FIRE With Kids Interview #2: Chrissy (Eat Sleep Breathe FI)

Welcome to the interview #2 in the “FIRE with Kids” interview series!

Today, I’m excited to share the story of one of my favorite FIRE bloggers, Chrissy from Eat Sleep Breathe FI!

After discovering the FIRE movement a few years ago, Eat Sleep Breathe FI was one of the first FIRE blogs I stumbled upon that I actually found to be relatable to my family’s journey. I’ve enjoyed watching her family achieve financial independence and embark on their most recent adventure, early retirement.

I think you’ll enjoy learning more about Chrissy’s story as well, and I’m thrilled to have her on the blog to share it!

About the FIRE with Kids interview series

I designed this interview series to connect with and share the stories of other families with kids (or dependents) who are pursuing financial independence, with or without early retirement.

Reaching financial independence is a huge feat regardless of your circumstances. However, adding kids into the mix provides another layer of nuance and additional challenges.

I hope that by sharing different stories and voices, more people will find an example that they can connect with and feel empowered to begin their own FIRE journey.

We believe that families come in all different shapes and sizes, and all are welcome here. If you’d like to share your family’s story, please read my interview series intro post for further details and contact me.

Now on to Chrissy’s interview…

BACKGROUND

Tell us about your family

I live in beautiful Vancouver, BC with my husband, two boys, and our Shiba Inu Mika. My husband is 46, I’m 43, and our boys are 14 and 16. I was previously a graphic designer at a local nonprofit and became a stay-at-home mom when our first son was born.

My husband was an art director in the videogame industry and retired in November 2021 at the age of 45. He loved his job, but time freedom was more important to him. It was hard to walk away from his career, but he has no regrets and has loved living the FIRE life!

FINANCES

Do you budget and/or regularly track your expenses?

We tried budgeting, but it never worked for us. When I discovered FIRE, I learned about the importance and advantages of tracking our spending—and I was immediately hooked! It worked so much better for me than budgeting did.

Soon after, I stumbled across YNAB (You Need a Budget), and I instantly became one of their biggest fans. Yes, I realize that the apps’ name includes the dreaded “b” word, but I use it solely for tracking!

I update YNAB every 2–4 weeks and am very detailed with my tracking—I track 33 different categories/expenses and reconcile all my transactions to the PENNY.

I love tracking our spending and feel it’s essential to the FI journey. That’s because your FI number is primarily based on your annual spending. And if you don’t know how much you spend, you can’t accurately calculate your FI number. In addition, you may not realize if your spending is consistently increasing or decreasing.

For example, I’ve been tracking our spending since 2015. Every year, I check to see how our spending has changed. Much to my surprise, I’ve found that our spending either stays the same or drops every year. I used this valuable information to keep our FI number accurately updated.

As you can see, if you don’t track your spending, your FI number could be quite inaccurate. That could mean you may not have enough saved or you worked longer than needed. Neither scenario is ideal.

That’s why I encourage my fellow FIRE seekers to track, track, track—it’s absolutely worth the time and effort. (And, for many of us, it can become a fun activity that we look forward to!)

What are your average annual household expenses?

Since I’m not anonymous, I don’t share our total annual spending. That’s because, if I shared that number, it would be relatively easy to figure out our net worth—and that’s more info than my husband and I are comfortable sharing on the internet!

However, I do share how much we spend on essentials every year in this post: How Much Does it Cost to Live the FIRE Life in Vancouver? (For a Family of Four)

(Hint: it’s just under $30,000 CAD/$24,000 USD per year.)

Besides income taxes, where do you typically spend the most money each year?

Property tax is our largest expense. Our property tax includes water, garbage, and recycling and costs us nearly $7,000 CAD/$5,600 USD per year. Our groceries come in at a close second, at about $6,000 CAD/$4,800 USD per year.

None of our other expenses even come close to our top two!

We love “value-spending” … what do you happily splurge on?

