I used to be a software engineer. I'm 46 years old now but I'm 16 years into retirement.

I’m Julien Saunders, this is my wife Kiersten. We were hoping to retire next year.

I’m Kristy.

And I’m Bryce.

We used to work in Toronto and and even on two engineering salaries it wasn't enough

to buy a house.

Instead of buying a house we actually put our savings towards building a portfolio and

investing and as a result of that [on] we were able to retire at the ages of 31 and

32.

Retirement just means, in the new definition, that you have a choice.

It’s less about retiring and more about having the freedom to [on] not have to rely

on a job for money.

It’s really about thinking about the kind of life that you want and seeing your money

as a tool to enable that vision to come to life.

Fire stands for financial independence, retire early. And it’s based on the principle that

you can retire not based on your age but by how much you save of your income every year.

Instead of doing the traditional path, where you save a little bit over your 50-year career,

you’d save significantly more, invest significantly more over a 10 or 15 year period and have

the ability to retire early.

You don't have to be this really badass monk living in a tent in the woods.

You just have to be slightly less ridiculous than average. I always felt like I was living

an extremely fancy life.

It just wasn't quite as ridiculous as my guy in the next cubicle who maybe had a brand-new

BMW and I had like an old Subaru.

These small decisions make a huge difference in terms of the percentage of your money that

you spend.

I grew up in a pretty frugal household in Canada with parents who weren't really flashy

with their money and I thought that was normal so when I got a good job in engineering, I

kind of kept that same lifestyle but I got paid more of an American professional salary

which meant that most of it was just getting not spent.

What do you do with this fair money?

And of course that led to investing.

It turns out if you do that for seven to ten years with the majority of your money you

have enough to live off forever with just based on the dividends and the ongoing capital

gains of this chunk of money that you saved.

I think the pandemic certainly caused people to re-examine their relationship with work.

But it also forced you to re-examine your relationship with expending.

Something as big as cooking at home, I mean, food for a lot of people is the second or

third largest expense that they have.

And so even if you can just make a tiny dent in that budget, that money can go towards

paying off debt or vamping up investments.

When you figure out how these different system kind of work together it almost becomes like

a super power.

If you’re location independent, basically it makes you very flexible.

For us, we actually travelled the first five years of retirement and when we visited places

like Poland or Portugal and as well as Thailand we were able to live easily on 20,000 dollars

a year because the cost of living was so much lower than big cities in North America.

We take a far more flexible process than most of FIRE aficionados. Mainly because the traditional

FIRE formula assumes that your expenses remain fairly stagnated. We do not have the luxury

of having such a predictable life. We have a four-year-old and then we also support Julien’s

mom in managing her living expenses.

Anytime you have more dependents or more demands on your income, the larger your expenses are,

the more difficult this is going to be.

The F.I.R.E. community has been accused of: Is this only for privileged people? I actually

didn’t grow up in Canada, I was born in China and at one point my family lived on

44 cents a day. I know what is like to struggle.

The less you earn the more difficult life is and that means making these changes is

even more valuable.

It’s not just one size fits all. You can actually just use your portfolio to

cover part of your expenses, like maybe you can just bring down the number of hours that

you have to work.

I’m a carpenter and I do that for fun but if I ever needed to make money I could just

do that professionally.

There are different versions of FIRE that makes it a little more inclusive to different

income levels.

And we wanted to make sure that we served as a lighthouse to all of the other black

people out there.

There’s been a lot of talk about racial justice and when we think about social equity

and social progress, economic freedom is really the last kind of leg for African Americans

and so when you talk about FIRE being something that they can have a greater control of their

finances, it’s really a appealing offer.

It’s far more appealing than working your butt off to only not get promoted or to join

the ranks of less than 1% of corporate leadership that looks like you.

I’d probably be laid-off in my last job if it wasn’t for us becoming financially

independent.

Do we really want to work like crazy and pay off the mortgage and then die at our desk?

The advice that we’ve been given doesn’t work in this environment anymore and we need

to write a new rulebook. We need to learn how to invest and we need to have all these

backup plans in case we get screwed again as proven by the pandemic by the employers

and by the economy.

We’ve been criticised for the past 5 years by saying: FIRE only works because the stock

market is on a tear and the economy is expanding and there is no recession.

Well, this is now the third recession that we’ve been through personally while on this

FIRE journey and if anything it has just proven that FIRE is the only path that makes any

sense because any strategy that relies on your employment being stable that just doesn't

work.

A lot of identity is wrapped up in our money decisions.

It’s actually very easy here in the United States to look like you’re rich even though

you’re not given the access to credit.

Secondly, in a lot of cases it’s actually very expensive just to maintain certain images

required to work certain jobs.

I don't take these social cues and Engineers are notorious for being clueless like this,

so you have this 45-year-old man like wearing a hippie plaid shirt with paint on it and

a huge backpack and riding a homemade electric mountain bike to the grocery store.

I think that's a great thing but it also of course depends on your personality type like

I am a novelty seeker and I love change and adventure.

After we had our son, it was the first time that I realised something as simple as just

having paid leave wasn’t available to me.

And it was only because the company that I worked for, like unfortunately a lot of companies

in the US, don’t offer any kind of benefit that allows fathers to be there.

When the pandemic happened, we found out at almost the exact same time that my father

was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Against all odds he seems to be fine now, but it really goes to show you it’s not

just about the financial part of FIRE.

Time is the best thing that money can buy. Like when your father gets sick and the amount

of time that you spend with him, because you don’t know how much time is left that is

worth more than any extra money an employer can give you, any promotion, any kind of title.

This movement is not really about the money, it’s about a much larger social shift.

The more people see it as a viable path, I believe the more difficult it will be for

employers to keep their workforce, particularly the most talented amongst them.

Because you’ll need more than money to attract me and to motivate me.

I think this movement has the potential to fundamentally change the way that we view

work and I’m really excited to see what happens over the next coming years.