People think you have to have a six figure salary income coming in at least
every single year in order to reach FIRE.
And that wasn't the case for us.
In traveling, I saw how other countries and societies treated work.
How in America we are so focused on what you do and how that defines
who you are.
That's the reason we started in a low cost of living country, because they
gave us a very good insight of where our money is going
to get us.
Before I retired, I was a consumer auto finance lawyer.
My last salary was about $200,000 a year.
My plan after my career break was to go right back and find a job.
I'd be in a better mood and I'd go back to a different job and things would be
fine. But traveling and seeing that the way we work ourselves to death in
America is not common around the world made me realize that I could have a
different life if I made the choice to have a different life.
I always say that I accidentally retired.
I paid off all my debt. I saved money.
And then when I realized I didn't want to work again, I did the math.
I looked at my investments and I had about half a million dollars saved and
invested. And I knew I was going to get another $150,000
in in stocks from a company I used to work for.
Because I knew I didn't want to go back to work, that was enough.
It was enough for me to live comfortably in Mexico City or another country for a
while. If I was in the US, would I have decided that was enough?
Probably not.
We had saved up $2.2 million and decided to travel the world in search of our
forever home.
I was a real estate agent and I had developed a small real estate team in
the United States. Northern Virginia, D.C.
metro area.
I was in the telecom industry for over 20 years.
Did 4 years in the military and the Marines.
So we have our money mostly in a real estate market and in Roth IRAs.
We really like Vanguard personally.
We're into index funds, which I think a lot of the fire community is as well.
So we manage our money ourselves.
We don't actually have a financial adviser and we also have money in
brokerage accounts and in high investment savings accounts.
In addition to the money that we saved up for retirement, we kept three rental
properties in Virginia as part of our investment portfolio.
That helped us have a little more comfort being able to have financial
independence without having to worry as much of having our money all in one
place. Right now, we're not considering moving back to the US.
But one thing we've learned in life is never say never.
So we're really looking more at Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, possibly South
America, and we'll continue our journeys until we find our little piece
of paradise.
We had 9 to 5 jobs, but we knew that we could never reach our financial
independence number by relying on the income that we got from our job.
We invested in real estate, we lived in properties, we renovated them and then
we resold them.
And that was in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We went to IKEA in the as is section and bought all of this as is furniture and
resold it for a profit.
We were dumpster diving, getting wine crates.
Oh, we were doing everything imaginable because our 9 to 5 jobs weren't going to
get us there.
But after we did things to make money and then also to save money, we also
went a step further.
We started investing all of that money.
We got to a point where we were saving up to 70% of the money that we came in
so that we could be investing it.
For example, we made more than $400,000 in profit from investing in real estate
in the Bay Area.
Something else that is just amazing about living here in Portugal and being
early retired is that we get to take full advantage of the beautiful nature
around us.