Hello and welcome to the first Practical Financial Independence Retire Early blog post.
This site aims to help you create and implement effective strategies that will actually help you reduce your costs, save more money and reach those financial independence goals. Whether you are just starting out on your journey to financial independence or are looking to increase your side hustle income this site will have something for you!
I started this site because I think there’s a lot of great work being done promoting the financial independence movement, lots of great story telling and lots of information out there….but not enough information on how you can do it too – step by step. I wanted to create a site where you could see my progress but also get actual help implementing FIRE strategies.
Anyway, a little about me. My name is Sam and I live in the middle of nowhere on a farmhouse I’m slowly renovating up in the beautiful Blackdown Hills in Devon, England. I’ve been working in the digital sphere for over a decade providing copyrighting and SEO (search engine optimisation) services to companies across the country.
I’ve never been able to do the 9-5 routine and have been self employed since leaving university – I did manage a brief managerial role as head of marketing but really didn’t enjoy it. Sometime in 2014 I stumbled into the world of financial independence and started a very modest and slow start to investing. I’ve had a very slow start in terms of my savings rate and actual progress towards FIRE (though have made several good strides) and this site is a way to provide myself with a good kick to keep moving and pushing forward.
The reality of my job is that……wait for it….i don’t like it. I’d like to move towards this website being able to support me in my life, allow me to travel more, live cheaply and enjoy some real freedom of time and energy.
So what does that mean for you, well here’s what we are going to cover:
Frugality
Living frugally means reducing your expenses through a huge range of tactics from cycling to work and car pooling to reducing your electricity use, cooking with solar to eating nothing but pot noodles…just kidding.
Making Money Guides
Saving money is great but unless you earn a high salary getting the money together for an early retirement is going to be tough. So, we’ll need to make some more money to compete with the huge earners saving rates. Plus side hustles give us way more flexibility than the 9-5 so this is going to be a big part of the website.
Saving Money Guides
Saving money helps push you towards living more cheaply, which reduces the amount of money you need for financial independence. Whilst there is some overlap here with frugality we want to push an intense saving money regime to try and hit that mythical 70%+ saving rate that really chips the timeframes for early retirement.
Investing Money Guides
Making our money work harder for us is going to be critical to getting the income levels needed for financial independence and I’m going to delve deep into investing your money wisely. Investing money guides are going to cover everything from your emergency fund to getting the most from ISA’s, Funds and stocks.
In addition, I will be providing monthly updates on my own progress towards FI, updates on income and a range of experiments to try and save money and make more of it. Hopefully together we will be able to crush those financial independence dreams without needing to be 6 figure income earners or investment geniuses!