I can spend my days entirely as I choose - the freedom is absolutely incredible. My kids are grown, I have no grandchildren and all I have to worry about looking after are the dogs and my garden. For the first time in my life, I can be totally selfish. It took me a long time to lose the fear that I didn't have enough to retire on.Īlso, being able to retire at 57 is an even greater gift. If I have to, we can live off the smell of an oily rag. The frugal habits I learned back then have really paid off! There were years of struggling to provide for my boys and pay the mortgage - it wasn't easy to live off $18,000 a year of Centrelink benefits until the boys were all in school and I could go back to work. When I left my husband back in 1997, I took with me my four boys under five and $60 cash. So what do financial independence and early retirement mean to me?įor me, the security of financial independence is an absolute gift. I would never have had the courage to do it if I hadn't have spent all of that time reading and listening to people who have already trodden the path to financial independence. This enabled me to release the equity in the property and move to a cheaper, but better, house further away from the CBD.īeing able to pivot from my original plan to stay there until I was carried out in a pine box saved me having to work for an extra decade. The last point had a huge impact on my financial life when, after years of struggling to bring up four boys and pay a mortgage on a teacher's wage, I grabbed hold of an offer to develop my East Bentleigh property in a much sought-after school zone. You have to be able to see the value in delaying gratification - to be a long-term thinker, in other words.Īnd you have to be willing to learn, so that when life offers up an opportunity, you can recognise it and - even more importantly, know what to do with it.

You have to know what you value in life so you can concentrate your time, effort and money on those things. I really believe that the secret to becoming financially independent is underpinned by three very important things. I'm not your stereotypical FIRE candidate, being older than a millennial, single with kids, coming from a career not known for being lucrative, being female and non-American. I hate maths and numbers with a passion, but even someone as maths-phobic as I am can learn the basic concepts.

I was hooked! I wanted to learn all I could about this FIRE stuff. I could retire at pension age and not need to eke out my life on the pension. Imagine my relief when I read the famous post by Mr Money Mustache, The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement, and I realised that by doing what I was already doing - saving and investing more than 50% of my take-home pay - I was on track to being able to retire at 67 with over a million dollar nest-egg.

Shockingly simple math to retirement