Looking to simplify your life, stuff, and finances all while becoming wealthy enough to be financially independent (FI) and do what you really want to do with your life? Hey, me too! Looking to stick to the status quo and work your 9 to 5 until you turn 68 and can finally retire to the good life? Get out. No, really. This isn’t going to be interesting to you. I’m on a journey, along with my family, to completely revolutionize the way we’ve been living. We are in the process of killing our final debt. We want it gone. Dead. Never to be heard from again. We’re done with the norm. We’re craving lives of meaning and exploration. We’re sick of spending hours a day cleaning and organizing “stuff” that isn’t adding value to our lives. We’re also a family of five. Our three kids are ages five and under, and we are on the brink of getting our foster care license to add more to the mix. And the real kicker? My husband has an incredibly low salary of $26k/year while I’m a stay-at-home-mom. How does any of that add up? Well, my new friends, let me introduce (or reintroduce) you to the world of FI. The extremely basic explanation of FI is to save/invest enough cash so that you have 25 times your annual living expenses (not salary) saved up. Once you’ve hit this amazingly awesome and entirely individual number, you have yourself a magical perpetual money-making machine from which you can draw your living expenses for the rest of your life without ever having to make another dollar again. In theory. FIRE stands for Financially Independent, Retire Early. The only issue I take with FIRE is the word “retire” because all of the implications and biases behind the word. The traditional sense of the word brings to mind Bunco nights and Wheel of Fortune on repeat. Not exactly something you want to skip over 20 years of life to get to. Instead of framing our future retirement as retiring “from” work, I want to reframe it to retiring “to” passion work. Work we do because we want to do it whether we make a penny from it or not. I’d love to have my husband be able to retire in his 40’s, if that’s how we are framing FIRE. There are many paths to FI, but the path that we are on is the low-income path to FI with the goal of my husband being able to retire early so we can travel the country and the world as self-funded charity workers. He’s 31 in the IT sector working for a nonprofit, and I’m 27 with a background in Family Development studies. But I’m mostly a mom. Which is plenty. Our path to FI seems to be a unique one. I’ve become engrossed in the FI community in the last year, and haven’t quite met someone like us, yet. There are lots of high income earners who spend the typical American income on their lifestyle, shovel the leftovers into tax-advantaged and post-tax accounts, and become financially independent in a couple years. There are also those who pull the real estate lever, buy up a bunch of rental properties, and quickly are able to live off of the rental income. There’s no one way to hit FI, or best way, or right way. I’ve just not heard a voice in the mix that’s been able to represent our way. So the point of this blog is to document our journey from debt to financial independence on an extremely low income with a big and growing family. Welcome. Come on in. Let’s learn from each other as we explore the endless opportunities in front of us. The FIRE is warm.
