FIRE gave me a way out—not just from work, but from a career without direction. After 12 years in Corporate America, I felt like a cog in a big wheel, a number in someone else's spreadsheet. The commute was tiresome, the office environment was stale, and the lack of flexibility left a lot to be desired. I felt stuck.
The FIRE approach is straightforward: build a savings and investment portfolio large enough to sustain your desired lifestyle without having to work. It's possible to implement a simple plan to create lasting wealth that doesn't require a radical change in your career or taking extraordinary risk.
The FIRE movement is about taking a fresh perspective and being intentional in crafting that plan for yourself to accelerate the timeline of reaching financial independence, thereby freeing yourself from being dependent on a paycheck.
Three core building blocks make it happen:
**1. Intentional spending and understanding expenses**
Understanding your expenses, both now and what you expect them to be in the future, is the first element to tackle. House, cars, groceries, taxes, gym memberships, kids' activities, vacations—all of this should be understood at a line-item level.
Be ruthlessly intentional about which expenses are necessary and which are wasteful. If an expense is wasteful, eliminate it immediately. If it's necessary, find ways to minimize it.
**2. Pay yourself first - maximize your savings rate**
No matter what you earn, you can always save some of it. Whether it's 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, or more, that proportion of any money earned should be immediately moved to your savings portfolio. Automate this savings process and figure out how to live on the remaining amount.
Think of yourself as the CEO and CFO for your own personal finance company. Your primary objective is to maximize retained earnings. Any extra value saved today is payment to your future self ten-fold.
**3. Buy and hold good assets**
You can't just hold dollars (or other fiat currency), because doing so will make you poorer, not wealthier. The cost of goods and services you use every day continually gets more expensive over time due to a combination of monetary debasement and government intervention in the marketplace.
Housing, healthcare, education—categories we all must spend money on that continually get costlier. Because of this purchasing power erosion, you must store your wealth in something other than fiat currency.
Most FIRE practitioners choose the stock market and/or real estate. I choose bitcoin.
Buying good assets allows you to maintain, and even grow, your purchasing power over time. This savings portfolio will be used to sustain your retirement lifestyle, and it needs to grow large enough so that you won't run out of money when you are no longer working.
Earn, save, stack, repeat. When you understand your expenses, pay yourself first, and start stacking assets, you're well on your way to financial independence.
🛠️ FIRE Fundamentals
Issue #2 - The building blocks for financial independence
