While the journey to FI was all about the numbers – savings rates and investment returns – and designing a lifestyle to fit those numbers, what comes after is all about crafting the life you truly want. For me, this means designing a lifestyle around increased independence. Here are the five changes that have made the biggest difference in my day-to-day life.

Working On My Own Terms

I used to grind out code from 9-5 (really more like 8-6) for my employer. I was so burnt out that I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to keep programming after reaching FI. Turns out, I actually love writing code – I just needed to do it on my own terms.

These days, my programming schedule follows my natural energy cycles. Some weeks I’m cranking out features for hours on end. Other weeks I might only open my laptop for a few quick commits and spend more time supporting the other developers on our team. This ebb and flow keeps my passion alive and my code quality high. No more forcing myself to stare at a screen when my brain is fried. No more guilt about taking breaks when I need them.

Location Independence: The Ultimate Freedom

One of the biggest wins of my post-FI life? Complete location independence. I just spent two and a half weeks in Asia visiting my dad. Now I’m writing this from Greece, where Rose and I will be staying for the next couple of months before heading back to Boulder for the summer.

The best part? Rose and I specifically designed our work arrangements to operate completely asynchronously with our teams. This means I can contribute meaningfully whether I’m in Boulder or Bulgaria. This freedom to roam while still staying connected has completely transformed how I think about work and travel. Traditional employers often have legitimate business reasons for requiring specific hours or in-office time. It wasn’t until I could walk away from traditional employment that I found a work situation that truly supports this flexibility.

No More Alarm Clock Anxiety

As someone who’s struggled with sleep, not having to worry about a looming alarm clock when I’m up at 3 AM has been life-changing. But it’s more than just avoiding alarm anxiety – it’s about embracing slow mornings. There’s something incredibly luxurious about taking my time with that first cup of coffee. I spend time reading next to Rose while our cat demands attention. Then, I am able to let the day unfold naturally.

Peak Life, Off-Peak Times

If you’ve ever been to a popular climbing crag on a weekend, you know the frustration of waiting in line for routes or dealing with crowds at the crag. Now, I can hit up even the most popular spots mid-week when they’re practically empty. (Hat tip to Mr. Money Mustache for popularizing this concept!)

This flexibility has actually made my weekend climbing sessions more enjoyable too. When I meet up with friends on Saturday, I’m not stressed about maximizing my precious weekend climbing time – I’ve probably already had several great sessions during the week! It’s freed me to focus on the social aspect of climbing rather than my own performance or just ticking off routes.

Investing in Relationships Without Time Constraints

Having a new niece, Heidi, who lives 45 minutes away (more like 90 minutes in typical Denver-Boulder traffic) has really highlighted this benefit. Instead of battling rush hour traffic after a long workday, I can visit during off-peak hours, actually spend quality time with her, and head home when it makes sense.

This flexibility extends to all my relationships. Meeting up with busy friends doesn’t need to be complicated by my own work schedule. And thanks to location independence, I can spend extended time with friends and family who live far away, rather than trying to cram everything into a long weekend visit.

The beauty of financial independence isn’t just about having money in the bank – it’s about having the freedom to design your life around what truly matters. For me, that’s meant optimizing for flexibility, relationships, and pursuing work and hobbies in a way that keeps them enjoyable rather than obligatory.

The post 5 Life-Changing Freedoms I Found After Reaching Financial Independence appeared first on A Way to FI.

During the final years of my journey to financial independence and in the years since quitting my full-time job, I’ve been in the process of designing the ideal lifestyle for myself. Five years in, the process is far from complete. What I thought I wanted in the beginning is different from where I’m headed now.

Pre-FI: Limited Options and Bountiful Safety

My career gave me guardrails – rigid structure that kept me on the road. Where did this road go? Since I chose my location (Colorado), my profession (software engineer) and employer, this road pointed generally where I wanted to go.

I was headed towards a semi-adventurous life very much in-line with what society wants from me:

• Buy a house,
• Get a dog and start a family,
• It’s okay to go climbing and hiking on the weekends and occasionally after work,
• Travel a few weeks per year,
• Make a boat-load of cash and spend most of it on an RV or a cabin near a ski resort
• Enjoy all these things occasionally until I’m old and can retire.

Not too bad. I mean who’s going to argue about the wonders of hiking a few times each week? A cabin up in the mountains sounds rad, right?

Going to an office daily gave me a way to spend my time and a place to meet people. On top of all that, I feel comfortable with structure. The routine of commute, office, commute, work out, sleep, repeat felt predictable, safe.

Transition to FI: Rip Out Those Guardrails!

I wanted more. But what did that “more” look like. Life without guardrails is scary. If I don’t have a commute, time in the office, happy hour with co-workers, etc. how do I spend my time?

TL;DR: I didn’t nail lifestyle design on this first iteration and that’s OK! In hindsight, choosing full-time #vanlife was an over-reaction to the rigidly structured life of an office worker.

Non-stop bopping around the American West climbing and hiking – though it may sound romantic – felt too open-ended for me after a while. My wife and I would climb for a day or two. Then we’d spend our off-days driving to the next place, re-provisioning food and water, and finding WI-FI. This wasn’t too bad for the first few weeks, but the unpredictability of it all quickly became unsustainable.

The first tweak to my post-FI lifestyle was small. Instead of spending 2-5 days in a place before moving on, Rose and I started to stay a week or more before moving on. This subtle change in our design enabled us to get to know a place a little bit. We learned where to get water, WI-Fi, and where to sleep. A little bit of predictability felt great!

The next pain point I found was that it’s hard to have community while on the road full time.

Van Life to Home Base: Craving Community

Even with slow van-based travel, it was hard to develop community. I missed my family that we got to see when living in the Denver area. I was also tired of spending all my time working in libraries and coffee shops. Wah Wah.

We enjoyed nine months of van life. Slowing down the location changes made a huge difference, but at 3/4 of a year on the road we were ready for a bit more normalcy.

Before the latest housing price boom, Rose and I came across a small and affordable-ish ranch-style home in the Boulder area.

Boulder, in case you don’t know, is home to some fantastic climbing. Road-side sport climbing, full-day alpine routes, and everything in between: Boulder has it. Add to that the fact that we have family living nearby and Boulder is full with other like-minded outdoor enthusiasts. We were sold.

We started seeing family regularly. Rose and I made friends with people at our climbing gym. We climbed. Our new place was spendy, so we took on some part-time work to fill the gap between what our FI number yielded and our new higher cost of living required. We enjoyed the work (and still do to this day) and still made time for climbing and training.

The balance of relationships and adventure tilted in favor of relationships. Then COVID struck. For a while at least, I was both confined to home and unable to see the people I cared about. As the restrictions lifted, I felt a burning desire to resume traveling.

Lifestyle Design: Constant Change

Three years after moving into our house, we packed all of our stuff in to two suitcases, listed our house on AirBnB, and flew to Croatia.

Which brings us to today.

Rose and I are currently on our second month living near Split, Croatia. We don’t know exactly what the next months or years will look like, though we have ideas.

For where we are in our lifestyle design journey, that’s okay. We think of Boulder as our home, but are also curious about making a life in Europe. We’re making friends here, but also miss our friends and family in the States.

That’s the beauty of post-FI lifestyle design: perfection can be a moving target. We don’t have to nail it the first time or ever. Every step along the way is an adventure and each experience adds to a life well-lived.

Let us know in the comments what you want your Post-FI lifestyle to look like! Have you achieved financial independence already? If so, what is your approach to lifestyle design?

The post Lifestyle Design: How to Live Your Best Life Post-Financial Independence appeared first on A Way to FI.

• companies to improve investments,
• workers to stay competitive, and
• governments to implement legislation that improves market safety.

In the same way that short-term struggle (i.e. physical exercise) keeps you and me from getting too soft and squishy, market downturns help the economy stay fit and healthy.

