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🤔 What's FI? Defining Financial Independence

Since this blog is exploring my journey to financial independence, it seems reasonable to explore exactly what financial independence means, both in general terms, and also more specifically to me. At the most basic level, financial independence is having enough assets saved that they can sustain you for the remainder of your life. The assets can come in different flavors (stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, or really anything that has a significant value) and the ways in which those assets are tapped to pay for your independence are also varied (stock dividends, real estate rental income, actually selling things off).

📌 An Introduction

Moments before I started writing this, I finished another set of runs on FIREcalc, a web app that runs a series of simulations to estimate the likelihood that a particular amount of savings and spending will last for a set number of years in retirement. It’s one of about a billion different retirement calculators that can be found all over the internet. I’ve experimented with many of these, plugging in different saving and earning rates, watching graphs of theoretical funds blast off to the stratosphere or crash and burn like a plane that’s run out of fuel.