I reached FI today...!

As a teenager, I had two big passions, martial arts and computer games.

When I moved out from my parents home my dream was to become a Gong Fu instructor. I soon had to realize that there was very little money at all. I knew kick boxing world champions who had their basement full of medals but were barely able to pay their rents.

So I started a business based on my second big passion - computer games - a company for 3d graphics with my flat mate around 1996. We went bankrupt half a year later and we ended in a big fight because we had absolutely no clue how this business worked. I started a new one with a schoolfriend…and a year later a new one with some guys I knew from university…

In the meantime I got my master in architecture and freelanced for an architecture companies. I had my 3rd company by then and for the first time I was able to get something like a steady income out of it. I had some jobs, but never longer than 2 years and always part time, because I always hated having a boss and felt that i could do better on my own. But it tought me how the business was working. I made myself known, I was pretty aggressive in aquisition, was much cheaper than the competition, I stole some clients from former employers and pretty soon had a lot of work, although not too much money.

When I turned 30 I was teaching two days a week, worked every day, every evening and most weekends, either as freelancer or for my own projects. On my 30th birthday I had a nervous breakdown alone in my office late at night. I realized that I was very close to a burnout and things had to change.

I had to set up some criteria for the work I did:

a) It had to pay well
b) It had to be really interesting
c) It had to be good for my reputation.

Since then I only accept jobs if two of the above points apply. At the beginning I was afraid I would run out of work and I lost some clients, but it was important to focus on only the best projects. It gives me the same sense of freedom as FI does.

My tips for newbies would be:
a) know your skills and passions and find a way to monetize, try to find or create a niche and a product that is scalable.
b) don’t work for idiots if you can make 3x as much self employed, it’s not that hard, kind of like investing actually - you just need a little courage
c) be aware of your weaknesses and work on them (i had to learn to talk in front of big groups of people about what I can offer without feeling embarrassed or like a car salesman, sometimes i still do)
d) quit if you are unhappy, no amount of money is worth being depressed or worse, don’t wait for it to change by itself, it won’t, it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse and life is too short and too valuable
e) don’t be afraid to loose or be rejected, failing is a great experience. courage can be trained by failing over and over again. get up! you’ll improve every time.
f) Be humble. there is so much to learn and just because you got a fancy degree doesn’t mean you know s***. Success will come over time. When I started to my first company, I made 6 CHF/hour, today it’s hundred times as much

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Congratulations and thanks for sharing tour insights ! We have a very similar path :wink:
Do you have kids?

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i have two kids, three and six, love being a dad

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Congratulations on your achievement and sharing your story.

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Wait you started at 200k, saved 100k a year and 7 years later you are at 2.4M having raised two kids in between? That somehow doesn’t really add up. :thinking:

Anyhow, that’s a load of money, congrats!

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I started investing only 7 years ago, but I had already saved (and put into my apartment, 2nd and 3rd pillar) a pretty large amount at that time. :nerd_face:

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Quick update: I have retired in the meantime. I spend most of the time with the kids, cooking, cleaning, shopping and sports, nothing fancy but it makes me happy- last night we slept in a tent outside. My bucketlist is still long but we’ll start travelling as soon as the borders open up again, next stop Biarritz. My NW went up to 2,7 Mio CHF in the meantime mostly due to some luck with cryptos and updated numbers on the 2nd pillar which is by now 90% invested in stocks (VIAC), so I expext a pretty decent return over the next 20 years. I have a 100k CHF cash buffer so we don’t worry to much about what the market does short term. And some gold and 9mm ammunition for bad times :wink:

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Congrats and enjoy life & family! :boom:

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For the zombie acopalypse or the next market crash?

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For the blackout! That is the catastrophic event with the highest probability. Even higher than a pandemic.
But since these are only probabilities, we experienced the pandemic first.

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congrats! enjoy the good life :slight_smile:

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First, congrats @kraphael for adapting to the FIRE life. Hope you’ll keep enjoying it thoroughly.

Second:

I hope a few of them are made of silver in case we have a werewolves apocalypse instead of the zombie kind. :smiley:

More seriously, I’m not a specialist but if there’s also an appropriate gun at home, I’d balance the probability and consequences of a scenario in which the ammo make a meaningful difference with the risk that my children have of shooting themselves by accident (I had a childhood friend who did exactly that and was very lucky that the bullet went through his jaw without hitting the skull).

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I expect the market to crash when the zombies come. :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie::zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :zombie: :woman_zombie: :woman_zombie:

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Thanks for the advise, I’ll prepare accordingly

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You don’t need guns and hammo in Switzerland. I’ve been shooting since I’m young, but I never knew my grandfather because of one of his friend’s gun.

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Sounds great! Congratulations and keep doing what makes you happy :slight_smile:

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Congrats and thanks a lot for sharing your success story! really inspirational!

In the original post, 6 months ago, you mentioned that quitting your job was not a priority.
what changed your mind in the meanwhile?
do you plan to restart working, even part time at some point? not that I wish you so :sweat_smile:

Enjoy your deserved freedom & free time :wink:

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Very inspiring story!

Quick question - how do you calculate your apartment into your FI number?
2nd Pillar - clear (the amount you have there)
3nd Pillar - clear (the amount you have there)
Cash (obviously)
Apartment (as example - i bought an apartment 5 years ago for 880k including 2 Parkings, put 176k into it, rest is mortgage - meanwhile the price of the apartments went up to about 1.1 to 1.2 million) - what do i calculate for my networth?

Cheers

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After some more hard thinking i felt that it was actually my fear of the unknown that was holding me back and not really the wish to continue to work, so i finally quit. So far i didn‘t regret that decision for one second, i feel very free now without that much resposability.
I‘ll prabably start working again in a year, but in a less stressfull environment, probably self employed with a lot of free time

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I used the price we paid at that time for the apartment, but you are right, it‘s value has probably increased by 10-20 percent
But since our mortgage is fixed for 10 years and we don‘t plan to sell it doesn‘t really matter to us for the next 5 years, but if we use the difference as a leverage in some future investments then it could become interesting again…