Stock market dips are (not) scary

As a person working towards FI, we are often keenly aware of how stock market fluctuations affect progress toward our FI Number. Because most of our net worth is invested in index funds, I’ve seen single-day market drops “reduce” my net worth by 10s of thousands of dollars.

To the uninitiated, this can be scary! After all, money you keep in cash in savings accounts (at least in the US) is “safe” from downturns because they are insured by the FDIC.

We are not the uninitiated! We know that the stock market historically recovers from these dips. And we know that afterwards, the economy emerges stronger than it was before.

As FI investors, we take a long-term view of the market. We do not pin our definition of success to the short-term, or even multi-year stock price. We buy and hold for decades. After reaching FI, we sell only a small portion of our investments to cover our carefully considered living expenses.

Hormetic stress for humans

The obesity epidemic shows us how abundance and easy living actually hurts us in the long run. While constant access to calorie-dense food might feel good in the short run, it can make us obese and more susceptible to disease in the long run.

Intermittent fasting: Between feast and famine

Optimal living lies between feast and famine. Sustained lack of food results in starvation, while unrestrained indulgence in food results in higher risks of:

• Type 2 Diabetes,
• Cancer,
• Heart Attacks, and
• a ton of other diseases that ruin your quality of life and may kill you.

One effective answer is hormetic stress in the form of intermittent fasting.

Hormetic stress, or “good” stress, is defined as:

Controlled, acute stressors that trigger healthy adaptive responses

– Stephanie Eckelkamp

Hormetic stress is not intense enough to cause harm, ie. starvation. And it’s not too long-lasting so that it becomes “chronic”.

Intermittent fasting (or “IF”) is when you create an eating window of four to eight hours per day. During your eating window, you eat. When your eating window is over, you don’t eat. Simple.

Benefits of intermittent fasting

Denying your body food a few hours each day has a few positive results including fat loss and autophagy. Allow me to digress briefly to chat about autophagy: It’s a near-magical process in which your body cleans up old weak cells, parts of cells and misfolded proteins.

Autophagy is linked to better skin and hair, reduced cancer risk, and even reversing early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Autophagy is a process we want to stimulate as much as possible. We get the majority of autophagy’s benefits when we place ourselves in a state of hormetic stress by taking a break from food or when we are exercising.

If this piques your interest and you’d like to dive deeper into fasting check out:

Hormetic stress for the economy

The same is true for the economy. Stress, in the form of dips and bear markets, to the economy and its constituent companies can keep things healthy in the long run.

Stock market primer

The stock market is comprised of every publicly traded company. Indices, such as the S&P 500, track large sets of actual companies. So when we hear that the stock market “is down”, they mean average stock prices of the companies in the stock market or an index are down.

A company’s goal/obligation is to provide value to its shareholders. A drop in stock price sends a message to company leadership that shareholders don’t approve of the direction of the company.

Share-price decline places real stress on the companies affected.

Stock price’s major impact

According to the Harvard Business Review, more than half of corporations’ upper-level management compensation in large companies is made up of stock and stock options. This effectively ties the stock price of a company with its executive’s wallets.

If a company’s stock performs badly enough, shareholders can exercise their rights as part owners of the company to oust corporate executives.

Additionally, a company’s stock can act as a currency used to make acquisitions of other companies. When its stock price falls, so does its purchasing power.

At the extreme end, underperforming stock can enable a hostile takeover. In short, a hostile takeover is when a prospective acquirer goes directly to the shareholders (subverting the company’s management) to aggressively acquire a company.

Finally, governments are watching for foul play and can levy fines and enact legislation in response to major market recessions.

Stress encourages change

Given the stress imposed by stock price fluctuations, how do companies, individuals, and governments respond? How do these responses result in a stronger economy in the long run?

Increase workforce competition

Companies can lay off mediocre employees. In stress-free times when the stock market is going up, the expense and liability of firing under-performing employees may not be deemed “worth it”. One way to increase share price is to decrease expenses. This puts those under-performing employees on the employment chopping block.

