Hi! My Name is Joseph.

Hi, my name is Joseph and I'm the creator of Fire Budgets. I'm a twenty-something-year-old Software Engineer living in Seattle with a handful of different hobbies including (but not limited to) playing video games, collecting sneakers, and eating more food than I should.

I graduated college with no personal finance knowledge.

My financial background consisted of me being frugal by nature and yet still losing a lot of money buying trash cryptocurrency in 2017. I had no budget, no savings plan, no debt repayment plan, no investment plan, nothing. All I knew was that I wanted to buy a Tesla in cash (terrible investment) and I wanted to get rid of my student loans as soon as possible.

After working my first full-time job for several months it hit me. I love being a Software Engineer, but I'm spending so much of my life working. More than 50% of the hours I'm awake during the week I'm working for someone else's company. And I'm supposed to be doing this until I'm 60+ years old? No way.

That's when I decided that I should make a game plan for my financial future. I began researching how to properly save, invest, and build towards a future that didn't require me to retire in my 60s. I discovered the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement and felt like I had all the tools I needed to create a strategy I could build upon. I'm still working on it every day, but I have no debt and I'm currently on track to retire by the time I'm 34.

Fire Budgets exists so that others don't have to go through the same struggle I did to educate myself.

It's a site to document my financial education and progress towards early retirement, while also collecting and explaining all of my learnings in one place. If I can help just a handful of people through my personal experiences that's a win in my book.