As you set out for Ithaka

Hello Swiss FIRE community,

my starting point with FIRE was when I came by an article from the Mad Fientist blog and read it. With this article a whole new world has been opened for me! I have always been reasonable with my spending, tried to save and also had thoughts about how I could improve my life by spending more time with fulfilling tasks. What I had never dome until then was to start making concrete thoughts and calculations about how much money I need in order to get to the “FU Money” status and really be able to fill my time with exactly the tasks that I find interesting.

So, a bit more details about me. I’m a 37 years old Greek (so please excuse my imperfect English) and have been living with my wife and children (12 and 8) in Switzerland for a bit more than 10 years now. I have studied economics and I am working for an Insurance company in and quite interesting job (as interesting as an insurance job can be). My net worth should be about 500k (2nd pillar, 3a, portfolio invested, emergency fund, privileged stocks of the company I work) at the end of the year and I manage to save about 50% of my approx. 150k annual income.

I’m not absolutely crystal clear about my goals jet. I see different scenarios that could work for me. If I would decide to live permanently in Greece I believe that a net worth of about 1mil would be more than sufficient. If I stay in Switzerland I would probably need about 2.5. If I go to Germany (my wife is German) or make a mix (half year Germany half year Greece) it would be probably somewhere in between. Anyways, although 1mil does not seem to be so far away I will still need a couple of years (4-5 I think) to achieve it. So at the moment I follow my FIRE Path without having a crystal clear goal in terms of how much my net worth should be. My goal is more, on being able to have more options on how to spend most of my time, which I believe will start at about 1mil.

As you can see I’m not absolutely concrete about my financial figures and not crystal clear about my goals, but I like it this way. I believe that there is so much variability in our lives and the world when planning in a 5 or 10 years horizon that I find it sufficient to have a direction and concentrate on the short term decisions and tasks.

I thank MP so much for setting up this forum and am so grateful to find such I nice community. I will try to contribute here as much as I can. So this post should be just the start :wink:

PS. If you wonder what the title is about klick here

5 Likes

Isn’t more expensive to have two house (CH and DE?). Also one of the biggest expenses is the Health insurance and you have to pay it even if you live half a year abroad. Half DE , Half GR migiht be similar for health insurance.

Anyway Good Luck. :slight_smile: _

Hi ma0, thanks for the wishes :slight_smile:
Yes it will probably be more expensive to have two houses but maybe I can find some clever housing hack that finances part of it. And it will probably not be more expensive to have two homes in GR and DE than having one in CH. Also I will definitely need to find some solution for health insurance but I have some time to think also that through :wink:

1 Like

Hi @a2ithaka, enjoyed your post. I’m also relatively new to this forum and interested in FIRE, or at least FI - not necessarily RE. I’m the one with the Greek background and my husband is German - αμέσως μου ήρθε στο νου η αναφορά στον Καβάφη! And yes, I absolutely agree, enjoy the way there and hope to not arrive one day too soon!

1 Like

Hi @Susanna . Niche to find somebody with Greek background here who also likes the Ithaca story as told by Kavafi. :grinning:

1 Like

well, we are not alone :slight_smile:

2 Likes