The beginning of Managing FI

“What better place than here, what better time than now?”

Rage Against The Machine

This isn’t the beginning of our life journey as my wife and I are around the 40 mark in 2020. However, it is the beginning of this blog and not too far into our financial independence (FI) journey. I’ve never had a blog before. To date myself, the last time I tried to make a website it was using Macromedia Dreamweaver in the late 90’s. Needless to say, a lot has changed since then. I’ve been drinking from the Google fire hose trying to learn what I need to just to get a site launched. A lot of time and effort was spent just to get a kindergarten level blog up on the inter-webs. But, that is how learning new things goes and I love the journey. But…please don’t hack my site.

Who are we?

You can learn more about my story here. In summary, my wife and I are mid-career (in a traditional sense) professionals that are sick of the rat race. I love my job but also traveling, the outdoors and not staring at a computer for 8-10 hours a day. We want freedom and control of our lives to do what we want, when we want. That’s our “why”. We’re fortunate to have great jobs so with a lot of life optimization our goal is FI by 46. More details about our FI plan and my own definition of FI in future posts.

Why am I making a blog?

Probably like many bloggers, I feel that I have something to say and I want a platform to say it. In 2020 I’ve backed away from a lot of social media. It’s highly negative, politically charged and often leaves me feeling worse off after having looked at it. I’ve never been a writer per say, or a creative person in general, so the idea of creating content was very daunting at first. A funny thing has happened though as I started to create a little bit. The pool of ideas has snowballed. So, I’m excited to see what happens if a creative spark turns into a raging inferno.

The blog is called managing FI because FI doesn’t happen by accident. There are a number of deliberate choices and actions that need to occur so managing your way through that is an ongoing process. It takes effort to get to FI in the accumulation phase maximizing income, reducing expenses and investing the difference. Then it takes perhaps even more effort maintaining FI to make your retirement successful by managing sequence of returns risk, avoiding taxes, dealing with bear markets and pulling from your retirement accounts in the right order.

What will be unique about this blog?

I’m a manager and an engineer so while I love details, I also want to understand the bottom line right away. What is the key point to take away from what you’re trying to tell me before I have to read an entire article? I value your time and while I’d love for you to read my posts, I don’t want to waste your time if it’s something that you don’t care about. Some bloggers will use the TL;DR nomenclature but I prefer the acronym BLUF – Bottom Line Up Front.

In addition to the BLUF approach, you’ll see “Action Steps” when a post has ideas for you to take action on a particular topic. If 2020 has taught me anything it’s that research and reading only takes you so far. You eventually need to leave the safety of what you know, take action, see the result, reflect on it and then take the next step. Learn, plan, take action, review and then repeat the process all over again. Fear and analysis paralysis have caused many a dream to never get off the ground.

What will this blog cover?

Well, a lot. Financially we’ll cover the income, expenses and saving/investing. You can dive into a lot of sub topics on each of those and what has worked and not worked for us. Outside of that I believe in lifelong learning using books and experimentation. I often like to dive into a topic, learn a lot, do something with that learning and then move onto something new.

Different life hacks will be covered including travel rewards since travel is one of our passions. Over time we’ve simplified our lives by reducing our stuff (decluttering) which has saved us money, made us money and saved us time. I’m not sure that I would call it minimalism, but we’re headed in that direction. Lastly, the pursuit of happiness and ways to increase it. We’ll talk about why you don’t need to be FI to happy and hitting a FI number won’t make you happy.

If you made it this far, thank you! I’m excited to be on this journey and I hope that you’re willing to come along for the ride. If you have ideas or suggestions please don’t hesitate to reach out via the contacts page.