It usually starts with a number.
$25,000, to be exact.
That’s the amount of student loan debt Kara Perez paid off while earning what most people would call an unremarkable salary. No windfalls. No secret hacks. Just intention, consistency, and a quiet refusal to believe that consumption was the answer to discomfort.
But this conversation on the Earn & Invest Podcast isn’t really about debt.
It’s about something much harder to measure.
Somewhere along the way, many of us were sold a version of sustainability that looks… expensive.
Organic everything. Ethically sourced everything. A curated life where doing good for the planet requires a bigger paycheck.
Kara gently dismantles that idea.
She points out something uncomfortable:
what we often label as “sustainable living” is simply what lower-income communities have always done—repairing instead of replacing, reusing instead of upgrading, sharing instead of owning.
In other words, sustainability isn’t a luxury good.
It’s restraint.
And maybe even more than that…it’s remembering that “enough” exists.
But then the conversation turns, as it inevitably does, toward something heavier.
A kind of quiet despair. Younger generations looking out at a world where housing feels unattainable, climate change feels irreversible, and the traditional scripts for success feel… broken.
And when everything feels broken, the default response is often isolation.
Figure it out yourself. Hustle harder. Optimize more.
Kara doesn’t just disagree with that mindset—she rejects it outright. The idea of rugged individualism, she argues, isn’t just unrealistic. It’s harmful. No one builds a meaningful life or solves a meaningful problem alone.
So maybe the better question isn’t “What can I do?”
Maybe it’s:
“What can I do with other people?”
That shift sounds small. It isn’t.
Because suddenly, solutions start to look different. Buying a house becomes buying with friends. Shopping becomes swapping. Scarcity becomes something you navigate together instead of something you silently endure.
And then we arrive at money. Not just how we earn it or spend it, but what it quietly supports. Kara introduces a concept that feels both practical and oddly relieving:
a harm reduction approach.
Because if you’ve ever tried to align your finances perfectly with your values, you’ve probably discovered something frustrating. Perfection doesn’t exist.
The system is messy. Complicated. Full of trade-offs.
So instead of chasing purity, she suggests something simpler.
Start where you can.
Move your money away from institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, or Citibank: banks heavily tied to fossil fuel financing and place it somewhere that reflects your values a little more closely.
Not perfectly. Just… better.
Even in investing, she offers permission to simplify. Pick one value. Focus on that. Let it guide your decisions.
And maybe most importantly, she acknowledges something we don’t often say out loud:
Choosing values over maximum returns is, in itself, a form of privilege.
Not everyone can afford that choice.
But if you can—even a little—it might be worth asking what that choice says about who you want to be.
What’s fascinating is when we reflect all of this. Because the principles Kara is describing, consume less, buy used, avoid excess, they sound a lot like the foundations of the Financial Independence movement.
Except reframed.
What if the pursuit of financial independence wasn’t just about freedom from work?
What if it was also, unintentionally, a form of environmental activism?
Not loud. Not performative. Just embedded in the daily choices to want less.
And then, almost as an afterthought, the conversation drifts into something else many of us feel but rarely articulate:
Division.
Political, cultural, ideological.
The kind that quietly reshapes friendships and makes conversations feel… risky.
But here again, the answer isn’t withdrawal.
It’s curiosity.
Because even across deep divides, there are often shared desires hiding underneath—like protecting public lands, or wanting safer communities, or building something that lasts beyond us.
We just disagree on how to get there.
By the end of the episode, nothing feels neatly resolved. There’s no perfect system. No flawless strategy. No single right answer. Just a series of more human questions:
What is enough for me?
Who am I trying to become?
And who am I willing to do that alongside?
If those questions linger a little longer than usual, it might be worth listening to the full conversation.
Not for the answers.
But for the way it gently changes the questions.
This is such a good reframing of “enough.” Not as deprivation, not as moral purity, but as a sane operating system in a culture that keeps trying to upsell us into exhaustion. Consume less, need less, waste less, depend on each other more — that’s not small living. That may be the most durable kind of wealth.