FIRE!

FIRE stands for Financially Independent Retiring Early.  I only just heard of this movement a couple years ago, but little did I know I had been a part of it for a long time.

When i graduated college, i found myself in $120,000 worth of debt!  I know, it’s atrocious. I figured out real quick that I needed to make finances a priority in my life or I was going no where.

So i set about reading books, blogs, talking to friends, joining groups, whatever I could do to learn more about how to build my small amount of cash into something bigger.  As you can see from the timeline above, I used many strategies to get ahead.  I moved to the best real estate market in the country at the time: Austin, TX. I bought a couple houses. Got a new job. Started investing in the stock market. And most of all, i saved saved saved and made paying off those loans a priority.

One goal was getting to a net worth of a million dollars.  You can see I finally got there in 2020. In later posts, I’ll talk about the tools I made and used to calculate when i could retire and how much I would need. Stay tuned.