July 2026 FIRE Budget: Month One in Colorado
This month was one of those in life where you look back on it in a couple contradictory ways. While I’m proud of all the accomplishments over the course of July, I never want to live this month again. We had a mountain of work to accomplish between home repairs, home renovations and moving back…
The Premature FIRE Experiment Worked: We Hit Our FIRE Number
This blog started with the premature FIRE experiment that was our international gap year. At the beginning, we had not hit our FIRE number at home in Colorado. We would have had a risky 4.5% withdrawal rate, having only 22 of the required 25 FU’s. Slow traveling internationally was an adventure of its own, but…
June International Travel FIRE Budget
June is the final month of our international gap year, and we spent the entire month (actually 28 days) in Barcelona Spain. This international travel FIRE budget breakdown will finalize the full financial details of this year, and reveal how we did overall at maintaining our target 4% withdrawal rate. Up to this month we…
May International Travel FIRE Budget
This month was split between Lisbon (13 days) and Barcelona (18 days), and this is a rare budget month in the year where the figures won’t be extracted and examined from an expat cost of living standpoint. There was better data for Lisbon in the April budget, and there will be better data for Barcelona…
Lisbon Portugal Expat Budget
Our stay in Lisbon Portugal was our first time ever in Europe, and we have generally enjoyed living here for the past five weeks. While this post will focus on an expat budget, it’s easy to see why many expats choose this as their destination for non-financial reasons. Strolling through the winding hilly streets with…
April International Travel FIRE Budget
In April our time was split between Knysna South Africa and Lisbon Portugal, and this budget includes a combo of the expenses from each location. However, the majority of this April international travel FIRE budget breakdown is from Lisbon, having spent 23 days of the month here. In an upcoming expat cost of living series…
March International Travel FIRE Budget
The beginning of March was the tail end of our tough stay in Sri Lanka before moving on to South Africa. The majority of spending in our March international travel FIRE budget is comprised of South Africa costs. In the upcoming expat cost of living series post on South Africa, I will extract the South…
February International Travel FIRE Budget
Our February international travel FIRE budget includes the cost for time spent between Chiang Mai Thailand and Colombo Sri Lanka. More of the days were spent in Thailand, but the costs were pretty similar between the two locations. However, these two locations could not have been more different outside of the cost. Thailand blew us…
Vietnam Expat Family Budget
Vietnam is a place that provoked a lot of feelings, rescued us from a bad living situation in Manila, and won us over with everything it has to offer. It is one of our favorite destinations so far on our international adventure. I have dedicated a lot of time to examining the day to day…
January International Travel FIRE Budget
The month of January was split between Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam (22 days) and Chiang Mai Thailand (9 days). This was anticipated to be one of the cheapest stretches of the year with these locations known for their lower cost of living, and no long flights to travel between them. However, we managed to…
Traveling Toward Fire
A Premature FI Experiment
