While it has felt like a long, slow journey to get the mortgage paid off, by most people’s standard, we’ve probably paid the mortgage off quickly. The actual total time was about 11 years and 4 months from beginning to end.

The question is…

What’s next?

First, FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. Some people focus on doing something that provides them an income where they have independence to do what they want when they want – Financial Independence. Others focus on not having to do anything at all if they don’t want to and their investments provide the necessary income – Retire Early.

I’m more focused on the Retire Early side of things, while using Financial Independence to fund splurges in lifestyle once we’ve hit our number. That’s why I’ve continued to grow the side business and will continue to do so to save more and have something to fund splurges in the future.

How you get to FIRE is essentially comprised of two basic principles.

• Hack your spending to spend less money and develop a lifestyle you enjoy.
• Save as much as you can (which also contributes to the first one because if you’re saving it you can’t spend it).

Once you’ve got enough money saved up to fund your lifestyle, you’ve achieved FIRE.

How long do I have?

The plan is to save consistently for the next 10 years until my 45th birthday, without making us feel like paupers. What that means is that we’re still planning on taking regular family vacations, but we won’t drive the latest cars or live in the size of house we technically could “afford”. (Our 2006 Prius almost has 230k miles on it and is running great.)

I’m tracking our investment savings each month in a spreadsheet and running calculations that give me an indication of where we should be at the end of the 10 years. If you’re interested in a copy of it for your own use, please let me know.

While I’m not yet comfortable sharing our final number, I’ll try to share a progress report each month to inform you on our progress.  This will let you know how we’re tracking towards our final number.

Why do all of this?

The answer is easy – time. Of all the things in your life, time is the one thing you have a limited amount of. You can’t buy more of it or manufacture it. Money comes and go, but time is a finite resource. No matter how you invest it, your returns will rarely ever come back in the form of more time. By saving for FIRE, I’m buying more time to do what I want.

I do want to clear one thing up that might not be immediately obvious. We’re a normal family that are just like most of you reading us. Right now, my wife stays at home, and I make a good salary as a software engineer. We’ve got 2 kids in school and have an average house. We could buy a bigger house or drive newer cars, but we value buying time versus those things. If we can do it, you can do it.