Just be aware… if you ask me about the FIRE movement, I’ll be happy to talk your ear off!

What is FIRE?

FIRE is simply an acronym for Financial Independence Retire Early. It’s a simple idea with a lot of practical applications for you to become more financially secure.

The goal is simply to save more – by reducing your expenses and increasing your income. We had been relatively frugal even before we discovered FIRE – but BOY did it get us excited! Retire earlier than we were planning?

We were originally planning on retiring pretty early in the 1st place – Gary would be 62 and I would be 55. We had a decent plan to get there and had been putting a lot in our 401Ks to help that. But we could do more?

Yep. We learned quickly about trying multiple different alternate incomes besides our “day job”. I actually started dabbling in options trading (quite interesting but not as lucrative as I was hoping) and in real estate. We started saving a lot more and really put everything in high gear.

We found that needing less really helps make your existing funds last much longer (duh!) and with 5 or so years of this accelerated savings and additional rentals, we were able to retire 7 years earlier than planned!

So where did I learn about all of this?

There are many excellent resources out there, but if you want to get a huge bang for your buck, here’s where we would recommend to start.

https://www.choosefi.com/

This site has a WEALTH of knowledge and it reasonably easy to search. They also have a great “getting started” area that gives you the basic ideas behind this financial philosophy as well as providing some practical changes (both small and not-so-small) that you can implement in your plan.

https://www.choosefifoundation.org/financial-independence-101

The way both Gary and I started was simply listening to the podcasts that they had online. We both had long commutes and this was a great way of learning while we we stuck in the car anyway!

https://www.choosefi.com/listen/choose-fi-podcast/

I’d highly recommend to just start listening. The first step is simply being aware there are other options. Some may work for you, some may not. But making small incremental changes will help make those future goals more real and ultimately accelerate your timeline.

If so choose to take action…