FI Via Mastery of the Mind FI via mastery of the mind, how do I achieve that? To become financially independent (FI) you can: Win the lottery (Nice idea, but unlikely). Receive a major inheritance at a young age (see above). Rob a bank and get away with it (only seems to work if you’re CEO, and you’re probably not going to rise that far anyway). Work in a job or business for 40 – 50 years. Depending upon your age, work in a job for say, 5 – 20 years and save hard towards FI. Meanwhile, work on controlling your impulses, questioning assumptions about major life events and expenditures, and pon ..read more

FI During the Time of Corona Hello Everyone, it’s time to put pen to paper again (or rather takka takka tak around on the keyboard) for a bit. FI during the time of Corona, inevitably something on our mind. We watched the virus from early in January when it was first reported in the German Tagesschau, ARD‘s evening flagship news program that we subscribe to via podcast. (For those of you who are wondering, ARD is the German equivalent of the BBC in the UK, CBC in Canada or PBS in the US and is an absolutely top flight broadcaster in our most humble estimation. The next best thing in the Englis ..read more

Retire in 12 Years – Part Two Could I really retire in 12 years? After many years of saving what felt like every hard-earnt penny, I had saved up some $310,000. Twelve years had gone by since I had started working on my retirement plan. This was the plus side. On the downside, I was being laid off for the second time in as many years. Time to pose the decisive question. Did I really have enough savings to declare financial independence? A Caveat Most people don’t want to reveal their personal financial information on the net and I’m no exception. Accordingly, I have chang ..read more

Retire in 12 Years – Part One Retire in 12 years, how do I manage that you probably ask? The short answer is that you’re going to have to save some money up, or to use finance jargon, create some wealth. A Case Study: My Own It’s going to be much easier to explain how to retire in 12 years, or to achieve financial independence in 12 years, whichever you prefer, if we look at a real life case study. The only numbers I have are my own, so let’s look at my own income and expense details. This will be for the main period of time when I was working towards this goal. I achieved FI at age ..read more

Woodstove Water Heater Repair A woodstove water heater repair; what? Okay, we admit, this post is a little, what?–specialized? But you know, given that it was such a satisfying fix and ties in nicely with the theme of efficient use of household energy and environmentally-friendly resource use–big issues these days folks–we thought we’d include it. Warning: if learning new skills and dealing with problems significantly out of your comfort zone don’t interest you, feel free to skip this one. Okay, so on to the good stuff. Regular readers of Money for Independence will remember that we ..read more

Looking for a House in Kingston! It’s official, Mrs MfI and I are looking for a house in Kingston! The main reasons: Mrs MfI wants to commute less and both of us would like to expand our social horizons. It will also be my next employment after I finish modernising our existing home. Our preferred method of achieving this goal–given we really don’t want to borrow any money–is to find a place in need of substantial renovation and to live in it as we fix it up. We are currently accumulating a house purchase fund as our GIC investments mature, although it’s far beneath the $387,000 price o ..read more

The Land Search Ends After a contract renewal, I was teaching part-time at the university again, A was a student there which made sharing a single vehicle and commuting a lot simpler; and we had $64,284 saved up–split fairly evenly between the two of us–for the purchase of land. Our search for land was top of our priority list. Diary Entry, 10th February, 1996 The woodpecker is back. Yesterday evening we also had northern lights–white shimmering columns of light. Interrupting our reveries about nature, Luke was rapidly removing the trees from his land with a feller buncher and the ..read more

How We Did It: Achieving F.I., Post 8: Land Search–A Near Miss The Story so Far: In our ‘How We Did It’ posts we tell the abbreviated story of how we achieved financial independence. Towards the end of this post we include a list of factors that were important to us in our land search. Clearly, what people are looking for varies, but knowing what is important to you is absolutely key. Many people follow the house in the subdivision with a mortgage, 2 cars with monthly payments and 2-3 kids path; our path was thoroughly thought through, involved savings and no debt and well outside the norm ..read more

Improve Your Gas Mileage We’ve been thinking about how to improve our gas mileage for a while. By a while we mean since around the 1970s oil shocks when our engineer/scientist father–accepted to MIT for his Master’s, don’t you know, but never went–originally pointed our family in that direction, citing concerns about pollution and the likelihood of a ‘greenhouse effect,’ or a warming climate from too much fossil fuel burning. Back in the ’70s, and into the ’80s, our family drove a couple of British Leyland Minis, one after the other, which were already legendary for their greatly superi ..read more

How we Did it: Achieving F.I., Post 7: Still Looking for Land Half way through the year and we were still looking for land. Art Gale as well as Ralph suggested we contact Ken Irwin whom we eventually visited. Ken had an amazing place by the river on the periphery of Fraser Rapids. He was living a self-sufficient lifestyle in a self-built cabin and had a truly impressive vegetable garden; he was even growing corn in a greenhouse. We stayed overnight at Ken’s place and slept in the back of our truck, although he had offered us use of his sleeping loft. In the morning we were woken up ..read more