This may sound harsh, but increasing competition among members of the workforce ensures that individuals are working to keep their skills sharp. It also encourages people who are just in certain careers “for the money” to go look for work that they are more passionate about.

Divest underperforming investments

Take the automotive industry for example. During times of plenty, auto manufacturers can afford to produce both electric vehicles (EVs) and gas and diesel engines. As consumer preferences, environmental legislation, and the economy change, these same auto manufacturers are divesting themselves of assets tied to gas and diesel engines.

According to a report by Ernst & Young:

Since the days of the combustion engine are numbered, most decision-makers are trying to decouple these [combustion engines and electric vehicle] parts of the business and sell them while it is still possible.

Constantin Gall, Ernst & Young

Governments Improve Legislation

After the 2008 Great Recession, the Federal Government passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This complex law limits predatory mortgage lending by banks, limits risky investments a bank can hold, and established a branch of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to improve how investment credit ratings are devised.

If your eyes glazed over in the above paragraph, I don’t blame you. In short, the government took several of the root causes of the 2008 financial crisis and created legislation designed to prevent them from causing another recession. The legislation attempted to (and has succeeded at?) encourage consumer confidence in economic markets generally and banks specifically.

What Should You Do in a Recession?

First off, take a deep breath. Your bank might show that you’ve lost money, but this is just a loss on paper, unless you need to sell.

Remember that we’re investing for the long run, so daily, monthly, and even longer downturns don’t really matter to us. It’s all about how the market performs over decades. As we can see below, even though the S&P 500 is down (considerably) this year, it’s up nearly 60% over the last five years!

You could lose money if you sold in a panic during one of the several downturns or mini-recessions we’ve had during this time period. But if you avoid that and just did nothing, your paper-loss would turn into a paper-gain shortly thereafter.

Conclusion

Of course, without stock market dips and recessions, companies still invest, still create competition in the workforce, and governments still create legislation. Market contractions and individual stock price drops serve to accelerate these changes and squeeze out less competitive practices.

While there are downsides to recessions—big companies tend to outlast smaller competitors, good employees are fired when companies downsize, and not all legislation is effective legislation—market contractions encourage change and health in the economy.

As FI people, we invest for the long term and get to simply ignore these downturns!

The post What Do You Do in a Recession? appeared first on A Way to FI.

Begin with with the end in mind.

Achieving Financial Independence in the shortest amount of time possible requires many subtle and not-so-subtle lifestyle changes over several years. If you’re just starting down the path to FI and depending on many personal factors this time could range from four to 15 years.

Given the effort and time required to achieve FI, it’s super important to establish how want your post-FI life to look. This future lifestyle design is not imaginary. Creating this vision of your future self will serve as your main Goal, the reason you’re working toward financial independence to begin with!

Money is not the goal

Money is not your goal. With all this talk of saving rates, the 4% rule, and safe withdrawal, I often forget that Financial Independence is not actually about money. Rather, FI is about removing money as a limiting force in your life and turning it into a tool that enables the lifestyle you crave.

Excuses

We’ve all thought some variation on the following:

• If I could just afford…
• If I didn’t need this job…
• If I just had more time, I would…
• I can’t wait for when I retire, I’m going to…

Money is a lifestyle tool

The goal is to do away with those (very real) money-based excuses and to design your ideal life now. We do this by converting money from an inhibiting obstacle into a powerful tool.

Lifestyle vision

What does your ideal life look like? Write this down! In addition to what you yearn for now, try to imagine yourself in 10 years. Who are you with? Where in the world are you?

Perhaps images of you in a cabin in the woods with your family pop up. Or it could be you as a single person sailing a catamaran around the Mediterranean Sea. Maybe it’s more simple and you are in the house you’re in now with the people you are with right now, only difference being you’re not stressed about money.

What are you doing? Some of us love the career we have now, but do you wish your commute was shorter? Do you want to work a more flexible or reduced schedule so you can spend more time with people you love and on your hobbies? Maybe you’re in front of a computer all day now and you’ve dreamed of building your own house or wood working.

