Hi!  I’m Ms. 4kFIRE, a 35-year old working in Canadian academia who lives in Ontario with my husband and our four kids.  Mr. 4kFIRE and I are both passionate about personal finance and making our money work for us.  Our goal is to invest our money wisely now so that we can both stop working conventional 9-5 jobs and spend more time together and with our kids.  We’ve had a taste of less conventional work lives when we’ve taken off time together when each kid was born, and we’ve loved it!  Because of that, we have an ambitious goal to FIRE in the next 4-8 years, hoping to be able to fully retire early enough to spend time with our kids while they’re still home.

So, if you’re looking for our story of working towards being financially independent and retiring early (FIRE), while also raising our four kids, you’re in the right place!

What is FIRE?

FIRE stands for Financial Independent/Retire Early.  It’s a movement that seeks to have individuals realize that while working until 65 is the norm, when you look at the math, it doesn’t need to be.  In fact, with either early savings invested for a long time (and the power of compound interest), or aggressive saving for a short time, people can have enough money to cover their needs (or be Financially Independent) or to fully Retire Early (stop working to make money).  There are a lot of other bloggers who discuss how to invest your money to get to FIRE, how much money you need to FIRE, and different types of FIRE (e.g. CoastFIRE, leanFIRE, etc.), but in this blog I’m going to focus more on our goals and what life trying to achieve FIRE is like for us.

Why 4kFIRE?

4kFIRE stands for 4kidFIRE.  The name came from the idea that our FIRE story revolves around trying to achieve FIRE while raising our four kids.  As I mentioned above, there are lots of financial FIRE blogs out here, and many experienced people living the FIRE life, however I don’t see many people talking about what it’s like to try to FIRE with more than a couple kids.  We also bring a Canadian perspective to the discussion since that’s where we live, making our health care and savings options different than many of our American counterparts.

How does FIRE work with kids?

Kids are known to be unpredictable, and obviously with four kids we’re in for lots of unforeseen challenges and arguably expenses.  Given this and the associated costs of raising a child (estimated about $15,000/year/kid (https://globalnews.ca/news/4271482/canada-child-cost-calculator/)), it arguably seems difficult thinking about stopping work to live off savings while raising four kids.  How FIRE works with four young kids is one of our key questions and something I hope to explore more on the blog as we progress towards our financial FIRE goals. It’s easier to predict what expenses you will have when it’s just one, or two, or three people, but how can we accurately financially plan for our life with SIX people!?  We are also scaling up as our currents needs and budget with four young kids will likely need to increase as our kids get bigger and need more food and/or have more interests.

Who are we and what do we do?

As I mentioned earlier, I  have been working/studying in academia for the past 12 years.  During this time, I’ve completed my Master’s degree and been chipping away at my PhD.  I’ve also simultaneously worked part-time academic jobs throughout my degrees, such as teaching and research, and also had all four kids while working/studying.  In addition to my academic work, we also have a rental house, that we lived in and renovated into a duplex, and I’ve been acting as the manager of that property, working to market and advertise the apartments, rent them, and, when doing short-term rentals, clean them.  Within our family, I also have a more flexible schedule and unofficially take time off in the summer to spend time with out kids. 

As for our kids, they have been in and out of full-time day care and school since they were born and currently attend a combination of elementary school and day care.  We have an 8-year old, Big A (born in 2015), a 6-year old, M (born in 2017), a 3-year old, S (born in 2020), and a 1-year old, little A (born in 2022).

The other adult-half of our family is my husband, Mr. 4kFIRE.  For the past 12 years, he’s worked full-time as an engineer for a consulting company.  He’s also taken off time when each of our kids were born which was a financial and personal decision that we’re so glad we were able to make.  Beyond working as an engineer, Mr. 4kFIRE is also very handy and loves fixing things, building, and learning how to build and fix new things.  He’s the one behind repairing and renovating all the things in our rental and home and he’s also recently become more involved in car repair and maintenance.  Mr. 4kFIRE is currently the one who most strongly wants to retire from his job, as soon as possible, and he’s originally the one who introduced me to the FIRE movement.

What are our goals?

It’s 2023, and our current goal is to try to have enough money saved (about $500,000) that we can coastFIRE by September of 2027.  This means that in 2027, Mr. 4kFIRE can retire and that we can relax our savings a bit and focus on making just enough money to pay our bills.  Our priority is to have Mr. 4kFIRE retire, and then have me join retirement when our retirement savings hits about $1,675,000.  We’re estimating that with some job changes this will be in about 10 years (so, 2033) if we don’t add any additional savings to our retirement fund.  So, both of us fully retired by 2033, which also happens to be the year that our oldest would be done high school.  I’m going to explore our FIRE numbers in a future blog, but for now that’s a good snapshot.

Part of the reason I’m writing this blog is so that our progress towards our goals has a place to live, and the other part is that there’s something to be said about making a goal public.  It’s a form of accountability and I think we could use some.  I seem to do well with a deadline, and so think having a written (and public) deadline will encourage us to work towards our goals and keep tighter attention on our budget.

If you’re still here, thanks for following along.  I hope this gives a clear overview of who we are and what this blog will be about, watch for my next blog post discussing more about our finances.  I’d love to hear from you about where you’re from and what goals you have for yourself; please comment below!