About this blog

About Mr.FightToFIRE

Who am I? Besides the owner and main author of this blog, I’m also 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 to 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 comfy 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 a Belgian personal finance blog about struggling to find the right path and reach the ultimate goal: Financial Independence/Retire Early (FIRE).

Ever since I started my professional carrier in 2012, I dreamed of becoming financially independent at an early age. But unfortunately, I have yet to achieve Financial Independence and Retire Early.

Forex failure in my 20s

Over many years, I tried different things to reach financial independence. One of them was Forex. Unfortunately, that didn’t yield the desired results. After over six 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. With my IT experience 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 and you, my reader, will reach FIRE on this journey to Financial Independence. It allows me to put my thoughts and (investments) goals in writing, which should help me decide.
The second purpose is to provide a different view on how to achieve FI in Europe. There are already excellent 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 perspective 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. Even though I haven’t reached it (yet), I wish to become FIRE by 45 at the latest by fighting.

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.

Featered on

Firehub.eu - Financial Independence hub of Europe

Yearly Portfolio Report – 2022

January 18, 2023

With no quarterly report to speak of during all of 2022, it's a bit silly to split up the past year now, especially since it would be challenging to find the exact numbers of my crypto positions; instead, I'll be giving you a long-awaited update on my personal portfolio for the entirety of 2022!

How to Start Freelancing for Holiday Cash

January 13, 2023

With the winter holiday season over, many people will already be looking at the summer. To help pay for them, you might be interested in finding new ways to earn money. Nowadays, there are many opportunities to earn cash online or provide unique services. You can find something that works for you. In this guest post, Kathryn Rucker delves deeper into the topic of freelancing to gather some extra cash for the holidays.

View from kitchen corner onto living area.

Apartment progress: 100% – Ready for renting out!

December 12, 2022

After my last update, I couldn't give any more visual updates as everything continued inside, where I was prohibited from entering alone. On top of that, I was busy preparing for significant professional changes, and our daughter still proved to be a bad sleeper giving us very little sleep and time in the evening. But I'm happy to announce the apartment is finished as of July 2022!

My monthly Savings Rate report: July 2022

November 10, 2022

This month was a very tough one financially. I had to take out all the cash I had left to pay for the last bills of the apartment, which was not enough, but more about that later. Luckily, these are the last main expenses for the apartment. I even got the excellent news someone has already rent it out, starting in September, for €1250. Besides the finalization of my apartment, this month is notable for another reason. It’s my last month as an employee!

My monthly Savings Rate report: June 2022

October 2, 2022

With a lot of things going on at the same time these past few months, I haven't had the time to write anything. As a result, this Savings Rate report is more than three months behind. Eventhough it's been so long, I still want to catch up and have a complete year overview by the end of 2022. To that end, I'm sharing the month of June. I saw some significant evolutions in terms of expenses due to some major changes in my financial situation.

My monthly Savings Rate report: May 2022

July 27, 2022

Apologies I haven't been able to post much in recent weeks, but a lot has been going on. In the meantime, I found some time to provide you with my monthly Savings Rate. Since we were abroad from the 21st of April till the 5th of May this report will contain a higher expense in the holiday category as I put everything I spend during my trip there. On top of that, some of the shared expenses weren't paid back yet increasing this months expenses.