First posts are hard, but not as hard as buying your first shares…….
Until mid 2019 I thought I had life figured out. I had ticked all the boxes of what I had been told by ‘everyone’ that I should be doing financially. We were in our dream house, paying our mortgage down, we took overseas holidays, and I had a secure job.
But I wasn’t happy.
My lifestyle was extremely dependant on my job and working on someone else’s terms for the next 35 years. I had no idea how to grow my wealth beyond paying down my mortgage and maybe after that contributing to my superannuation.
Like many of you reading this I wasn’t financially literate enough to understand wealth or wealth building beyond buying a house and paying off my mortgage. I grew up poor, during a recession, and when home loan interest rates were 18%. My parents were very young and did the best they could by teaching me to be frugal, develop a strong work ethic, and to be resourceful.
In High School I participated in the ASX Share Trading Game and managed to lose the most money in the class in the process. Despite no real shares being purchased and no money being lost this experience solidified my desire to never invest in shares. I told myself that the share market wasn’t for me, and I was best to leave it to rich people.
Fast forward to mid 2019 when I discovered the FIRE movement and started my journey towards financial independence on my terms.
I happened upon FIRE by accident. I have always been a big #debtfreecommunity follower via Instagram, and I started to see hashtags for FIRE on several people I followed posts. So whilst scrolling down the rabbit hole that is Instagram I found a post for an upcoming movie called ‘Playing with Fire’ and it was based on a book of the same title. Someone had used the free audiobook deal from Audible to listen to it, and recommended it.
With zero risk I then used the exact same deal to listen to the Audiobook, and I was positively hooked within about 15 minutes (I’ve since purchased the movie worth every cent by the way). For me what stood out about the story and FIRE movement was the simplicity of the concept.
“If you save / invest 25 times your annual expenses you can retire early”
For me this felt achievable as I was already quite good at the saving money to pay off debt side of things, but I had no idea how to grow wealth. The book also introduced me to the term ETF’s (Exchange Traded Funds) which were something I had never heard of before (and not covered in my High School share trade class).
Suddenly I was inspired to learn everything I could about reaching financial independence and decided to start an Instagram account called Frank on FIRE to track my journey (and keep myself honest).
At this early point of my journey ‘I’ hadn’t turned into a ‘we’ yet. My husband didn’t know about my new ‘cult’ as he would initially call it, and it would take a little convincing for him to come on board. I look forward to writing about that experience.
So now that we’ve been on the FIRE journey for over a year I thought it was time to finally have a grown up blog to share even more of our journey.
xx Frank on FIRE
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Frank on FIRE 