Pre-COVID, we happily splurged on travel and took at least one big trip every year. I’m so glad we traveled with our kids when we did because the memories from those trips are priceless.

Sadly, COVID put a damper on our travels. But I’ve also become highly conflicted about air travel anyway. So, for now, we’re only splurging on local trips.

Another thing we happily spend on is specialty ingredients to cook with at home. Even if these ingredients are a bit pricey, we figure it’s still cheaper than eating the same dish at a restaurant!

My husband also happily spends money on his 1965 Mustang. Fortunately, despite being 57 years old, it’s not too expensive to maintain and run. That’s because my husband does all the maintenance himself (with help from uncles and friends). The car also qualifies for collector’s insurance, which is surprisingly affordable!

What’s your annual household income and/or typical savings rate?

My husband worked in the videogame industry, and we felt he earned an excellent salary. However, his pay was relatively low compared to average tech industry wages.

Before becoming a stay-at-home mom, I worked as an in-house graphic designer at a local nonprofit. My salary topped out at just under $50,000 CAD/$40,000 USD per year. 

When we became a single-income household, we decided to host international homestay students to supplement my husband’s income. That brought in $10,000–$12,000 CAD/$8,000–$9,600 USD per year.

In the early years, we saved very little because our income was quite low. But over time, my husband’s salary increased, and we were able to save more. By the time we discovered FIRE, we were saving between 50–60% of our income every year.

Do you have any income streams in addition to your primary job?

As mentioned, we hosted international homestay students to supplement my husband’s income. It didn’t earn us a lot of money, but it made a big difference for frugal people like us!

Importantly though, we didn’t host students just for the extra income. Some host families are only in it for the money, which unfortunately results in an unhappy experience for their students.

For us, the biggest reason we host homestay students is for the experience and relationships. We love meeting and getting to know our students and their countries and cultures. 

Many of them are like family and still keep in touch and visit—even years after they first lived with us. Our kids and we have learned and experienced so much through our students. I highly recommend it as a side hustle/house hack!

Do you have any debt? If so, what is your paydown strategy?

We were mortgage-free, but in 2018, we leveraged our home equity and invested it. This allowed us to supercharge our investments and reach FIRE years earlier.

We’ve decided to make full use of our leveraged investing strategy and will keep it going until we or our kids sell the house. If all goes well, that will be many decades in the future.

Note: Leveraged investing is risky and not for everyone! I did a lot of research and enlisted the help of professionals to implement our strategy.

Besides our mortgage/investment loan, we don’t carry any other debt. (However, we have lines of credit that we never use but keep on hand for emergencies.)

Financial Independence / Retire Early (FIRE) with Kids

When did you discover the FIRE Movement, and why did it appeal to you?

I discovered FIRE in 2014 when I googled, “How much do I need to retire?” That led me to Mr. Money Mustache’s legendary post, The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement. I was instantly hooked.

I’d always believed that we only had one trajectory—work to 65 (hopefully with our health intact), then retire. Yet here was this slightly bossy but very intelligent man telling us we could retire much, much earlier.

On top of that, his message of consuming less and living more efficiently very much appealed to me. I felt like I’d finally found my ‘people’ and eagerly followed MMM into the FIRE rabbit hole.

Where are you currently at on your financial independence journey?

My husband and I reached FIRE in November 2021. In my post We Did It—We Reached FIRE, I wrote about how and why we decided to FIRE when we did and how our family and friends reacted.

It’s been an incredible seven months since he retired! We’ve enjoyed having a slower pace, getting to all those backburner tasks, and enjoying family time together. 

Is there a target “FIRE Number” or safe withdrawal rate you are working towards?

While I feel that 4% is a safe withdrawal rate, I wanted a little more cushion than that. We added some buffer to our number by:

• Saving more than we needed.
• Planning for more annual spending than we really need.
• Including large future expenses in our FI number. (But since this money will be spent slowly over many decades, it’ll continue to grow and add to our nest egg.)

