Mark White-Robinson

My kind of reasons for doing it was I was working in a law firm at the time and was like, I'm going to burn out at some time, but I'm making good money now, so I've got to kind of save and invest as much to make sure that doesn't happen.

Fortunately, I didn't burn out.

But what I wanted to do and identify at the time was, you know, you should be able to build a business

portfolio that helps take away a significant chunk of living kind of costs.

And once you hit that point, that freedom just opens up to do what you want to do.

So part of my circumstances, why I could afford to take time off to build Fiji was I built a portfolio to get me to that position.

Um, so kind of in the future DNA, I think, because that's, that's something that's been in my DNA for like 20 years, you know, I've been, I started off investing in smart shares back, I think way back in back then, um, you had to start off with, I think, you know, a couple of thousand dollars in each one to.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

That's right, yeah.

The brokerage fees on it as well were crazy.

But, you know, I started that so long ago and that formed the base of, you know, 10 years of my investing and I just kept pushing it up and up and up.

I started to get addicted to watching the numbers go up in the spreadsheet.

which is quite which is a good thing i guess because it you know it was it helped get some really good outcomes but yeah but what's the crux of fire for like those who don't know oh it's a financial independence retire early so the idea is that you can you can build like a portfolio that that covers enough of your living costs that you're actually independent from the need to work so um

Retire early, isn't it?

I don't reckon anyone who really does fire probably wants to retire, but what it does is it gives you the option to do it, and it gives you a lot of freedom, right?

The other thing it's called is fuck you money.

Basically, if you hit that level of thing where you can actually tell someone, I don't want to work here anymore because it's not right for me, so goodbye.

Yeah, I think so.

So the dividends are nice, but personally, I don't follow a dividend-seeking kind of portfolio.

often those dividend companies don't grow as fast so they get you a nice income that you can live on but um you know you depending on your risk appetite right like it might not be quite right for you I personally I'm like super high risk I'm super aggressive like like part of what I do is when I go into managed funds I look at them and even the aggressive ones aren't quite aggressive enough for me so I've kind of