Traveling Toward Fire

A Premature FI Experiment

Finance

  • Guam Expat Family Budget: The Cost Of Living In Paradise

    Guam Expat Family Budget: The Cost Of Living In Paradise

    My family of four lived in Guam for a total of 45 days recently, and during that time we closely tracked our spending to determine what an expat family budget would look like. Guam is a special destination because my parents were stationed there in the Air Force. It’s a location that has fascinated me

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  • October International Travel FIRE Budget

    October International Travel FIRE Budget

    October was a chaotic month with two extremely long haul flights (first, second), round-tripping to Denver from Guam twice to pick up and drop off my mom. In all of that planning, traveling, and spending time with my mom, I completely forgot to document the October international travel FIRE budget. The month of October was

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  • September Travel Budget In The Red

    September Travel Budget In The Red

    I always get excited when budget time rolls around, and I was particularly interested in this month. September is the first full month we have spent in Japan, which is our most expensive location (not counting Guam). If I had been allowed to peek ahead to the result of any one month’s budget before the

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  • August Gap Year Budget Review

    August Gap Year Budget Review

    We have concluded another budget month while slow traveling internationally on our family gap year. I’m excited to crunch the numbers and see how our projections are matching reality. It’s the chance to prove or disprove that this approach of slow travel is sustainable over the long haul. Either way it’s useful data. The month

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  • July Gap Year Budget

    July Gap Year Budget

    July is our first full month of travel and is our first chance to see if the financial aspects of this trip are going according to plan. We projected expenses for the places we are traveling using numbeo, but the accuracy of that in practice is a complete unknown to us. Being in Costa Rica

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  • The Best Things In Life Are Free

    The Best Things In Life Are Free

    Travel Log: Day 12 (7/9), Costa Rica Today was the undisputed best day so far in Costa Rica, thanks to a completely free activity (aside from a $3 Uber ride). This is exactly the antidote to yesterday’s failures. The place we went to is called “El Salto” or “The Jump”. It’s a small waterfall with

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  • Rental And Budget Failures

    Rental And Budget Failures

    Travel Log: Day 11 (7/8), Costa Rica Failures It was a day of rental and budget failures, and lessons learned. Lesson #1 – We aren’t professional cleaners This lesson kicked off first thing in the morning with an email from our property manager saying the new tenants thought the kitchen and bathrooms weren’t cleaned sufficiently.

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  • Travel Vaccinations Cost Planning

    Travel Vaccinations Cost Planning

    When you have a list of 27 places that you might travel to, the plan for travel vaccinations becomes a project of its own. It is also an important consideration for cost planning. Reading through CDC recommendations became complicated enough that I had to put together a tracking spreadsheet. It was either that or one

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  • I’ll Show You Mine (Budget)

    I’ll Show You Mine (Budget)

    With tariffs bringing chaos to the market, this is an entertaining time to take a look at our year long travel budget for the upcoming premature FIRE experiment where we will travel internationally for a full year. I find the budgeting aspect of this interesting because we have different moving parts that we don’t normally

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  • Pulling Out Early: A Premature FIRE Experiment

    Pulling Out Early: A Premature FIRE Experiment

    Are we there yet? We haven’t achieved FIRE as you could guess when the title says a premature FIRE experiment; at least not where we currently live. If you’re unfamiliar with FIRE there are plenty of good sources of detailed information on that topic. I will only provide some very basic info to set the

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