Focus on your lifestyle, not your bank statement

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Making your way to Financial Independence is about using money to realize your lifestyle goals. It’s about freeing yourself from the need to work a job you may or may not love so you can start spending time how you want.

Money becomes a tool. You will have enough money in the bank to leave your job altogether or (if you’re like me and like what you do) change jobs to reduce your commute, avoid toxic office politics, or increase your geographic and time-flexibility.

It’s a tool to allow you to travel, to live where you want, and live how you want. If you still desire a standard 40 hour-per-week work week you can even keep your job! The point is: you no longer have to after Financial Independence. You have greater freedom to craft your ideal lifestyle.

My ideal lifestyle

I’ve done this exercise myself and iterated on it throughout the years. I’ve broken out my goal, my ideal lifestyle, using three broad categories: Community, Purpose, and Adventure. To live my ideal life, I want a balance of all three.

Adventure

In my ideal life I am able to travel, both domestically and internationally, quite freely.

I have established a home for myself in a place designed for outdoor enthusiasts like myself—the Colorado Front Range. I want to be able to get outside during the week when trails and climbing areas are less congested. If the weather is good on a Tuesday, I want the freedom to go climb or trail run on that Tuesday.

I also want to chase spring and summer conditions, avoiding winter. This means that when it’s frigid in Colorado in January, I want to be able to go to Moab or Greece.

Rose and I put a high value on international travel. It’s important for us to be able to spend long periods of time exploring different countries. This winter, for example, we spent two months in Ecuador. Upcoming, we have a longer trip planned to Croatia.

Purpose

In my ideal life, I’m not working for a paycheck, but I am using my skills as a software developer to make the world a better place. I do get paid for that work; I selected a job that is both extremely flexible and gives back.

I am currently working on a software application that removes human bias from commercial loan underwriting to more fairly give loans to deserving, hard-working entrepreneurs.

The difference now is that I am not seeking the best paying job, I’m seeking a job where my skills make a difference.

Community

Family and friends are the essences of a meaningful life. Rose and I have developed a community in the Front Range of friends and a few family members with whom we climb, hike, and share meals.

When we travel abroad, we take time to learn the local language so that we can form meaningful relationships in the destinations we spend time in.

Why FI?

It’s important to start with your lifestyle goals in mind. When talking about Financial Independence, we talk a lot about money. Remember to keep an eye on these lifestyle goals and remember that money is just a tool to achieve the lifestyle you want. Money itself is not the goal.

The post Intro to FI Series: Lifestyle Goals appeared first on A Way to FI.

We set the FI Number by multiplying the amount of money we spend each year, called “Annual Spend”, by 25. To get to the same number, you can live off of 4% of your net worth annually.

For example, if you spend $30,000 per year on housing, transportation, travel, food, and everything else you need and want to live on, your FI Number would be $750,000. Four percent of $750,000 is $30,000.

The 4% rule

Why 25 times your Annual Spend? According to Investopedia,

The 4% Rule is a practical rule of thumb that may be used by retirees to decide how much they should withdraw from their retirement funds each year.

The purpose of adopting the rule is to keep a steady income stream while maintaining an adequate overall account balance for future years. The withdrawals will consist primarily of interest and dividends on savings.

Historic stock market performance shows that between stock market growth in the form of capital gains, dividends, and interest, you can annually withdraw 4% of your total net worth without reducing your net worth.

This 4% accounts for both inflation and periodic market downturns, including crashes. Some economists argue that 4% is actually too conservative and that 5% is more accurate, but for argument’s sake and to satisfy the more financially conservative among us, we use the 4% rule as a starting point.

Calculating your annual spend

Before you can multiply your annual spend by 25, you have to know what that spend is. You can calculate your yearly spending by adding up all of your expenses. It’s important to include both recurring expenses like rent payments, phone bills, and groceries as well as one-off expenses such as that new winter jacket, that new cell phone, and flowers for your front garden.