As a result, our withdrawal rate will be under 4% (even now, with our portfolio as down as it is).

Are you planning to retire early?  If so, what do you envision early retirement will look like?

Yes, we’d planned to retire early, and we did! Since I was a stay-at-home mom, I pretty much knew what it would be like. Life hasn’t been all that different for me since my husband retired.

On the other hand, my husband’s life is quite different now that he’s no longer working. He’s loving all the freedom and has enjoyed spending more time with family and friends.

Interestingly, he’d made a list of hobbies and interests he might pursue once he retired. We’re only seven months into retirement, and many things on his list no longer interest him! He’s continuing to explore and try new activities and is having fun finding his new ‘thing.’

Do you plan on working after reaching financial independence? If so, will you make any changes?

Currently, neither of us wants to take on anything that requires an ongoing commitment. The freedom of FIRE is just too lovely to give up—even a part-time job would be too much to ask right now!

When we’re ready to work or volunteer again, some interesting ideas one or both of us have considered include:

• Working as a movie or TV show extra.
• Working as an election official.
• Offering tours of Vancouver in a classic Mustang. (I think you can guess which of us wants to do this!)
• Volunteering for Kids Help Phone.
• Volunteering for Pacific Postpartum Support Society.
• Volunteering to mentor at a local high school.
• Volunteering for an environmental cause.

We’re both reminding each other to take it slow and not jump into anything. We want to decompress and fully transition into FIRE before adding any commitments to our lives.

Did you make any changes to how you manage your money after discovering the FIRE movement?

Fortunately, we were already doing most things ‘right’ as far as spending and saving went. However, our spending wasn’t as optimized as it could be. We also didn’t have a big, driving goal for our savings.

In addition, I knew I was missing the boat when it came to investing. I’d never taken the time to learn how to invest because it always seemed so dry and boring. I could never muster up the interest or motivation to deal with our investments.

When I discovered FIRE, a fire was lit under me (pun intended)! I finally found my why to do better with our money—I wanted to reach FI so my husband could one day retire. That got me super motivated and laser-focused.

I quickly got to work and started by optimizing our expenses. Next, I started tracking our spending. After that, I learned how to DIY invest. Finally, I opened a brokerage account and moved our investments into low-cost index ETFs.

It took me about three years to get everything fully optimized and set up. (My kids were still little at the time, so big projects always took a looong time to complete!)

What’s the worst financial mistake you’ve made?

The worst financial mistake I’ve made was not taking charge of our investing earlier. We could’ve retired even earlier and/or grown our investments that much more if I had.

I don’t want others to make the same mistake. That’s why I try to spread the message about FIRE through my blog and in interviews, presentations, and more. I believe that when people find a strong why (like FIRE), they’ll have the long-term motivation to do better with their money.

What additional challenges does having kids add to the pursuit of financial independence and early retirement?

As much as I love our kids, having kids definitely adds additional challenges to FIRE! Here’s how:

• You want to spend time with them, so it’s hard to find time to work on reaching FIRE.
• You have to save for a larger nest egg.
• Your expenses are higher, so you have less to put towards your nest egg.
• FIRE tactics like geo-arbitrage, house hacking, and living in a smaller home are trickier when you have kids. 

However, as much as kids add to the challenge, they also help in the pursuit of financial independence. How? Well, they serve as an enormous source of motivation!

In my case, I wanted to reach FIRE so that my husband could retire and have more time with our boys. Keeping that in mind helped me continue learning and finding new ways to grow and optimize our money. 

In your opinion, are there any negatives to pursuing FIRE with kids?

I honestly can’t think of any! But some people worry that if they reach FIRE, their kids won’t have a parent role modeling how to work hard at a career. Because of this, they worry that their kids could grow up to be lazy, unmotivated, and unrealistic about what it takes to retire. Personally, this doesn’t concern me.

