Four blogs on FIRE in India that inspire me

Hope their experiences inspire you too!

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Hi!

Over the last few years as I was getting started on my journey to become financially independent, I looked for inspiration on the internet. Of course there are the classics like Mr. Money Mustache, but I was looking more for experiences closer to home.

Here are four of them which I follow:

1. Financial Safari

Blog link: https://financialsafari.wordpress.com/

Rajshekhar Roy worked in the IT industry since 1988, and transitioned to consulting in 2014 after achieving financial independence. He provides a wealth of information on his experience on investing for retirement and other goals like home buying and children’s college education. Using that experience, he provides ways to how to plan for different goals and retirement. There is a lot of content on asset allocation and how to select debt and equity products for achieving those financial goals.

Is it active?: No, but the existing content is a good read.

Where to start: The series on Financial Independence is a great place to start.

2. Saving Habit

Blog link: https://savinghabit.com/

Naren and Sugandha are a digital nomad couple living in Goa, who plan to retire by 45. They decided to quit their jobs in their late twenties and started a business. They’re living the life which many of us in the Software Industry want - live near a beach in Goa and work :) They provide details about their approach on saving for FIRE, and their experiences towards achieving it. They also give details on managing life and FIRE with a kid.

Is it active?: No, but their experiences are worth a read.

Where to start: Their “Early Retirement in India - Ultimate Guide” is a good starting point, although I don’t agree with their calculations on the corpus in that post. Refer to this post to get a more realistic approach.

3. Retired at 37

Blog link: https://retired.re-ynd.com/

Chandan (who goes by “re-ynd”) was a software engineer at Google before retiring in 2018 at the age of 37. In the blog he talks about how he achieved FIRE and his investing strategy to maintain his corpus through retirement. He describes the projects and hobbies he has taken up in retirement, and generally how he spends his time retired. He also has details about home-schooling his daughter and how he helps her learn using the “unschooling” approach.

Is it active?: Yes!

Where to start: The blog’s Start Here page provides a great overview of the blog.

4. Financially Free Family

Blog link: https://finfreefamily.blogspot.com/

This anonymous family is a typical software engineer family - couple in their thirties with a kid, working in an IT MNC in a Tier 1 city, live in a rented home close to their offices. They want to retire closer to their home town (who doesn’t want to if it’s in the beautiful Uttarakhand?) when they achieve financial independence. They provide details about their expenses, savings rate and corpus over the years. Their portfolio updates were initially monthly, but it has dropped to once in three months. Nonetheless, the slow and steady growth on their path to FIRE is there to see!

Is it active?: No, but the corpus updates are an inspiration!

Where to start: Their posts on the topic “Progress towards Financial Independence” are a great resource.

Wrapping up

I hope these blogs will provide some inspiration to you as they did to me when I first looked at those big corpus numbers. They show that the progress is slow, but steady when we keep at it.

Please drop a comment if you know of other blogs I may have missed and don’t forget to take the survey: https://forms.gle/7r6VMKkT48NyjBcK7

Until next time!