I never, ever envisioned living in another country, and then I never had this
idea of ever retiring early.
Amon is the visionary and I am the strategic planner to get there.
My main motivation for FIRE was freedom to spend my time ever I saw fit.
What we did was we made some intentional short term sacrifices so that we could
have a lifetime of freedom.
You gotta clap.
My name is Amon Browning and I'm Christina Browning.
We are from California and at the ages of thirty nine and forty one, we retired early and we moved here to
Portugal. FIRE is an acronym, it stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early.
Amon and I went to the same college.
Funny enough, we actually started talking in line waiting for the food as we're piling food up
on our plate. Oh, you're seriously understating piling up.
She was in line just like me piling her plate up high.
We met when we were really starving, college students, literally starving.
And we were we were shameless.
That set the tone for our relationship.
You thought of the idea like I want to retire before I'm 40.
Right? And you brought it to me and it was like, OK, let's figure out how we can do this.
I know that I wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for my background.
I grew up poor. In fact, at one time my family was even homeless.
We were on food stamps.
My father would always say to us, we're in this situation now, but every generation is supposed to get
better.
I was raised by a single mom.
We didn't have a lot of money growing up and we just never really talked about money.
But I do recall that my mom was really good at saving.
It's very different than how we are with our girls right now.
We have a 12 and 14-year-old and we are constantly talking about money with them.
Yeah, the most important thing that you can do to build generational wealth is to educate the
next generation.
Down. So before we quit our jobs, Christina and I worked for the federal government,
Christina was an attorney and she was making about seventy thousand dollars a year.
And I was an urban planner for the federal government and I was making about ninety thousand dollars.
Right after Amom and I graduated from college, we moved to San Diego and he said, OK, we need to buy a
house.
That was the first thing I wanted to do as soon as I came into money because my family never owned a home.
And so for me, it was going to be such a powerful thing to do was to buy a home.
And here we are. We have bought six homes.
So we found a way to completely live rent in mortgage free, which is huge, especially at the time
when we were living in the Bay Area, when we were investing in the Bay Area and flipping
properties, we were renting out these properties also on Airbnb, and we rented them out for so much that
it covered the mortgage of the house that we were renting out, but then also where we were staying as
well.
Our employer, when we lived in Spain and Japan, paid for our housing, so we had no housing costs, no
mortgage, no rent during that time.
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.
We had nine to five jobs, but we knew that we could never reach our financial independence number by
relying on the income that we got from our jobs.
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, and we...
Oh we were doing everything imaginable because our nine to five 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 percent of the money that we came in so that we could
be investing it.
For example, we made more than four hundred thousand dollars in profit from investing in real estate in the
Bay Area.
I see you.
Having no background in real estate, having no money, having no ability to fix up properties, we
were still able to do it because we were able to feed off one another and get to a solution.
Right. That's what we've always been able to do.
That's how we achieve financial independence.
I've been able to evolve and I've been able to grow.
I think Amon really helped bring that to me and give me that vision of what we could potentially
be.
I really pride myself on being there for for my family.
I think that that's the most important thing that I do.
And together we just strive for it.
And we were able to succeed.
I love telling the story of our last day of work, because Christine and I both worked
actually for the same agency.
We had to strategically do this.
Going into the office and telling people officially I felt really powerful because it's like, OK, we're,
we're doing this. We're actually doing this.
I really loved the people that I worked with.
I mean, I wasn't quitting the people.
I was quitting the job.
That was such an exciting day for us.
But it was also it was also a sad day, right?
Yeah, it was a shock for a lot of people.
But for those that were close to us that worked with us, they knew exactly what was happening.
And we were walking them through so that they could really join this FIRE journey and be on the same path
that we were on as well.
We also just bought an investment property in Portugal as well, so we still have our money sort of
floating in between the stock market and real estate.
And for me, I love that we're able to do that because it really diversifies our
portfolio.
Right now, we're only holding two properties, both in Portugal.
One is our primary residence and this investment property.
But over the life of our journey, we have bought and sold six properties.
I've always been so grateful for having Christina there with me to be able to help me focus
and we wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for us working together to achieve all of these dreams.
I didn't have a fear that we wouldn't reach it because I felt like, you
know, what we were doing was so really extraordinary.
We were spending our money in the right way.
We weren't wasteful. We weren't trying to keep up with the Joneses.
She's the yin and the yang, however you want to put it.
We really complement each other.
So my weakness is, is sometimes my focus.
I can get so caught up in the vision that I maybe I like the focus to put the plan into action.
Worst case scenario, if we didn't reach FIRE, you know, I still felt what we were
doing was so positive.
It was something where we were focusing our money.
We were focusing on the things that were important to us.
We used to live in Spain and we traveled to Portugal quite a bit when we were really tightening
up our list of where we ultimately wanted to end up.
We just started looking at all these different factors in Portugal, just kept coming up number one on the
list. The start of our day here in Portugal.
Now that we're retired, it's so relaxed, it doesn't feel like a rush.
We get to sit down and have a healthy breakfast.
We'll make pancakes or eggs or we'll make some organic fruit and yogurt and
granola and honey.
And it's just this time where we get to really sit down with one another and be present
with each other. And I love that we get to start our day just like that every single day in early
retirement.
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 and we can do it when
everyone else is at work.
We go to the beach Monday through Friday and we have the whole thing to ourselves.
Good job Mel!
Because Christina and I are relatively young and our children are
relatively old.
We are at a nice place where we can do certain things together.
Like we can go surfing together.
Yes, we can go hiking together.
And we don't have to necessarily worry about a baby bag.
And we always talk about, you know, the girls grow so fast, they get so old so fast.
They're 12 and 14 right now.
And we still have a good couple of years with them in the house before they decide to go away to college.
You know, we weren't running from something.
We always tell people we're running to something.
We're looking forward to something.
And for us, achieving FIRE meant being able to spend more time with each other, being able to spend
more time with our girls and have really that quality time that we have with our girls now.
I want people to understand that there is a completely different path.
Take a detour.
Once you achieve it you have so many options.
You have such a fulfilling life once you reach FIRE.