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…
Settling In To Our CO Life
This week we were wrapping up a lot of nagging things around the house, and we finally put an end to all of our extended family activities. We’re finally settling into our CO life. FIRE: Day 29 (7/27) There wasn’t a lot going on today with the house now that we have it almost fully…
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…
Finally Home
This was another week of busy house activity. We returned to stay at our house (day 22), sleeping in sleeping bags because we don’t have any furniture in the house. We continuously worked on unpacking, installing, and fixing things through the week. The carpet installation took place later in the week (day 25), and once…
Flooring Marathon
FIRE: Day 15 (7/13) The days are starting to feel like they are just blasting by, and I’m not sure what that is. Today felt like it was about six hours long, and maybe it’s just because we’re busy with various things. I continued with intervals of applying mud to my drywall patch, scraping, sanding,…
Barcelona Spain Expat Budget
Barcelona Spain was the final stop of our year-long journey. With it being our single longest stay in any one Airbnb, I have lots of data to pull from for this expat budget. While I already know the cost of living is relatively high, there are some affordable aspects of Barcelona as well. For example,…
FIRE Existential Crisis
We are still working on house projects this week, and making good progress. There aren’t any more emergencies to deal with, so it’s all forward progress now. I had a bit of a mental meltdown, a FIRE existential crisis (see day 9). FIRE: Day 8 (7/6) We rented a 9′ UHaul van today and started…
FIRE Week One
At this point with our year of travel over, we have returned to our regular life in CO. In the kickoff post for our year of travel I was speculating about what we would return to in terms of having achieved FIRE or not. Our at-home budget is still developing at this point, and I…
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…
Return to USA
Our final week of gap year was a mixture of trying to soak up our final moments in Barcelona, while doing the necessary things for our return to America. We did a lot of car shopping which even I don’t find interesting and it’s my car. The final day of this week (day 366) details…
Traveling Toward Fire
A Premature FI Experiment