Tools of the trade

The best way to do this is to use a personal finance application such as YNAB (which Meghan talks about here), Mint.com, or Personal Capital. Each of these applications allows you to link your bank accounts, and then auto-import your transaction history—aggregating all your transactions from (possible) multiple credit cards, Venmo, and direct deposits/withdrawals into one place.

I personally use Mint.com and have used Personal Capital in the past.

Of course, you can always create your own spreadsheet—and maybe you do to perform further analysis. To get started, however, I’ve found that using the above tools to automate the transaction aggregation is a critical value-add.

Add up all expenses

Once you have all your accounts imported and have one year of history, add up all the expenses you had in the last year. Feel free to leave out reimbursable expenses such as airfare bought for a work trip that your company paid you back for.

This sum (less reimbursable expenses) is your annual spend.

No Judgement (yet)

If you’re like me, this number might be higher than predicted. Diving into my data I learned that though my recurring expenses (food, housing, etc.) are quite low, my “one-off” purchases for hiking and climbing were not so “one-off”. That’s okay! For now…

Remember, right now your goal is to simply calculate your annual spend so you can calculate your FI Number. There will be plenty of time to trim up your budget (and re-calculate your FI Number!!) down the road.

How does other income affect your FI number?

Most people don’t want to actually retire once they hit their FI number. Hard-working, driven people—like those in the FI community—tend to stay busy and productive throughout their lives.

This is why I take issue with the acronym FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). It implies that once you hit FI, you retire. You may want to actually retire for a time, but most are just looking for flexibility and freedom in their lives.

Most in the FI community still generate income, and many actually end up increasing earned income after reaching FI.

If you are calculated about this, this means you may be able to reduce your FI number. Let’s look at two examples.

Example 1: Real estate supplemental income

Let’s say you own your own home in Boulder, CO. Boulder is a desirable place to live and it is a year-round vacation destination for climbers, hikers, and skiers. When you travel, you like to take advantage of “Geo-Arbitrage” (leveraging travel to less expensive parts of the world like South or Central America, East Asia, or Eastern Europe to reduce costs over your home town in an expensive place like Boulder, New York City, or London) to save money on housing and you make money by renting out (via VRBO or Airbnb) your house while you’re gone.

In a nice but very inexpensive city like Quito, Ecuador, you can find a luxury apartment for $475 per month.

In Boulder, your house might rent out for $4,000 to $7,000 per month.

This is a CRAZY difference in price. If you were to do something similar to this a few months out of the year, you might be able to take home a net income of ~$30,000 per year.

Additionally, you’d be able to write off a lot of your housing expenses against this $30,000 of income. We’ll chat more about tax optimization in future posts!

Example 2: What if I like my job?

You (like me) actually like writing code! You just don’t like being told where or when to do it. As mentioned above, if it’s nice out on a Tuesday, you want to be able to go outside and not be beholden to some corporate rule about the number of vacation days you can take.

What if you can still code, but do so with a flexible schedule. Maybe even work remotely…

According to Glassdoor, the average salary for a mid-level software engineer in the US is over $110,000 (or roughly $55 per hour).

Let’s say you’ve built a good reputation and are competitive in the job market. You can be very selective about the company you work for and the benefits that the company provides. Critically, because you like coding, but no longer need to make money, you can trade a portion of my salary for flexibility.

With some persistence, you find a part-time side hustle that pays way below the market rate at $30 per hour (or roughly $60,000 per year if you work full time) that allows you to work part-time—say 20 hours per week. If you also take two weeks per year completely off, this gives you ~$30,000 of income that you enjoy making.

One big caveat

The keyword here is enjoy. The whole point of FI is to have enough money to live out your ideal lifestyle. If you like programming, great! But you should enjoy every aspect of the work, including: the projects you work on, the team you spend time with, and the schedule you’re asked to work. It should be a passion project, not a job.

Other ideas

Obviously, this does not just apply to coding or AirBnB. These examples are similar to two of the side-hustles I’ve picked up. Here are some other ideas:

Maybe you like carpentry, but don’t like working for a big construction contractor and you decide to start your own gig.