Your kids will still see you working hard—you’ll just be ‘working’ at things you truly enjoy. They’ll still pick up on your money habits and all the other things that helped you reach FIRE. Those skills are better taught through your everyday actions anyway (and not by how many hours you spend at the office)!

For more thoughts on this topic, Justin at Root of Good wrote an excellent post about it: Will My Kids be Okay if I Retire Early?

How do you plan to teach your kids about money?

We don’t give our kids an allowance, but we do pay them for bigger chores like weeding, scrubbing the siding, washing the car, etc. They’re expected to pitch in and help (for free) with smaller tasks like tidying, putting the dishes and laundry away, etc.

As far as teaching them about money, we started that from a very young age. Here are some ways we’ve done that:

• Teaching delayed gratification by getting them to add wanted toys to a list instead of whining for and buying them immediately at the store.
• Hosting “dollar birthday parties” where, instead of gifts, the guests bring $1 for every year of age that the child was turning (e.g., $5 for five years).
• Donating half of their birthday money to a charity of their choice, then putting the rest towards a toy from the aforementioned list.
• Saving and investing almost all the birthday, Christmas, and Chinese New Year’s money they receive from family. (I opened special accounts for them to invest in.)
• Discussing current financial events they hear about on the news (meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, etc.)
• Watching the Playing With FIRE documentary together, then discussing their takeaways from it.
• Talking about FIRE and what their own paths to FIRE could look like one day.
• Sharing our thought processes when spending money (e.g., why we choose not to spend on certain things even though we could afford them).
• Having age-appropriate discussions about how the stock market works and how to invest.

There are so many ways to build money lessons into everyday life! The easiest way to do this is to simply be open with your kids about money and not treat it like a taboo topic.

They’ll quickly and naturally learn from you through your day-to-day interactions. It’s an easy and very effective way to raise money-savvy kids!

WRAPPING UP

What advice would you give to families just starting out on their FIRE journey?

It can be very overwhelming when you first discover FIRE. There’s suddenly so much to learn and do, and you’ll wish you’d started YESTERDAY! It’s also really easy to get obsessed with FIRE and lose sight of your family and their happiness. (I might know a thing or two about this. 😬)

My advice is to take a deep breath, break it down into manageable steps, then take it one day at a time. Yes, it may sometimes feel like slow progress, but when you look back in a month, six months, or a year, you’ll marvel at how much you’ve accomplished.

Also, remember to check in often with your family. Make sure they’re journeying to FIRE alongside you (as opposed to being dragged)! It’ll be much more rewarding if your family is on board and part of the journey. 

Where can readers learn more about you and follow your journey?

You can find me at my blog, Eat Sleep Breathe FI. That’s where I share how we reached FIRE in a high-cost city, with kids, on one income (along with lots of other helpful and interesting FI-related content)! You can also find me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Do you have any questions for the FIRE with Kids community?

For those of you with kids who are school-aged or older, how have they reacted to FIRE? Do they think it’s cool? Weird? Crazy? Also, are they interested in pursuing FIRE one day?

Is there anything else that you’d like to share?

I believe FIRE can help us become better parents by freeing us from the grind of HAVING to work for a living. The FIRE community also teaches us to prioritize spending time with people we love, doing things we truly enjoy. Those are such important life lessons for our kids to see us embodying.

I’m so grateful to Mrs. RFL for this opportunity to spread the FIRE by discussing it through the lens of parenting. Our kids have been a huge driving force behind our journey, and I’m thrilled to see more and more families on the path to FIRE!

I hope you enjoyed FIRE with Kids interview #2 with Chrissy!

Thank you again Chrissy for taking the time to share your family’s FIRE story!

If you have any other questions for Chrissy, or an answer to the question that she posed to the community above (re: school-age kids’ thoughts about the FIRE movement), please share in the comments below.

Are you ready to share your family’s story?

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