FIRE stands for “Financial Independence Retire Early” and it’s actually not a new concept. Any freedom-loving-person will have had this idea no matter at which point in time/history/place in the world. The idea behind it is very simple: Saving up cash, investing and stop working as soon as possible.

It’s a great idea, but unless you are extremely lucky or come already from a wealthy background, it’s very difficult to pull it off without a proper plan – as I mentioned in some of my previous posts. There is no magic bullet. However, what we do have now is not magic. We got the internet.

The internet. The greatest source of knowledge that humanity ever had at its disposal, accessible 24/7 from almost any spot in the world. While there is a lot of useless data out there, there are plenty of blogs, newspaper articles, financial websites and of course, successful early retirees who are usually more than happy to share their experience and how they got there.

Sharing is caring

Sharing knowledge is, generally speaking in everyone’s best interest. At the end of the day, it’s better for all of us if more of us have a safe and sound future. Following this, there are plenty of great websites that can teach us a lot about how to deal with financial issues. How to invest, how to live a frugal (but happy) life, how to pay back your debt, and plenty of other things that can help us to advance.

Once you start following even just a few of these websites, get into investments and start figuring out how to save up cash, you will quickly realize that it’s actually pretty time-consuming. The time you spend on it will at some point start producing results, and the results will (hopefully) turn into cash. And well, isn’t this the definition of a job? Dedicating time and effort to a monetary reward?

 You will probably never retire

Looking at it this way, one can say that even a person who has reached FIRE, never truly retires. You need to keep learning, investing, saving and being actively focused on maintaining your FIRE status. This is the reason why I actually don’t use this term for my personal future goal.

Ultimately, it’s not about retiring early, but about the freedom to pursue our own interests at the time and place of our choice.