My feet tread the path – The journey to FIRE

So I’ll get the obvious out of the way first; it’s been a minute since my last post.  And by a minute I mean almost two years, which yeah that’s a while between posts.  I could come up with a bunch of reasons why but the reality is that it’s mostly because I just haven’t felt like there was anything that I particularly felt like writing about. 

I’m sure that I could have written a bunch of posts about market movements or changes to legislation or some such, but for the most part that sort of stuff hasn’t been what I’ve been aiming for with this blog.

So what I have been doing in the meantime?  Pretty much just living the good life.

It’s a long haul

The reality is that for the vast majority of us the journey to being able to FIRE is going to be a pretty long one.  Oh sure you might win the lottery or get an inheritance or some such and get there without even planning it, but most of us are going to build up our wealth through savings and investment returns over a period of years if not decades.

You’ll often see people who are new to FIRE on Reddit/FB/social media who are super keen and want to cut their expenses to the bone and ride to work every day and live off baked beans on toast and all the rest of it for as long as it takes for them to reach FIRE. 

Good luck to those people if they want to do that, but I doubt that living that sort of life is going to be sustainable for most people over the long term when they have to pass up meals out with friends or holidays or whatever it is that they enjoy. 

I’ve been a longtime fan of Ramit Sethi’s Rich Life concept of cutting expenses ruthlessly on the stuff you don’t care about, but spending on the things that do make you happy.  Because if you’re going to cut costs on everything including the stuff you enjoy, then you’re probably not going to enjoy your new life.

And in between the start of your FIRE journey and actually getting there, you want to be enjoying life otherwise what’s the point?

The (Not so) boring middle

You’ll sometimes see people talking about the boring middle between the start and the finish of your journey.  But if you’re doing that, well what’s the point of the journey? 

Even without cutting spending most people in regular reasonably well paying jobs will probably save enough by age 67 that between their superannuation and the age pension, they can lead a pretty good life in retirement.  If that’s what your aim is, happy days, don’t worry about FIRE.

If you do want to retire earlier, well then yes you do need to be putting more money aside.  But you also need to be enjoying life, otherwise you’re likely to give up on achieving FIRE because you’re not having fun along the way.

It’s not just about you

Another consideration is that for a lot of us, there’s more than one person involved.  In my case there’s my wife and our two kids.  Happily my wife is very much on board with FIRE, and my kids seem to be happy with what they have.  But as much as you might hear from people that rather than a bunch of toys or devices all your kids want is time with you, although that’s true to some extent, I also want them to have a great childhood as well.

That doesn’t mean that they get given everything their heart desires (and if you talk to them they certainly don’t think they get that!) but it does mean that we try to give them some great experiences along the way.

So what have we been up to?

Since my last post we’ve managed to fit a fair bit in with plenty of travel.  We live in regional Victoria and have been to the Otways and Port Campbell National Park (highly recommend this one!), up to SE Qld, and to the Blue Mountains and Sydney.  We also made it to Canberra (where I managed to meet up with The FI Explorer!) and the Victorian High Country. 

We’ve taken the kids to a bunch of great museums along the way, Questacon in Canberra in particular was a huge hit with both kids and parents!  Taronga Zoo is absolutely world class, Sealife Aquarium in Mooloolaba was great, and there’s a lot to be said for Werribee Open Range zoo as well. 

My daughter isn’t really into sport at this stage and nor is my wife but my son and I have been to bunch of Richmond games at the MCG, we went to a Women’s Soccer World Cup game, I went to a Boomers game, and we’ve been to the cricket as well.  We also took the kids to the Avalon Airshow, this was a huge hit with the adults but alas the kids didn’t enjoy/appreciate it at all. 

The kids have also been busy with swimming lessons, AFL and soccer for my son (I’ve helped out a little with coaching/volunteering there) and this will presumably get busier next year when my daughter takes up some sort of team sport like soccer/netball/football.  And in summer we’re down at the beach most weekends assuming the weather is good for some swimming/body surfing/stand up paddleboarding. 

It’s a good life

Obviously we’re not doing all of this sort of stuff all of the time (not least due to things like work and school!), but we are certainly doing a fair bit of it.  Sure it costs a bit of money and we could just put that money towards investing instead so that my wife and I can retire a bit earlier, but as I detailed in this post spending a few thousand dollars a year on stuff that we enjoy doesn’t make much difference to when we hit FIRE, and even if it did we’d still want to do it so that our kids could get to enjoy all of these sorts of experience. 

We still manage to save plenty of money for our eventual retirement, and we try hard to make sure that money isn’t the deciding factor in whether we do something or not.  Obviously there are limits to that, but it’s pretty rare that we would say no to something because of money.  In fact having money gives you the option to say yes to more things if you want to!

Next year we’ll likely go on an overseas holiday, and whilst we don’t want to spend more on certain aspects like airfares and accommodation than we have to, we do want to make sure that when we get there we don’t say no to anything that we want to do because of money.  There are limits on that of course, but it’s pretty rare that it’s an issue.

Live your life

Obviously not everyone is in the same situation that I am.  Other people are going to be in different stage of their lives, some will be younger or older, some will be married or single, some will have kids and some won’t, the list goes on and one.

But if you’re on the path to FIRE, you have to enjoy your life along the way.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson said “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey”. 

How are your living your life?

PS I know that I said in my last post that I was going to do another one on decision making.  That may happen at some stage down the track, but for the moment at least it’s not going to.  If you are interested in learning more on this topic I would highly recommend Annie Duke’s books Thinking in Bets and How to Decide, she’s also the founder of the Alliance for Decision Education which has lots of resources and a great podcast.  Daniel Kahnemann’s book Thinking Fast and Slow is also a great resource on this topic.