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my name is peter aydney i used to be a
software engineer and i'm 46 years old
now but i'm 16 years into retirement i
am julian saunders this is my wife
kirsten we were hoping to retire next
year
i'm christy and i'm bryce we used to
work in toronto and even on two
engineering salaries it wasn't enough to
buy a house so instead of buying a house
we actually put our savings towards
building um a portfolio and investing
and as a result of that we were able to
retire at the ages of 31 and 32.
retirement just means in in the new
definition that you have a choice it's
less about retiring and more about
having the freedom to not have to rely
on a job for money it's really about
thinking about the kind of life that you
want and seeing your money as a tool to
enable that vision to come to life
fire stands for financial independence
retire early and it's based on the
principle that you can retire not based
on your age but by how much you save of
your income every year instead of doing
the traditional path where you save a
little bit over your 50-year career you
would save significantly more invest
significantly more over a 10 or 15-year
period and have the ability to retire
early
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you don't have to be this really badass
monk living in a tent in the woods you
just have to be slightly less ridiculous
than average i always felt like i was
living an extremely fancy life
it just wasn't quite as ridiculous as my
guy in the next cubicle who maybe had a
brand new bmw and i had like an old
subaru these small decisions make a huge
difference in terms of the percentage of
your money that you spend
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i grew up in a pretty frugal household
in canada with parents who weren't
really flashy with their limited money
and i thought that was normal so when i
got a good job in engineering kind of
kept that same lifestyle but i got paid
more of an american
professional salary which meant that
most of it was just getting not spent
what do you do with spare money and of
course that led to investing it turns
out if you do that for seven to ten
years with the majority of your money
you have enough to live off forever just
based on the dividends and the ongoing
capital gains of this chunk of money
that you've saved
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i think the pandemic certainly caused
people to re-examine their relationship
with work but it also forced you to
re-examine your relationship with
spending something as big as just
cooking at home i mean food for a lot of
people is the second or third largest
expense that they have and so if even if
you can just make a tiny dent in that
budget that money can go towards paying
off debt or ramping up investments when
you figure out how all these different
systems kind of work together it almost
becomes like a superpower if you are
location independent basically it makes
you very flexible so for us we actually
traveled the first five years of
retirement and when we visited places
like poland or portugal and as well as
thailand we were able to live easily on
twenty thousand dollars a year because
the cost of living is just so much lower
than big cities in north america we take
a far more flexible process than most
fire aficionados mainly because the
traditional fire formula assumes that
your expenses remain fairly stagnant we
do not have the luxury of having such a
predictable life we have a four-year-old
and then we also support julian's mom
anytime you have more dependents or more
demands on your income the larger your
expenses are the more difficult it's
going to be
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the fire community has been accused of
like is this only for privileged people
i actually didn't grow up in canada i
was born in china and at one point my
family lived on 44 cents a day so i know
what it's like to struggle the less you
earn the more
difficult life is and that means making
these changes is even more valuable it's
not just one size fits all you can
actually just use the portfolio to cover
part of your expenses like maybe you can
just bring down your number of hours
that you have to work well i'm a
carpenter and i do that for fun but if i
ever needed to make money i could just
do that professionally there are
different versions of fi that makes it a
little more inclusive to different
income levels and we wanted to make sure
that we served as a bit of a lighthouse
to all of the other
black people out there there's been a
lot of talk about racial justice when we
think about
social equity and social progress
economic freedom is really the last kind
of leg for african americans and so when
you talk about fire being something that
they can have greater control of their
finances it's a really appealing offer
it's far more appealing than working
your butt off to only not get promoted
or to join the ranks of less than one
percent of corporate leadership that
looks like you i probably would have
been laid off in my last job if it
wasn't for us becoming financial
independent
do we really want to work like crazy and
pay off a mortgage and then die at our
desk the advice that we've been given
doesn't work in this environment anymore
and we need to write a new rulebook we
need to learn how to invest and we need
to have all these backup plans in case
we get screwed again as proven by the
pandemic by the employers and by the
economy we've been criticized for the
past five years by saying oh fire only
works because the stock market is on a
tear and the economy is expanding and
there's no recession well this is now
the third recession that we've been
through personally while on this fire
journey and if anything it's just
proving that fire is the only path that
makes any sense because any strategy
that relies on your employment being
stable that just doesn't work
a lot of identity is wrapped up in our
money decisions it's actually very easy
here in the united states to
look like you're rich even though you're
not given the access to credit secondly
in a lot of cases it's actually very
expensive just to maintain certain
images required to work certain jobs
i don't really take these social cues
and engineers are notorious for being
clueless like this so you have this 45
year old man like wearing a rippy plaid
shirt with paint on it and a huge
backpack and riding a homemade electric
mountain bike to the grocery store and i
think that's a great thing but it also
of course depends on your personality
type like i am a novelty seeker and i
love change and adventure after we had
our son it was the first time that i
realized something as simple as just
having paid leave wasn't available to me
and it was only because the company that
i worked for like unfortunately a lot of
companies in the us don't offer any kind
of benefit that allows fathers to be
there when the pandemic happened we
found out at almost the exact same time
that my father was diagnosed with brain
cancer against all odds he seems to be
fine now but it really goes to show you
it's not just about the financial part
of fire time is the best thing that
money can buy like when your father gets
sick and the amount of time that you
spend with him because you don't know
how much time is left that is worth more
than any like extra money that an
employer can give you any promotion any
kind of title this movement is not
really about the money it's about a much
larger social shift the more people see
it as a viable path i believe the more
difficult it will be for employers to
keep their workforce particularly the
most talented amongst them because
you'll need more than money to
attract me and to motivate me i think
this movement has the potential to
fundamentally change the way that we
view work
and i'm really excited to see what
happens over the next coming years
you