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…
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…
Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau
This was not an interesting week, although the beach weirdness did keep us entertained (days 357, 358). JC also popped her top like a real local (day 359), and we did a final tourist activity, visiting Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau (day 355). Travel Log: Day 353 (6/15), Spain Pretty standard day…
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…
The End Of Homeschool and Sick Car Searches
In this week of travel, I unbelievably get sick again after being sick just six weeks ago in Lisbon (days 334-337). We had our last day of homeschool (day 336). Besides that I spent a lot of time being sick, working on yesalittle.com, and researching cars. Travel Log: Day 332 (5/25), Spain Today is labor…
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…
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…
Traveling Toward Fire
A Premature FI Experiment
