Aussie HIFIRE

The vast majority of FIRE posts I see are about areas such as investments strategies, investment structures, savings rates etc.  Insurance and in particular personal insurance rarely seems to get a mention and when it does often gets dismissed as being an unnecessary expense.  I disagree with this, I think it’s a very important part of your road to FIRE.  Read on to see why! Continue reading →

Unlike a lot of people in the FIRE community my wife and I have kids and one of the hard parts about being a parent who wants to FIRE is that we often worrying about whether our children are missing out because of our own desire to hit FIRE.  There are lots of ways in which this can play out from the big decisions like public vs private school, medium ones like brand name clothing vs generic clothing, and little ones like whether they get their own meal when we eat out vs just sharing the adults.  Another example of this is their birthday parties.  Read on for some of the ways we’ve tried to balance costs vs fun! Continue reading →

There are always plenty of discussions in the FIRE community about the best way to get to FIRE but there’s no one right answer. I thought I’d talk a little bit about some of the different choices to make, how they work, and who they might work best for.  Many of these choices also affect the other choices you make so it can be a bit complex!  This is going to be a long post so prepare yourself! Continue reading →

I read a lot of finance blogs and recently saw this article discussing a couple of different personalities in the FI/FIRE space and their different ways of looking at your finances and potentially FIRE.  There’s obviously more than one way to organise your money which is one reason why I find blind following of the Barefoot Investor approach to be somewhat annoying, well that and the fact that he is just plain wrong on a lot of stuff but that is potentially another post at some point.   With that aside, let’s have a look at the people mentioned and the article! Continue reading →

The first question is a tricky one in a number of different ways.  Traditionally when we ask this question about assets what we mean is how much could you buy or sell it for, and if you’re looking at other liquid assets like shares then you can just look it up on google or whatever sharetrading platform you use and it will give you a pretty up to date price.  Shares are fungible and there is more than enough volume in any of the major ones that any retail investor can buy or sell as much as they want effectively.  Houses on the other hand are not fungible and they don’t change hands every year let alone every day.  So what’s a house worth, and should you include it as part of your net worth for FIRE? Continue reading →

As tough as it can seem to be to keep up with the ever rising cost of living in Australia, for the most part we Aussies are actually living a pretty comfortable life.  Obviously that’s not the case for everyone, but as a generalisation it’s true even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes.  The problem for most of us is not that we can’t have anything that we want, it’s that we can’t have everything that we want.  Continue reading →

One of the central tenets of the FIRE community is the 4% rule, aka the Trinity Study. For those of you who are new to FIRE the 4% rule as understood by at least some people in the community is that you can safely draw down 4% of the amount invested at the start of your early retirement and never run out of money. This is based on a study done at Trinity University in the US looking at historical data for a 50/50 portfolio of stocks/bonds running over 30 year rolling time periods with the last period ending in 1995. What doesn’t get mentioned, particularly here in Australia, is that the study is based on US data and that in at least some of the 30 year time periods the money ran out, and also that it’s only for that 30 year period rather than in perpetuity. So that nice safe 4% withdrawal rate isn’t actually based on Australian data and ran out of money in some scenarios. On top of that if there was still $1 left at the end of the 30 years it is classed as being a success even though come year 31 you’re going to be in a world of hurt? Are you starting to worry a little bit about retiring early based on the 4% rule yet? Continue reading →