Know Your Blogger Series

Our Freedom Years

We launched our blog and our YouTube channel during the same month that we boarded a one-way flight from Singapore to Poland and began our life as full-time travelers.
As we explore the world, we share how-tos for financial independence, retiring early and slow travel. The goal of our blog and channel is to equip others to gain control of their finances so that they too can pursue the life of their dreams.
Check out our Q&A with Our Freedom Years here.

Come read about the retired couple who are now full time travelers and loving life!

Each week at Personal Finance Blogs, we publish interviews from amazing bloggers from the personal finance space. This week, we are featuring the blog, Our Freedom Years.
During these weekly features, we are hoping to provide a way for you to interact and learn more about different blogs in the personal finance space.
Below, you can read more about the story behind Our Freedom Years, learn about the author, and learn personal finance tips from Our Freedom Years to help you improve your financial situation.
A big thanks for Our Freedom Years for this interview! Now, we will turn it over to the author for this interview.

Tell us about Our Freedom Years

When we became financially independent and said goodbye to high pressure corporate careers as expats in Singapore, we realized that we had a lot of learning to share with others who are keen for a life beyond the workplace.

We launched our blog and our YouTube channel during the same month that we boarded a one-way flight from Singapore to Poland and began our life as full-time travelers. As we explore the world, we share how-tos for financial independence, retiring early and slow travel. The goal of our blog and channel is to equip others to gain control of their finances so that they too can pursue the life of their dreams.

What makes you and your blog unique?

What makes Our Freedom Years unique is that we invite our audience to join us in our post-retirement life. Yes, we share practical tips and advice for financial independence but we also give an inside look at our life of travel, including where we go, what we love about it and how much it costs. We hope this helps our audience chart their own path to financial independence while providing inspiration for envisioning a life beyond the 9-to-5.

What does “being good with your personal finances” mean to you?

Being good with our personal finances means having a measure of control over our present and future. While it’s impossible to account for all of life’s possibilities, we feel confident knowing that we have the financial literacy and the means to handle any challenges that come our way.

What are some habits you practice to keep your personal finances in order?

On a daily basis, we track every penny that we spend as we spend it. At the end of each month, we sit down with a coffee and review our spending, update our net worth and discuss the budget requirements for the upcoming month.

On a strategic level, we have a quarterly financial review – a fancy name for a breakfast meeting – where we review our short and long-term goals and decide if any changes need to be made within our investment portfolio or our risk management approach. All of these practices ensure that we devote a reasonable amount of time discussing our finances and planning for the future.

What are your three articles people should read to get to know you and your message better on your site?

How to Plan Life After Retirement

Money Worries and Retirement

Lessons from Early Retirement

For someone looking to improve their financial situation, what’s your best advice?

The easiest way to improve finances in the short term is to track every penny you spend. Once you know where your money’s going, you can do a better job of spending on the things you value most and saving towards whatever your financial goal might be.

In the medium term, we recommend calculating your net worth and tracking its growth, along with your household’s financial inflows and outflows.

For the long term, we recommend stepping away from the spreadsheets and instead focus on identifying your life goals. While savings and investing are an important part of the equation, it’s equally important to know what it is you’re working towards.

What’s an area of your life which has benefited from improving your personal finances? Have there been any areas of your life which have suffered?

When we discovered the concepts of financial independence and retiring early, our lives underwent a total transformation. Instead of facing decades more in an office, we realized that, with a bit more financial discipline, we could step away from corporate jobs permanently.

Since fine tuning our finances and retiring early, we’ve shed years of work stress and embraced a new life of discovery and adventure. Sure, we had to go through a couple years of frugality to arrive here…but escaping a crushing corporate schedule and never-ending emails made it all worthwhile.

In your opinion, what’s better? Renting a place or buying a house to live?

Speaking as former homeowners who now live full time in Airbnbs around the world, we are strong advocates for renting. For us, selling our first home enabled us to put the equity towards our investments. This became the basis of the wealth that we have built over the subsequent years and what eventually enabled us to retire early. As short-term renters who move to a new city every month or two, we can have our pick of homes and never have to worry about maintenance, repairs or paying for utilities.

That said, we are not against home ownership. Whether it makes sense financially depends on your personal circumstances and local real estate market.

In your opinion, what’s better? Focusing on increasing your income, or focusing on decreasing your expenses?

Based on our own experience, we recommend a balanced approach to achieving your financial goals. For most of our lives, we focused on increasing our earnings. We undertook graduate degrees, sharpened our skills with additional training and eventually moved to Singapore to take advantage of high salaries and low taxes.

Unfortunately as we increased our earning, we also increased our spending. Only in the two years prior to early retirement did we get serious about decreasing our expenses. Had we focused on both sides of building wealth, we would have been a lot further ahead financially.

Do you have any financial mistakes you’d like to share, and how have you grown from these mistakes to improve your personal finances?

Early in our relationship, we decided to plan our investments as a couple. We met with an investment advisor who assessed our risk tolerance and recommended a plan. Feeling a lack of confidence in our own financial literacy, we ended up buying high fee mutual funds. These were very generic mutual funds giving us slices of the US, Canadian and bond markets. Ultimately the funds didn’t outperform the market average and therefore didn’t merit the management fee we were paying.

We held those funds for a couple years until the day we did the math and realized that we were overpaying. Those management fees were just going to chip away at our returns over the years.We decided to exit those funds — paying a penalty fee in the process – but felt it was the right move. We’ve since sharpened our financial literacy and are responsible for charting our own investment strategy… with a focus on low-cost index funds, of course.

What’s a non-money related interest you have and what do you love about it?

We love exploring the world and have made slow travel the primary focus of our post-retirement life. We enjoy learning about new cultures and customs, discovering new foods and getting lost in natural settings. We find it exciting to land in a new destination, try out a few words in the local language and become part of the neighborhood life.

The travel experience has become even more precious to us during these unusual times. While we need to exercise caution, we are still committed to exploring as much as possible, safely and responsibly.

How You Can Contact Our Freedom Years for More Information

You can learn more about Our Freedom Years at ourfreedomyears.com, follow them on YouTube at Our Freedom Years, and follow them on Twitter at @OurFreedomYears.

Thank you for reading this interview, and thank you, Our Freedom Years, for providing us with some great personal finance tips!