From S – I started working full-time in August 2011, after graduating with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. With a combination of tuition scholarships, working part-time as a teaching or research assistant, or at different on-campus jobs, and sleeping very little for 3yrs, I managed to graduate debt free. I had a grand total of $80 in my account when I started my first day of work, and was thrilled to see my bank balance grow from there on. During those years, I learnt to live frugally, and I don’t plan to give it up anytime soon.
From K – I started working full-time in January 2009, after graduating with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. Similar to S, I too graduated debt free, using the same techniques but partied a bit more than S. I was definitely not living frugally until I met/married S, but now I think I am better at frugal living than S! While S is the risk-taker, in life and financially, I am more cautious, and between us, we have built a well-balanced portfolio.
For a variety of reasons (to be elaborated at some point in this blog), we relocated from North East USA to Birmingham, UK in June 2022. To say it was a bumpy transition would be a severe understatement. However, nearly two years later, we feel more settled in our lives here and starting to love it. Having lived and worked as Indian immigrants for 10+ years in the USA, we have gained a lot of experience in a unique field which is an amalgamation of immigration laws, personal taxes and finances, and we have started are building this competency in the UK as well.
OUR VISION
What if you had enough money to cut back your hours at work (take a pay cut), so your child does not have to go to before or after school care, and you get more time with them. You would not need to rush them out the door, half asleep, at 7:30am to pre-school care program and pick them up, fully exhausted, at 5:30pm from an after-school care program. You could just drop them off at 9am, go to your part time job from 9:30am to 2:30pm and pick up your child at 3pm. And everyone is in a better mood!
Imagine having enough money to take an unpaid career break to take care of an ailing parent, and you have sufficient savings to not worry about your rent.
There are hundreds of such scenarios, each of which results in a form of happiness for the individual’s circumstance. To us, these are forms of happiness, derived from money. However, with current inflation and insecure job environment, it is insufficient to simply earn a good paycheck. Knowing how to invest the money efficiency, in simple and complex formats, long-term planning is the key to mental peace and financial independence. And we can help with the latter. Planning for a future with some semblance of flexibility and real work-life balance is our hope for us, and its possible for anyone reading this website. All our timescales to achieving this result will be different, and for us it is mid-40s. We see many of these, currently hypothetical, scenarios becoming reality in a few years, and we would like to get prepared for it. For now, we are still working full-time but with plans to cut back work hours from 20 June 2027. Why this exact date? More to come on this topic, on the blog.
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Retire from 8 to 5 