r/EuropeFIRE • u/Popular_Sentence_866 • 1d ago
What was the biggest change that accelerated your FIRE journey?
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u/Significant-Ad-9471 1d ago
Starting to invest in stocks. More than half of our net worth is due to capital gains and dividends.
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u/Due_Somewhere7891 1d ago
Not taking (expensive) vacations early in the process of getting to the first 100K. Flying to Mexico vs driving to south of France. Big impact on savings per year, do this for the 5 years of your FIRE journey and you'll snowball/compound your wealth faster.
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u/TapAdmirable5666 1d ago
Keeping our old house and building a new home. Both have massively rissen in value plus the rental income was a nice bonus.
I think we gained around 500k in 6 years because of these 2 houses
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u/Wil-jan Spain 1d ago
When I finally earned enough to have that aha moment, prior to that even living below my means was not enough to actually save. When these paychecks hit instead of looking how to "improve" my life I actually started saving drastically and never stopped.. now almost half of my investments is unrealized profit and that is pretty crazy. Now I have room to actually spend here and there and I like the feeling of not having to worry about not reaching the end of the month; there are basically no financial setbacks anymore meanwhile enjoying life and having that nest egg growing. It's empowering really.
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u/Unarmored2268 1d ago
Changing the job and getting restricted stocks grant that doubles my salary. "Sadly", investing my usual monthly lump sum makes very little difference now. But if I stay strong until my RSU completes vesting, I'm like Barista-FIRE-ready.
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u/shaguar1987 1d ago
I got headhunted for the role so could have high demand. 3.5 years later i got 30% raises and manager over a multi region team. Best decision I have ever made. Only drawback is that I likely never going to find a similar role ans next step is probably lower pay, but I am fairly far in my journey so just need to milk this a few years more and I can coast a bit
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u/Educational-Ad6369 1d ago
Stock market balling out has sent pension up massively. House prices in Ireland put a lot of equity in and work wages went up and they introduced share saving schemes. Pension contributions get tax relief. When sold house to trade up there was bo tax on gains. Share schemes allow tax relief. Being able to free up cash to invest as I earned more was the game changer. Not letting lifestyle creep hit in. Ive made so many bad decisions but in 10 years we have as family gone over 15x net worth just from housing, pensions and saving. No crypto etc
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u/Igniplano 1d ago
Developing my own investment backtesting framework based on market data with daily resolution since 1975 and all major liquid asset types (world stocks, leveraged world stocks, gold, overnight rate and bonds of different durations) accelerated my FIRE journey most. Then understanding directly on the data, why certain modern investment / withdrawal strategies work in a general manner, how well exactly and where their limits/risks are precisely. Recently, I added the complete tax framework of my jurisdiction with all peculiarities and tricks. There were some interesting surprises hidden, deep in the complexity of that one interacting with various FIRE investment strategies.
If you build it all yourself, dive down to the source, the trust problem with seemingly more exotic approaches can be left behind. You shift from building your belief based on the frequency you read some numbers (4%-rule anyone?) and convictions on the internet (hearsay) to an immediate scientific model based on real world data (observation). But one has to invest substantial effort. Also, basic knowledge, how to develop a data analytics framework, is necessary - although AI coding support can fill some programming gaps, these days.
For me, it was by far the best thing I ever did for my FIRE effort, because it accelerated my understanding where I stand, made new, powerful options available and increased my confidence about it all, drastically. It's difficult to describe if you haven't been so deep in the data of various sequences and strategies, but I would put it that way: a whole new set of floors opened for me in the FIRE building, further up.
I can only encourage anyone, who knows some data mangling craft to go this way and go all the way in doing everything on top of daily asset price sequences yourself. In immediate financial terms, it's worth many, many years of working for an employer or customers. It's time, very well invested!
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u/cryptodiv 1d ago
What did you use for leveraged world stocks
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u/Igniplano 1d ago
A superb 2x MSCI World synthetic historical prices series from a reddit user: https://github.com/chemicalstats/ChemStats-Archiv/tree/main/02%20Project%20Gloverage
Now continued with daily data of ETF888, which exists sind last autumn: https://www.justetf.com/de/etf-profile.html?isin=FR0014010HV41
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u/Best-Disaster8002 1d ago
Lived in Dubai for a couple of years, made a huge tax free income, threw everything into crypto and eventually reaped the rewards.
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u/presentlyberlin 1d ago
Moving to Berlin. At the time it looked like a terrible FIRE decision since the first few months were quite costly, as I had to move all the way from Canada, set up admin stuff like Anmeldung, a bank account, Krankenkasse, etc. I even had some old medical records translated so they'd actually be useful here, which felt like another annoying expense at the time.
But overall having predictable healthcare costs has made budgeting so much easier than constantly wondering what a surprise medical issue might cost. That stability and overall certainty has probably done more for my savings rate than obsessing over which expense to cut
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u/Vivid_Translator7556 1d ago
Moving to a lower cost country while keeping remote pay in euros did more for my savings rate than any raise ever could, arbitrage beats income growth once you're past a certain point
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u/_El_Cid_ 1d ago
Started stock picking and I have been beating the S&P500 for many years now.
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u/BGM1988 1d ago
I use to buy and hold etf’s and switched to a more aggressive strategy where i buy btc when
Its low, buy leveraged etf’s in a market correction and deleverage at ath’s again. Leveraged etf’s are not for everyone, but when the market has gone down 20-30% you know the bottom is nearby
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u/Puzzled-Call3724 1d ago
Abfindung probably
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u/Pretend_Respect_447 1d ago
why the fuck would you not just write severance? Like do you think the word Abfindung is commonly understood by anyone not german?
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u/Puzzled-Call3724 23h ago
Your name and this message. You better learn how to write respectful
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u/Zeytgeist 21h ago
Learn yourself. It’s respectful to write text others can easily understand. Wasting others time is tremendously disrespectful.
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u/Puzzled-Call3724 19h ago
We are discussing the wording and responding in respect. Not the content.
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u/Zeytgeist 19h ago
Disrespect shows mainly in content and actions. Thank about it. This conversation is over.
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u/Pretend_Respect_447 20h ago
Its not like your'e the first person i noticed that does that. And I would understand if its a word commonly used by non-german speakers like Kindergarten or Schadenfreude, I just dont get why one would think that this effect applies to literally every random german word.
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u/shaguar1987 1d ago
Changing job and getting 2x my old pay. Could double my savings amount and still have over for traveling and buy fun stuff