Owen Raskovitch

yeah and it's also knowing why you want to do it if you just set the if you just start putting heaps of money aside for no strong reason you're not gonna last very long and the budgets just gonna collapse you need to know your motivations you need to know what the idea of financial independence looks like for you maybe you do a vision board or you have a spreadsheet whatever it looks like for you to sort of get that idea into your head

And then you want to understand your motivators behind it because it's not just like you're locking the money away for years for no reason.

You're pretty much buying back your time and buying back your independence.

So you are putting the money to something that's important to you.

It's just further down the track.

You're not getting an immediate item.

You're getting essentially time in the future.

Yep, absolutely.

Well said.

Okay, so I guess this leads us into our next point, Kate, which is, do you think everyday Australians can achieve FIRE?

I think yes.

I think it definitely will really vary between different people because depending on which career path you've chosen, your family, your goals, you might just be happy to live quite frugally or you might want to go on a holiday each year and enjoy sort of a more, I don't know, they call it fat fire, but a more sort of

luxurious approach to it all and so it will all vary time so it might take you until 50 or 60 to be financially dependent or there's some people that I've seen online that get there by 30 and so it's possible it's just really varied so I definitely don't

look at people online and think oh i'm already 40 and i haven't even started there's no way i can be financially independent you don't have to worry about the retire early part but being financially dependent independent even if it's not by not until 60 it's really good oh yeah it's still a wonderful achievement and i guess one thing i've used this quote a few times on the podcast but it's the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken and

And what that means is once you get your mind over the hurdles to start saving, to start investing, to live this way, they become habits and those habits become effectively what you do day in, day out.

And before you know it, you're actually saving and you don't have the struggles that everyone else has, the financial, the mental, all those struggles that everyone else has.

But the point here is even though we say that the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken, I do disagree with that statement because they can be broken.

I've seen people who go on a one way, seemingly on a one way street to spending, to consumer debt, to everything.

And then they realize that isn't for them and they take steps to get out of it.

So you absolutely can.