and an hour there rather than getting down to the last week of working from home and trying to cram in 6 hours a day of this horrendously boring course a day for five days. Just another example of one foot in front of the other.

And so, being the personal finance blogger I am, I started thinking about how this song also related to life in the personal finance realm.

So many financial goals are achieved by the one foot in front of the other philosophy. Paying down debt often takes years of perseverance and I remember plenty of times I felt like I was getting nowhere, but each payment is another step toward freedom.

I remember the feeling of being stalled right after paying down all that debt. I feel like there’s a weird plateau at several phases of the personal finance journey and that was definitely one for me. However, I settled on some savings goals and again, one foot in front of the other, I started achieving them. There were some years they felt impossible to achieve. Some years they actually were impossible to achieve and I had to accept I was only taking baby steps forward, and I definitely felt like the queen of nothing at all.

Another line in this song that reminded me of the circus and also reminds me of the personal finance community is “got your back, if you got mine.” It’s a lot easier to get across the wilderness with a great team.

At the circus, our crew is literally out of this world. This year I watched them do so many things people said were impossible.

I think a lot of personal finance bloggers attack life the same way. The norm in America seems to be to just stay swamped in debt for most of your life. This group is full of people killing their debt using so many different ways and they’re happy to share those ways! There’s also a bunch of financial independence/early retirement folks who are also balking the norm and spilling the exact way they did it for anyone to copy if they want to and can.

I also love how supportive this community is of one another. I’ve never met any group anywhere where so many people who don’t even know each other will go out of their way to help.

So, if you’re trying to make progress on any goal, find a good tribe and keep putting one foot in front of the other.