Forget the Grind

Sharing our journey to financial freedom to help others exit the grind

Achieving financial freedom in Australia

Budgeting

Spend Less than you Earn

Creating a household budget is a crucial first step towards financial freedom. By carefully tracking your income and expenditure, you can gain better control over your finances, pay down your debt, create a safety net and achieve your financial goals. We use a simple budget spreadsheet to both organise our finances and hold ourselves to account. This spreadsheet is linked below for you to also explore.

Saving

Pay off your Debt

We are financially risk adverse and therefore decided to pay down our mortgage and car loans before investing outside of our superannuation. Through developing a sensible budget strategy to spend less than we earn, we were able to pay off our debts and then supercharge our investments. While there are some who argue that investing should come first, we found that for piece of mind, having no debt suited our risk profile.

Invest for Capital Growth

Not being expert stock pickers, we choose to rely on an index fund investing strategy that aligns with our financial goals and risk tolerance. Our approach involves a 50% allocation of international shares, a 50% allocation of Australian shares, and maintaining three years' worth of living expenses in cash. This strategy aims to strike a balance between growth potential and stability, while also considering the impact of currency fluctuations on our investments.

A little bit about us

We’re a family of four who recently relocated to Adelaide Australia to downsize our lives and provide more opportunities for our kids.  While we took a considerable drop in pay to make the move, we have found that Adelaide provides a quality of life at a reasonable cost that suits our budget and lifestyle.  We love that Adelaide has access to amazing active travel infrastructure (a fancy name for bike paths) and is close to the Adelaide Hills for great trail running opportunities and the occasional winery visit to entertain interstate visitors. We are yet to retire as this year we are measuring our cost of living, think of it as a trial run, to make sure that our retirement number is sufficient to support the family when we decide to exit the grind next year.  You can read more about our retirement number in our article about Coast Fire.  Please browse our website to learn more about us, our philosophies on life, and how you can take incremental steps to make money work for you, achieve financial freedom, separate yourself from the flock and ultimately “forget the grind”.  You can learn a little more about our journey on our About Us page.

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