Maybe you love helping people optimize their finances, but don’t want to be an accountant anymore. You could become an IRS enrolled agent and volunteer to help people optimize their taxes.

You’re a busy journalist for your city’s newspaper. You love writing but are sick of intense deadlines and competitive culture at the paper. You could start your own blog or newsletter and publish articles on your own schedule.

Adjusted annual spend

Earned income in retirement can dramatically reduce your FI Number. There are many ways to do the accounting on this.

One way would be to take this after retirement annual income and subtract it from your annual spend. We’ll use the $60,000 as a sample (very high) annual spend.

$60,000 (annual spend) – $30,000 (post-retirement income) = $30,000 adjusted annual spend

This would cut your FI Number in half from $1.5m (25 x $60,000) to $750k (25 x $30,000).

You don’t have to be a millionaire to retire.

Technically, if you still need to pull in external cash to fund your lifestyle, you’re not financially independent. However, I’m willing to argue that you’re well on your way to FI if you’ve made some tweaks to how you make money that make you happier now, versus slaving away at a job you don’t like for another several years.

Through the above examples, I want to throw a spotlight on some of the nuance and opportunities that exists in the FI community.

Final thoughts

It’s so easy to focus on your FI Number and what you want your net worth to be in order to retire and lose sight of what you want your life to look like. You need to determine for yourself what that life looks like and, importantly, if you’re likely to be making any money once you do “retire”.

With some thoughtfulness and goal-setting, Financial Independence might be a lot closer than you think!

The post Intro to FI Series: Your FI Number appeared first on A Way to FI.

I benefit from the privilege of being introduced to many of the pillars of Financial Independence from my dad relatively early in life. Because what I learned aligns with some of my core interests, I’ve also earned a pretty good salary as a Software Engineer throughout my career.

2008 crash and first company

I’ve always been money-conscious. In high school, I ran a landscaping business that cut lawns, spread mulch, and built stone patios for people. I had five employees. Making money was a fun game – like SimCity but real life.

My dad set me up with a Fidelity account and showed me how to invest in low-expense index funds. I think it was VTI or IVV.

During the 2008 financial crisis, I watched my hard-earned income get halved. I was too into “being cool” in college while getting a degree in Information Technology to get too bent out of shape about it.

By the time I entered the job market in 2010, things had started to recover and my Fidelity balance was back up to about what it was before the crash. I had learned a valuable lesson:

Don’t sell in a panic! You’ll miss out on the gains when the market rebounds!

Entering the job market

In 2010 and fresh out of college, I started my first job as a Software Engineer in Richmond, Virginia. I was making good money, but nowhere near the six-figure mark that I heard developers were making in Washington D.C. and San Francisco.

Importantly, Richmond has an extremely low cost of living. I was able to get a room in a nice apartment on Monument Avenue in The Fan (highly desirable location) for $400 per month. I spent weekends backpacking on the nearby Appalachian Trail and going on bike rides. Additionally, I drove a $3k 1998 Honda Civic.

Though I had no vision for Financial Independence at the time, at age 22 I was on my way to FI due to having a reasonable salary and very low spend rate.

It took me five years to discover FI

Over the next few years, I:

• Got a new job in a new location (with a smaller salary),
• Bought a small town house and got two roommates to pay 90% of my mortgage, then kicked those roommates out when I
• Got married to an equally-money-conscious woman,
• Got a second new job with a higher salary.

This new job paid closer, but still shy of, the Silicone Valley ideal of the six-figure salary. Importantly, this company had a bonus program where they would contribute to employee 401k up to the IRS max.

My new wife and I took a position with her job in Germany. Here, the U.S. Government paid for our housing through Rose’s job. I qualified for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) – a tax situation where a large portion of your active income is tax-exempt.

We were saving money at an astonishing rate, but didn’t know what to do with it.

I checked into my Fidelity account and found that I had 10s of thousands of dollars just sitting in cash. I figured I should do something with it, but had no idea what.

