Aussie Hifire Blog
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This is a blog about having enough money to have a high income and be financially independent after retiring early or HIFIRE for short. Basically, I want to get to the point where I have enough money that I no longer have to work and have enough passive income to support myself and my family.
Aussie Hifire Blog
7M ago
So I’ll get the obvious out of the way first; it’s been a minute since my last post. And by a minute I mean almost two years, which yeah that’s a while between posts. I could come up with a bunch of reasons why but the reality is that it’s mostly because I just haven’t felt like there was anything that I particularly felt like writing about.
I’m sure that I could have written a bunch of posts about market movements or changes to legislation or some such, but for the most part that sort of stuff hasn’t been what I’ve been aiming for with this blog.
So what I have been doing in ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
One of the aspects of FIRE that people find most difficult is deciding how to go about it. Although the broad concepts are very easy to understand, there are a lot of decisions that need to be made to actually make a start.
Unfortunately although we get taught a lot of things in school and university for those who go on to further study, I do not recall being taught much if anything about how to make decisions either during my formal education or thereafter.
Some of the various jobs I’ve had over the years have taught me a little bit more about this, but almost always just i ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
One of the biggest problems I have when writing about FIRE and personal finance in general is trying to look at things from a different perspective than my own. I don’t think I’m alone in this because we all tend to look at the world through the lens of our own experiences.
Morgan Housel has a great line in his book The Psychology of Money (which I highly recommend!) about your personal experiences being 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. I think he’s probably deliberately exaggerating with the 80% number, but you get the id ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
Most of us on the path to FIRE hopefully have at least some plans for what we want to do once we’ve reached whatever our magic number is. I think that you want to be retiring to something you like rather than from something your hate (your job in most cases) because otherwise you’re probably going to find that retirement won’t actually make you happy.
Some people plan on spending more time with family and friends, or doing lots of volunteer work. Bowls and golf also seem to feature pretty heavily, as do looking after grandchildren.
On top of that day to day stuff a lot of pe ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
Something that constantly comes up in FIRE forums on Reddit/FB etc is people asking for advice on their current or proposed portfolio. Sometimes this will be a fairly standard mix of 50% Aussie shares and 50% Intl shares or somewhere around that at least, and other times it’s 50% US stocks, 30% tech stocks, 20% cryptocurrencies.
So why is it that there are so many of the second type of portfolios being asked about at the moment? And what sort of asset allocation should you have?
Quick disclaimer: As is always the case you should not plan your finances around what s ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
Most of the time I write about cool things like safe withdrawal rates, or which Aussie equity index ETF is better, or diversification, emergency funds, savings rates and the like. You know, fun and light hearted entertaining stuff! This post isn’t going to be like that unfortunately, but it is important.
I’m going to put in a disclaimer that none of what I say below is specific advice, it is not tailored to anyone’s personal circumstances, you should not be relying on anything written here, and you should seek advice from a professional about your estate planning. I’ve ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
Whether or not you should buy a home is a question that gets asked a lot in the FIRE community. Here in Australia, particularly if you are part of the 35% of the population that lives in Sydney or Melbourne, it’s a huge amount of money both as an absolute number and as a multiple of your income. As a result of the cost whether you buy one or not can have a huge impact on how much money you can put into the investments that you’ll need to support yourself when you retire.
If you do decide that you want to buy a house though, then from a financial perspective now seems to be a great ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
I wrote a similarly titled post a while back about people getting inspired to follow the FIRE path by finding a blogger who they can relate to. It’s great to know that there are other people out there at a similar stage in their life to your own and you have someone that you feel a connection with.
I think it’s fantastic that the Aussie FIRE blogging scene has so many people in different situations that even if there isn’t someone for everyone just yet, there is at least someone for most people and often several someones. I think it’s important to keep in mind though tha ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
Happy new financial year everyone! Seeing as we are now halfway through the calendar year it’s time for a review of how we’ve gone with our spending so far, as well as an update on our portfolio and things in general.
The last 6 months seem to have lasted a lot longer due to working at home for much of the time because of the Coronavirus, and not going out a whole lot either for the same reason. We’re very fortunate that I’m in a job where it’s relatively easy to work from home for most things and there hasn’t been much of a hit to my employment income.
Having said that it’s certa ..read more
Aussie Hifire Blog
2y ago
This post has been inspired by this recent podcast featuring three of the biggest names in the Aussie FIRE blogging community, and the follow on discussions in the Aussie Firebug Facebook group about how much it costs to raise kids in Australia. As all three acknowledge they don’t have kids so it’s not something they really have any experience with.
As someone who has two young kids I thought it would be useful to write about it from my perspective. Obviously my situation isn’t the same as everyone else’s, there are plenty of people who would be horrified with how much we’ve spent, and others ..read more