Financial Independence (or FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early) is the point at which you have accumulated enough income-producing assets to cover your living expenses indefinitely. Once you reach FIRE, you don’t have to earn an active income anymore and are free to retire if you wish to.
FIRE followers usually spend 10-15 years working and saving hard to reach this point. We refer to this path as Traditional FIRE.
Besides Traditional FIRE, there are several alternative FIRE strategies that will get you to the end goal (Financial Freedom), but that have a slightly different path. Most of these are geared towards people who don’t want to fully retire and would prefer to work part-time. For them, a more gentle semi-retirement approach is suitable. Depending on when you want to semi-retire, there are different options that use semi-retirement strategies – Coast FI and Flamingo FI are two examples.
Depending on your lifestyle goal in retirement, you could opt for Lean FIRE (suited for very frugal people who want to retire as soon as possible), Fat Fire / HIFIRE (for those who want a more comfortable retirement with lots of travel) or normal FIRE (somewhere in the middle).
As you can see there are many different options and strategies. Money Flamingo focuses on the less mainstream FIRE strategies to help you design the lifestyle you really want, before and after you reach Financial Independence. You can find an overview of our Alternative FIRE Strategies page.
Barista FIRE is an alternative Financial Independence approach. While traditional FIRE is still the main goal for most members of the FIRE movement, alternative methods are becoming more popular. Barista FIRE is particularly popular in the US because of the health insurance benefits this approach offers. Barista FI consists of two phases – the accumulation … Read more
I started my first “real” job in early 2012. 10 years ago at the time of writing. A lot has changed in those 10 years. I went from being broke and feeling stuck to enjoying a fabulous semi-retired lifestyle with my family. Time for a look back. This article is a mix of personal reflection … Read more
If there is one skill you need in order to reach Financial Independence it is this one: delayed gratification. The FIRE community as a whole is very good at it. Maybe a little too good…
Baby Flamingo #2 turned 1 recently. I thought this would be a good moment to share my thoughts on a hotly debated topic in many FIRE Facebook Groups and on podcasts and Financial Independence blogs: the cost of having a baby in Australia!
Finfluencers on Instagram, FIRE bloggers, Youtube channels about making money online, investing courses for millennials, podcasters who recommend share trading platforms, side hustle coaches, Fintok, the latest mentoring program by xzy personal finance guru, podcasters who recommend share trading platforms … The list of people in the personal finance and investing space who are not … Read more
I started this blog just over three years ago to chronicle the last leg of our journey and share our approach to Financial Independence. In 2019 our first child was born and life got busy. When I went back to work in late 2019 I stopped reading other personal finance blogs. We had another baby, … Read more
We reached Flamingo FI six months ago and are now officially semi-retired. In this post, I’ll talk about our plan to get to FI in the next 10-15 years while working part-time and without saving and investing another cent for retirement. The Race to Flamingo FI Here is a quick recap of our plan (you … Read more
We all know the basic math behind FIRE – you take your annual living expenses, multiply the number by 25 and voilà – you have your target FIRE number. But what if you have no idea what your future living expenses will look like?