About this blog - Fight to FIRE

About Mr.FightToFIRE

Who am I? I’m a 30-year-old Belgian IT professional working for a large European retail bank in Brussels for over 8 years. I work on IT projects of various sizes where I develop customer-facing apps to support our clients in requesting banking products such as credit cards, loans, insurances, etc.

For now, I live in Belgium together with my wife in a cozy 40m² apartment. I have traveled around, seen various parts of India and the Americas but will always enjoy being cozy with the misses.

Me looking out towards the Taj Mahal — Me during my visit to the Taj Mahal in January 2018.

About the blog

Fight To FIRE is Belgian personal finance blog about the struggle to find the right path and how to reach the ultimate goal: Financial Independence/Retire Early (FIRE).

Ever since I started my professional carrier in 2012, I dreamed of being able to become financially independent at an early age. But unfortunately, I have yet to achieve Financial Independence and Retire Early. Over the course of many years, I tried different things to reach financial independence. One of them was Forex. This unfortunately yields the desired results. After over 6 years of trying, I decided to stop and focus on keeping it simple through stocks.

My forex journey left me financially scarred. I needed a place to write down my thoughts and to prevent making the same mistakes in the future. Together with my experience in IT and working in a bank I kickstarted this blog in September 2018.

FightToFIRE is a place I can call my own. A place where I can put my progress online; progress that I hope can help myself but also you, my reader, on this journey to Financial Independence, reach FIRE. It allows me to put my thoughts and (investments) goals in writing which should help me with decision making.
The second purpose is to provide a different view on how to achieve FI in Europe. There are already amazing sites available such as Mr. Money Mustache, Think Save Retire or Root of Good.
These blogs give excellent advice on FIRE and how to approach it, but they have an American point of view that doesn’t always apply to me, fellow Belgians, or European FIRE aficionados. For this reason, I hope I can add something meaningful to the Belgian fire movement just like NoMoreWaffles, Dividend Cake, and many other blogs.

So, there you have it, my story. And even though I haven’t reached it yet, by fighting on, I wish to reach FIRE by 45 at the latest.

Now that you know where I come from, I invite you to join me and see where we end up.
Don’t hesitate to contact me to help me broaden my horizon on FIRE, provide improvements on how I should write something or just anything you think can help me.

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Firehub.eu - Financial Independence hub of Europe

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My monthly Savings Rate report: April 2021

May 5, 2021

April was amazing! From both an income and expenses point of view, I was able to achieve my best result in months. The Belgian government played a huge part in this. Of course, cutting expenses helped a lot as well giving us this splendid SR. Or am I cheating a bit?

Spring cleaning your wallet in 2021

April 28, 2021

Do you feel the spring fever? There is a good chance that you feel the urge to start cleaning and scrubbing and remove all the clutter out of the house. Maybe now is also a good time to take a look at your personal finances. With these simple tips, your cleaning duties might also save you some money.

Quarterly Portfolio Report - growing stack of coins

Quarterly Portfolio Report – Q1 2021

April 24, 2021

Q1 2021 ends much like last year's Q1 ended in the middle of a pandemic. One full year of the corona pandemic; crazy to think a year ago, it all started. Now with the first quarter of 2021 finished, it's time to take another look at my portfolio and see how it faired during these challenging times. Did my portfolio continue to rocket to the moon, or did it orbit a bit and crash back down?

Financial planning for our baby

April 16, 2021

With a baby comes not only a new family member but also an extra mouth to feed for the next 20+ years as well as an extra person to dress. In other words, there are some extra costs involved. This is all part of the game, but what is sometimes forgotten is to generate some extra income for him or her.

My monthly Savings Rate report: March 2021

April 10, 2021

March turned out to be a good month for my Savings Rate. While on the expenses side I spend a lot on the home and ownership part and again on food, I also received a nice extra on the income side thanks to evening deployments for work. I ended up doing a bit of nightly work between 1 am and 3 am.

Apartment progress: 30%; finally above ground!

April 3, 2021

Delays are normal in life. A train that's delayed because the machinist overslept, bad weather causing you to get stuck in traffic and arrive late at work. A lot of them are due to circumstance and you can't do much about them. However, my apartment that only now has reached ground level, clearly didn't just have delays due to Force Majeure from Corona.