Welcome, thanks for joining us!

We are the Firebears, two twenty-something year olds from the UK documenting their journey to achieve Financial Independence and Retire Early (FIRE).

Who are we?

We are a young couple from the UK who are both living and working in Germany. We moved to Germany directly after university and currently both have corporate mid-management type desk jobs and our aim is to achieve Financial Independence before the age of 40.

Our story so far…

We moved to Germany almost six years ago and spent the first four years enjoying the expat lifestyle (maybe a little too much). We took full advantage of living in mainland Europe and spent our weekends exploring other European cities. Yes, we maybe didn’t spend our money responsibly over this period, but we don’t regret it either. Many incredible memories were created over these four years and we enjoyed many great experiences.

Everything changed two years ago when we started to seriously consider saving for a house deposit. It didn’t take us long to realise that we didn’t have anywhere near enough money to buy even a small flat in the area where we currently live. In fact we quickly realised that we barely had any savings at all. This is when we really started to take our finances seriously and started researching ways to increase our savings and grow our money, this led us to the FIRE movement.

We dived into the FIRE movement head first, quickly becoming obsessed. After a couple of months researching we decided to streamline our expenditure and invest the difference in low cost passive index funds. This in itself brought up some initial challenges as living in Germany we do not have access to some of the benefits available to U.K. residents such as ISAs and being able to invest directly with Vanguard.

The majority of FIRE blogs are based in the U.S. where due to the numerous tax benefits of the American system it can be much easier to achieve Financial Independence. Being based in Europe we have had to be more creative with some of our solutions and this was one of our main motivators in starting a blog.

We want to document our journey to Financial Independence and all the successes and failures along the way. Our goal is to achieve Financial Independence by the age of 40 with a retirement pot of £1.5m. We have chosen to retire slightly later with a larger pot of money compared to a lot of our FIRE compatriots as we plan to build our dream home after we have finished working before then living on £40,000 a year.

We hope that you enjoy following us on our journey to Financial Independence and our many adventures along the way.

What started you on your journey to Financial Independence? How close are you to being financially free? Let us know in the comments below, we love to hear your stories.