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An introduction to Freedom Jar FIRE

My purpose for ‘Freedom Jar FIRE’ is to document our journey towards FIRE (financially independent, retired early). I visit a lot of sites where the story begins after the author has “made it” – hit their number, gotten their expenses under control, eliminated debt. Now they’re 30-something millionaires living some version of the dream. Which is great!

This isn’t that. We’re doing pretty well but have a ton of work to put in before we can think about abandoning the daily grind for whatever comes next.

It all started with the eponymous jar of freedom. Basically, we were earning plenty of money, living below our means, and saving/investing what felt like a boatload of cash. It didn’t really click what a treadmill that was until I stumbled upon the idea of visualizing our debt. Not on a spreadsheet I can close or an app I can log out of, a physical representation right there in the living room. At the time we filled it, it was about $780,000 USD of pure, uncut debt. A few years before that you’d have had to add a comma.

Am I telling you how to live your life? No! I’ve been exceptionally lucky and I’m not some boomer here to tell you “in my day I earned $5 an hour and paid my way through college before buying a house!” – Because we all know that’s bullshit. That $5 adjusted for inflation would be $40 today, higher education is a financial crime, and housing is essentially a huge pyramid scheme.

Anybody that says “all it takes is hard work” is a fucking idiot. There are hundreds of millions of people doing hard work every day that are underpaid (or worse). Privilege and luck were required for my hard work to pay off, I harbor no delusions.

– me, just now

Because we’re still working (a lot!) in our daily jobs and various side gigs, I don’t know what early retirement would look like for us. I guess we do have some notion of FI as we’ve left some money on the table. For now it’s largely the typical grind and a lot of “Imagi-Planning.” I think if we do things right, the first few years would be spent renting affordable places in midsize European cities. But that’s escapism for now, we have to put in the work to make it a reality.

So poke around, and follow along as we take a little bit of pasta out of the jar each month.

Why is my username jarheadAF? Do I eat crayons? 

No! I’m not that kind of jarhead. I spent 8 years in the US Air Force and credit that time with basically every good thing that’s happened to me since.

Who are we?

“We” are white-collar 30 somethings that earn a bunch of money but still find ourselves on the spending treadmill. Married in our mid-20s while I was active duty and she was in grad school, our earning has increased dramatically but our spending has, too. If we have any hope of early retirement it’s time to get serious.

Who is Freedom Jar FIRE For?

At the moment I don’t really know. I guess people like us. You’re bringing in plenty of money but it’s going right back out the door and you want to get better about it. Maybe you were never taught about basic personal finance because you didn’t have good role models or the education system failed you. Maybe you’ve never heard of the 4% Rule. Maybe you don’t know why index funds are a cheat code to wealth. I intend to cover some basics like “what is PMI and why should I avoid it?” “How can I use unit price comparisons to save a bunch of money on groceries without changing anything else?” and things like that. But I also appreciate that some of our stories will elicit eyerolls because we earn enough to outspend a lot of problems.

Are we actually going to be able to retire early?

Well that’s the goal! In truth, nobody knows what the future holds. We could live to our mid-90s like some of our grandparents, or get killed in a scooter accident tomorrow. Since that’s largely out of our control, we’re just doing the best we can. At this point we’re comfortably CoastFI, so we’ve just started giving serious attention to taxable brokerage accts to let us easily withdraw money before age 59½. I’m confident we’ll be able to retire before age 65. Exactly how and when that will work, we have no idea. Which is kinda the point of this site 🙂

What’s the purpose of yet another FIRE Blog?

This isn’t an advice site, and it certainly isn’t a humblebrag. I’m a pretty good negotiator but it’s a skill I learned and honed. While we earn far more than I could have reasonably hoped for when I dropped out of school after 9th grade, we make the same mistakes as everyone else. We seriously consider upgrading to a bigger house, we buy things we don’t need, we convince ourselves we “deserve” certain things, we take large sums of money out of our 401k, and then at tax time we wonder where the F it all went. So this site is a way to document our path and offer some accountability even if the only two readers live in this house. Early retirement starts with an honest and thorough accounting of habits, so that’s what we’re doing here.

In the 6 months since I started this little blog, my savings rate jumped from an average of 16% up to 55%. So while I hope it’s informative and I’d be thrilled to know someone learned something on here, it’s really a way for me to focus. I’ve read FIRE blogs for many years but done nothing particular to achieve it. This is me trying to make the leap from “knowing” to “doing.”

That’s why we’re here, how about you?