I know. I know. There are so many financial independence blogs out there. Don’t get me wrong, they’re wonderful and very helpful. I have personally learned a lot from reading them, and been motivated by them to pursue FI. If it wasn’t for these blogs, I would think you’re crazy to consider retiring in one’s 30’s and 40’s possible. Now, I am preaching it 🙂
Then why am I starting yet another blog?
Well, here are a few reasons:
I live in a high-cost-of-living area:Â Southern California.
Most of the early retirement / financial independence (FIRE) stories I that read, seemed to follow a pattern: Those who achieved FI early in life, live in and move to small ski resort towns in the mountains that have low cost of living. (I am aware that I may be unfairly generalizing here). What if that’s not where I wanna live? Can I still achieve FI and not have to work for 40 years?
I started working relatively late, right around when I turned 29. The reason for that was graduate school. I was half way through a PhD program when I decided that it wasn’t for me and that I prefer industry over academia. That also didn’t seem to follow another FI pattern: All FIRE folks started working right after college so by the time they’re in their 30’s, they have had years of income and savings making early retirement more possible (oh, the magic of compounding interest). I didn’t really save much during graduate school years, living in probably one of the most expensive cities in the US: Honolulu.
Home prices are insanely high where I live (I guess that’s implied under HCOL), whereas another common theme in FIRE stories was the ability to buy a home right after getting a job. Now, I agree with you that it might be better to rent than to buy (as I’ll compare both options in this area in a future post) and this might not be a good excuse, but all the reasons mentioned here made FIRE stories unrelatable to me and most people I talk to in my network of friends and coworkers.
With this blog, I hope to share with you the strategies and lessons I experiment with along with a few of my friends who are also on the path to FI, but live in a HCOL area. This will hopefully provide different viewpoints and approaches and reflect on their effectiveness, so that you’ll have more data points when making decisions based on your life situation and priorities: penny-pinching vs. tax strategies, etc.
Woooh, that was only part of the reason this blog is here. I haven’t told you why I chose Our Ecomoney yet?
That’s honestly the main reason why I started this blog. That’s what was missing from the FI conversations: focus on eco-friendly financial decisions. And I don’t mean we should all organize protests against GMOs, stop showering and form drum circles. Although if you’re doing that, awesome! That’s super cool and you should keep on doing so. What I noticed was that there is a lot of attention on financial frugality and not much focus on the environmental frugality. Because those are often thought of as conflicting mindsets.
“I can’t eat at Wholefoods all the time, bro! That’ll be all my paycheck “.
I agree, and I’m here to research and present affordable ways to spend Our Ecomoney and encourage an eco-friendly economy (see what I did there?), reduce our waste and hopefully create a platform where we can share our experiences. We need to penny-pinch our carbon footprint too.
Image from this great article on Vox.
At the time I’m writing this, United States is the only country that hasn’t signed the Paris Climate Change agreement. And as an engineer I’m tired of elected officials denying science and refusing to take action. So, I’m going to research ways to reduce the carbon footprint from my daily actions, while not breaking the bank. And not just the carbon footprint, but also the material waste.
Recently, I came to the realization that I have been talking a lot to my friends about our lack of attention to environmental consequences of the simple things we do (we all have that one annoying friend who can’t shut up talking about the environment; yup that was me), and yet I wasn’t really doing anything about it. It was a lot of talk and not enough action. Accountability is another reason behind this site. Everyone I talk to shares the same sentiment, that we need to be more eco-friendly, which begs the question: what’s holding us back from doing something about it?! (same way everyone complains about hating their job yet not doing anything to get in the FIRE zone -I should copyright that phrase). First reasons that come to mind are: it’s too much work figuring it out, it’s not convenient, everyone else is doing it (I see you nodding your head). Does that sound familiar?
Those are the mindsets that make people work for 40 years (at the job they hate), that hold people back from learning about investment strategies, that make them spend irrationally on things they don’t need to impress people that don’t care about them. Yes, that’s the very culture and mindset that FIRE movement is trying to change. So, let’s change this ridiculous culture of consumption from both financial and environmental perspectives. With your help, I’m hoping to offer easy ways and examples from low to high impact choices (see image above) in our day-to-day life that make our ecomoney ideas more convenient and accessible.
We’ll ecomonkey around with tools that are commonly used in Design Thinking, Systems Engineering and so on to optimize our decisions and we’ll let our frugal spirituality blossom as dedicated self-righteous ecomonks (Read that last part in the voice of your annoying yoga teacher who way overuses those words). #Namaste!
Wow, that ended up longer than I thought (stop it). So, hope you join us and share your ecomoney strategies with us. How do you spend and think about your ecomoney?