Chris@TTL

Originally, I learned the basics of financial independence before the FIRE acronym was commonly used via J.D. Roth at GetRichSlowly.org back in 2007.

Jenni and I chronicled our entire route to millionaire (well, 1.2M) status in 2018. But, at its worst, we were some $107K in debt nine years prior to that.

Rather than aiming to assume we'd spend all of our income in some fashion and then whittle down that spending (and hopefully add saving), we simply started a budget from zero. I think this concept was coined by Ramit Sethi -- conscious spending. We added what we actually wanted to spend on meaningful parts of our life (largely travel), then just added the basics for the parts we didn't really care much about. Then we kept living that way. We've spent somewhere around $40K-45K/year for a long time quite happily.

I really shot myself in the foot during the 08-09 Great Recession by getting too involved in stock picking (and wrote a whole post about my massive loss!). If I'd avoided that, and stuck with index funds, as a regular slub no more capable of picking stocks than anyone else, we could have reached FI earlier. Not to mention all the time I wasted researched the minutiae of stock picking. Ugh.

It's almost entirely a longterm psychological game. The math is really quite simple. Save and invest way more than average, keep doing it for a long time (probably 8-13 years for typical savings rates people reach when they try).

The way you keep it up, mentally, is to have something you're saving for. You need to build a life, then save for it.

Don't reach FI and wonder why you did it.