Welcome To A Pocket Full of Change!

Welcome! A Pocket Full Of Change is a blog about personal finance from a Canadian perspective. At its core are elements of the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement and my experiences with it so far. There will be various topics on saving, investing, real estate, some psychology, philosophy, and maybe some life hacks and other fun stuff. My goal to address some issues that have not yet been touched upon in the FIRE world, and to share some new perspectives on existing ideas.

You may be asking yourself, “What is this FIRE movement you’re talking about?” Great question! The idea has been around for a while, but has become more mainstream in the last decade. It is comprised of two ideas that overlap each other.

1) Financial Independence

The first idea is that of Financial Independence (FI). This means having enough passive income or savings to support yourself whether you are employed or not.

Some of the more common ways FI occurs in society is:

• Receiving a pension by working to a traditional retirement at 65
• Receiving a windfall (family, lottery, insurance)
• Having a rich spouse
• Large amount of personal savings and investment income

The FIRE movement typically focuses on total savings and investment income.

*Note: You can have any of the above and still not be financially independent if you are spending more than what these methods provide.

Why would I want to become financially independent?

• Maybe you feel trapped in your job and would enjoy a different line of work but it pays significantly less
• Maybe you would only like to work part time, or not at all so you can focus on your hobbies that you’ve always wanted to invest more time in
• Maybe you want to travel a lot more but you can never get enough time off at work.
• Maybe your hobby is a passion that you want to turn into a home business but you don’t have any time to do that with your current job
• Maybe instead of being at work 40 hours a week, you would rather spend that time with your kids and your spouse

These are just some of the reasons that you might be interested in FI, but there are many others. FI is good to have at any age, although the sooner you can achieve it the better. When you are financially independent, YOU have the choice to continue working at your employment, or change jobs, or not work at all. F.I. provides you with options. More importantly, it gives you freedom.

2) Retire Early

The second idea is to Retire Early (RE).

Where I work, my pension plan defines age 55 as the earliest you can take your pension. However, RE in the FIRE concept applies to what’s known as Extreme Early Retirement. This means retiring even sooner than age 55. Maybe 50…Perhaps 45… 40… Even 35 or 30. Now you might be thinking to yourself, “What kind of sorcery is this!?”. Well, it’s a real thing and achievable for many people, yet so many aren’t even aware this is possible. I wasn’t until a few years back.

Combining these two ideas together creates a framework for allowing you to retire much earlier than society’s standard by becoming financially independent as soon as possible.

The FIRE movement completely changed my perspective on finance and work. It opened up a whole new world of knowledge that I didn’t know previously existed. With that knowledge came new questions and new ideas to discover.

The FIRE concept offered me the Red pill or the Blue pill; I chose the Red pill*. Since then I’ve had several WTF moments and apostrophes…errr, I mean epiphanies. (Hook, anyone?)

I plan to share with you many of these things and hope that you will be able to use and apply them to help you add more efficiency, value, and freedom to your life. I also hope to provoke thought and self reflection as to why you may do some of things you are currently doing and whether they can be done in a better way. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll have your own WTF moments too.

*The Red Pill – Blue Pill concept was popularized by The Matrix movie from 1999 but was around before then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill