Hi, I decided to start writing about our journey to financial independence. Why? Simply because I want to show people that if we can do it than there’s no real reason why they couldn’t. We are no experts on gaining wealth, but we are trying to make logical decisions about our finances and limit amount of crap we buy. I look around me and see friends and work colleagues buying stuff on credit and I simply don’t understand. In these days of uncertainty why would you want to borrow money to buy stuff you don’t really need. I can’t remember where I read or heard this, but it went something along the lines of “we buy crap, get in debt and work like donkeys to impress people we despise”. Big homes, cars, watches, expensive gadgets, fancy dinners, overprices groceries in posh supermarkets where only people with branded clothes are allowed and the list goes on and on. We don’t really need any of that! We simply got lost in separation of wants and needs. They are not the same thing and what we sometimes want is not what we necessarily need. We have completely lost the idea of enough and however much we can afford on credit sometimes becomes new enough. So, how has this all started in my head? I became aware of the Financial Independence Retire Early or FIRE movement at the beginning of 2019. Since then I was obsessed with the idea of being able to make 9-5 work optional. Not that I don’t want to work or that I don't like my current job, but I would love to work on my own terms. I watched lots of video blogs, read books and listened to days worth of podcasts. I learned about passive investing, the 4% withdrawal rate rule and other stuff I had no idea about. My wife also quickly got on board. All she needed to know was that the plan is to be semi-retired in ten years and fully retired in twenty. Once again, not that we don’t want to work, but only want to work when we want to and do what we want to do. I know it sounds too good to be true. . . . Well we are going to try and make it work. I am not going to go into this too deep, but we are by no standards wealthy. We only recently reached a status of average earnings after years of education and struggle. We are very motivated. That probably comes from the fact that we both immigrated to UK without much. I come from troubled family and my wife's family was lower middle class. We now understand that it is not what we make, but what we spend, the gap is all that matters. We were never big spenders, but I had a few bad habits I had to shed to ensure that we can make it work. If you’re interested in specifics of our plan visit us more often for a read as there’ll be a lot more. If we fail you can read and hopefully soon watch how we failed, but if we succeed then maybe you can learn something from it.
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My name is Witold, but I call myself a frugal alien on this blog. Why? Because I feel like one when talking to people about personal finance. I write about financial independence and ideas surrounding it whilst embarking on that journey with my wife.
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