Thanks for creating the community! I'm mostly posting to signal boost here so others can see that someone actually posts here.

I'll give my brief story. I've been happily married for >10 years and a couple years in, my brother recommended I read Mr. Money Mustache's blog, and I ended up reading most of his posts within a week or two and I was hooked. I'm a SWE and love optimizing things, so I soon found Mad Fientist and loved that style, and soon I was off building my spreadsheet. At first it was just a few calculations, and now it handles most of my taxes, tracks payroll, does a ton of projections (many of which are irrelevant), and so on.

Fast forward to today, my brother is FIRE, and I'm on my way to get there in my mid-40s. I don't make a crazy salary, but I do well enough that I can sustain a 40-45% savings rate while still keeping up somewhat with the neighbors. I'm very frugal and look forward to sharing frugal ideas, as well as just crunching numbers.

Anyway, welcome everyone! I'm going to make an effort to post a bit over the next few days, so please don't hesitate to ask questions so I can throw together some relevant posts. I'll try to ask some of my own so others get good ideas of topics to post about.

Thanks for starting this community!

I started on this path back in 2015, while working at a low paid dead end job. I figured at least if I followed the investing principles from bogleheads, MMM, and r/financial independence, that at least I could retire someday.

Now 8.5 years later, I'm at a much better job in a career I enjoy. More importantly, I'm much further along the FIRE path and could conceivably retire in the next 5-10 years.

It's crazy the confidence that comes from being able to last years on your current savings. With all the rumblings of layoffs/recessions I don't really care if I'm one of them or not. I'm still at a point where I'd have to get a new job eventually if I was to be let go, but I'd be fairly comfortable for several years if I needed to be.

I have subscribed & know to learn plentiful from this community. Thank you.

Thanks for starting this group. I started on my FIRE journey in 2018,though I didn't know it at the time. After years of just barely getting by, I decided to take control of my finances, track everything, and aggressively pay off my student loans. In 2020 I finally paid off my loans and switched to saving money, though I've also spent far more than I would have liked on deferred maintenance projects that I couldn't afford before.

Somewhere in there I learned about FIRE and started working on a plan for my family. At first I thought I would only manage FI and not RE, but that would still be a great outcome. Right now I'm looking at late FIRE in about 15 years (I will be in my late 50s then).

I don't usually post much, but will try to participate more to help contribute to growing this community.