Starting my Journey to FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)

I can’t recall the exact moment it dawned on me, but it hit me like a brick when I thought of retiring at the traditional age of 65. I thought to myself…

“Why would I want to wait until 65, when I have less energy and an uncertain amount of time left in my life, to enjoy my hard-earned money?

As I pondered this over the last few years, I think my mindset has shifted drastically towards a movement that has been gaining a lot of popularity, especially in the millennial generation, called the FIRE movement — or — Financial Independence Retire Early. The idea behind it is to ramp up your savings to somewhat insane amounts (e.g. 75–90%) as opposed to the traditional 10–20% for a few years, usually 10, and be able to retire in your 30s or 40s. Sounds pretty enticing right?

Though, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the retire early part as I don’t think I would ever do that, but rather just the financial independence (FI) part of it. I think what makes a happy life is one in which you are free to pursue your personal and/or professional interests without any financial constraint. After nearly burning myself out over work and pretty much eroding all my personal relationships over the last few years, the idea of being financially free to pursue my interests and invest in my relationships seems like a worthwhile pursuit.

Fortunately for me, I actually embarked on the FIRE journey back in 2015 unknowingly because I had an extremely low cost of living in the tiny city of Rochester, Minnesota. I was also working well over 100 hours a week for a few years as I had just started to build my career so I didn’t spend much money. In fact, I was pretty much confined to a 1–4 mile radius for 4.5 years as my days were spent either working or sleeping. It’s a bit more difficult now that I’ve moved to Washington DC where the cost of living is much higher, but I’m much more intentional about how to reach my goal of becoming financially free. One example is in the area of investing.

I’ll likely make a video that goes more into depth about all my investment accounts and the rationale behind them. However, my general strategy is to max out all my tax-advantaged accounts (403b, 457, HSA, Roth IRA) and invest the vast majority of my remaining discretionary funds into taxable accounts. Given the number of investment options available when it comes to taxable accounts these days, especially in an era of commission-free trades, I have opened quite a few of them to try each of them out. My current favorite is M1 finance, but I also have accounts with Robinhood, WeBull, Wealthfront, Fundrise, Fidelity, and Vanguard. They all have their pros and cons, but I continue using all of them — at least for now — because there are aspects of each I really like and don’t want to part with. Building wealth is not all about investing though, it includes managing the money you have as well. For these purposes, I use You Need a Budget (YNAB) for prospectively managing my budget (honestly has been a game-changer), but also Personal Capital for monitoring my net worth and progress towards my financial goals.

Although I still have some ways to go in my FIRE journey, for now, I’m just enjoying the ride. If you want to follow along in my journey towards FIRE, I’ll be blogging about it on Medium and Squarespace and posting vlogs on YouTube. Here’s my latest video if you want to check it out!