Hello!

Welcome to Firebears! Are you trapped in the endless cycle of eat, sleep, work, repeat? Do you long for something more than working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for the next 40 years? Wouldn’t you prefer to be free of your financial constraints and take back control of your most precious resource, your time? Then congratulations, you are in the right place! Join us on our journey as we share our successes and failures on the road to Financial Independence.

Who are the Firebears?

We are a couple in our late twenties, originally from the U.K. but now living and working in northern Germany. Our story started out like that of many young professionals, fresh out of university we found ourselves in a new city (and in our case, a new country), taking our first steps onto the corporate career ladder and like most people, experiencing a serious case of lifestyle inflation.

After four years of working and being in a relationship, natural progression took its course and we started thinking about what the future should look like. One of our biggest considerations was whether to buy a house, as coming from a buying-obsessed nation, this was the next logical step. We started researching how much money we would need for a deposit and quickly came to the realisation that after four years of working we had no savings. Whoops!

This kicked us into action and we started researching the best ways to save for a house deposit and where to store our savings. This is when we first came across the idea of investing and the FIRE movement.

What is our goal?

Gone are our days of saving for a house deposit, instead our primary goal is now to become Financially Independent and stop working by the age of 40. Retiring early can be misleading notion, do we want to quit our jobs aged 40 and then proceed to do nothing? Absolutely not! What we do want is to not have to rely on work to financially sustain us. The aim is that by saving hard and making smart investments our passive income will eventually cover all of our day to day living costs, enabling us to focus on our own interests and hobbies, freeing us of the financial burdens that cause so much stress for many of our generation. Stress that is likely to increase, as financial stability looks more uncertain than ever with the rise of automation and AI putting job prospects at risk and the ever increasing retirement age forcing people to find other ways to financially sustain themselves. We want to put our financial future back in our own hands.

Our journey to Financial Independence comes with its own unique set of challenges, being non-resident U.K. citizens prevents us from taking advantage of the investment friendly environment in the U.K. such as Individual Saving Accounts (ISAs) or using low cost Vanguard brokerage accounts. Instead, we have had to navigate our way through German bureaucracy with its confusing tax rules and ingrained fear of investing.

Why start a blog?

We decided to start a blog predominantly as a way to track our progress and share our successes and failures to help others within the FI community. We hope that our passion for investing and FIRE will inspire others to take back control of their finances.

To learn more about us and our journey to Financial Independence then START HERE.

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