Financial Independence and Early Retirement (FIRE)

Returning to the UK after two years touring Europe in our motorhome in 2013, we set ourselves a goal to reach financial independence and retire early (FIRE) before the age of 50. We wanted to be able to travel where, and more importantly when, we wanted to.

After only two years, a lot of hard work and some major lifestyle changes, we retired aged 43.

Being financially independent means we have the option to work (like writing this blog and our books), but we’re not forced to. We could opt to never work again for the rest of our lives. We have no bosses to tell us where to be and what to do. We’re free.

In order reach the financial independence goal we needed to earn enough money to sustain us outside of the ‘rat race’. Living well below our means and saving wasn’t enough. We needed our money to work for us. In other words, we needed to learn to invest, to buy assets rather than save cash or buy liabilities.

Our income now comes from share funds, bonds, rent from a small shop, rent from houses we used to live in, solar panel FIT payments and a few other streams. In future we’ll get access to private and state pensions to bolster out income as we age.

We both started on a journey of Financial Education (something they don’t teach us in school). Jay documented this journey on a sister blog he called ‘The Money Muppet‘. You can read just the posts from The Money Muppet, or you can see them below in with all our other posts about our financial freedom and early retirement journey.

Posts cover topics like minimalism, tiny living, money mindset and investing and we have split them into posts from during our journey to financial independence, and posts from after our early retirement.

‘Instead of working towards your retirement, work towards your ideal lifestyle. There is usually a path to get there in a few years instead of a few decades.’

– James Clear

The Non-Trepreneurs

In August 2015 we did it, we reached the tipping point where we had enough money coming in from our investments to allow us to stop working, for ever.

We had achieved financial independence. Jay wrote a short free ebook called Funding Freedom to tell the story of how we’d re-designed our lives to enable us to stop the daily 9 to 5 of our corporate jobs, and instead have the choice to do something else.

During the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, Jay used the time to write a much more in-depth book called The Non-Trepreneurs, which is designed to help others who are thinking about making a similar lifestyle change.

The book not only tells our story in more detail, but breaks down the process to show how other people can do what we have using the tools we used. There is also a lot of information about our lives after we reached financial independence, early retirement and what to expect you achieve you goal.