Some internet research led Rose and me to find Mr. Money Mustache’s blog and JL Collins’ Simple Path to Wealth. We promptly moved this money into a new Vanguard account and bought VTSAX – one of the best low-expense index funds.

Path to financial independence

In 2015 and in our mid-20s, we were on our path to Financial Independence! We had:

• A goal of reaching Financial Independence in the next five years,
• A townhouse in the States that was then rented out and producing a small amount of passive income,
• A solid combined income from our jobs, and
• A spectacular savings rate.

Rose and I had always been natural savers, but had figured out what to do with our savings and we had a goal!

For the next several years we continued traveling around Europe, finding bargain flights and accommodations. While our friends were buying Audis and staying in luxury hotels, we were a one-car family driving a cheap Volkswagen and staying in gasthauses in private rooms with bathrooms shared with other guests.

We put aside $2,000 to $4,000 for an emergency fund and to handle our cash flow. We invested everything else into low-expense index funds like IVV and VTSAX. Riding the insane rise the stock market took from 2015 to ~2022, our money made an approximate 60% return.

Declaring (lean) financial independence

Five and a half years later, in 2018 we quit our full time jobs and moved into a van.

We had reached FI. Well, sort of. Our spending rate MINUS about 75% of what we were spending on housing put us within the Safe Withdrawal Rate from our net worth. In other words, living off of 4% of our net worth, we could cover our spending and a portion of our housing. Given the high cost of living in the Front Range, hacking our housing situation would allow us to “retire”.

There certainly was some fat we could trim from our monthly budget (more on this in another article). The big change we decided to make was exchanging our $2,000/month rent in our single-family home for $50 per month for a tiny storage unit for our stuff and a van (paid for with cash – no loan payments) for us!.

We also wanted to be location independent and spend time climbing around the western US!

In short, we had enough money to retire in 2019, but not enough to live super comfortably. Certainly not enough to be able to afford rent or a mortgage in the very competitive housing market that is the Colorado Front Range.

We didn’t want to wait until we had enough to declare full Financial Independence/Retire Early (or fat – FIRE) to quit jobs that we weren’t crazy about and to start living the life we desired.

We leveraged our (already) substantial savings in combination with our willingness to be flexible in our housing situation to make drastic changes early!

(re)Focusing on FIRE

We spent just shy of a year in the van, bouncing around to different destinations in the American west.

Wanting to be a little less mobile, we eventually scored a great deal on a home in Boulder, CO. We also converted our side-hustles (that we LOVE) into extremely flexible full-time jobs to cover our new housing expenses. In short, we took smaller salaries than we could find elsewhere in exchange for a high degree of flexibility

We were still living the life we wanted but still depended on some amount of supplemental income to support our cushy lifestyle.

Enter: Meghan

Having a home base in Boulder made it easier to make friends! This is when Rose and I started spending time with Cal and Meghan. After a few months, Meghan asked us (Rose, I think) about FI and what we did to have the flexible schedule we then had.

The best way to learn is to teach. Getting materials together to share FI principles with friends forced Rose and I to dust off our FI knowledge and re-orient ourselves to the FI mindset. We had to get smart, again!

That brings me to today.

Full- and (eventually) fat- FIRE

I’m excited to be refocusing myself towards Financial Independence. Spending time as a lean-retiree has given me a taste of what is possible. I like my current job, but want to set Rose and myself up for true Financial Independence so that we would not have to change much if our jobs were to go away.

There is much more Rose and I can be doing to better achieve FI. We can trim lots of fat from our spending, use some simple tricks to reduce our tax burden, and put time into our side-hustles to increase passive income.

I’m excited to learn and grow with you during this next FI-focused chapter of my life!!

A Way to FI

I’m starting this blog to share with you specific tips and tricks I’ve used to achieve Financial Independence. Equally, I want to learn from the community your thoughts on Financial Independence. Specifically, I’m looking forward to learning your thoughts on:

• What do you do when you retire?
• Tax optimization,
• Travel hacking,
• Lifestyle design.

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