Everything you’ll read at Thomtax is based around a single aim – generating and keeping wealth . Then one day I read about the FIRE movement and it struck a chord with me. If you haven’t heard this acronym before, FIRE stands for – ‘achieve financial independence and retire early.’ FIRE has become a popular movement as more and more people dedicate their time and earnings towards retiring much earlier in life than traditional retirement plans or budgets would usually allow. There are various levels of frugality and extreme savings that you can adopt to achieve this  but essentially the point is to concentrate a certain amount of savings and investments each month on retiring a lot earlier in life. Some people choose to put everything into their retirement, taking an extreme approach to preparing for the future at the expense of the present. My approach will be a little more nuanced than that, with increasing income for my retirement a side hustle, meaning that I can still enjoy the life I am currently leading, whilst building those savings. Now, getting that perfect balance between retirement savings and enjoying life in the present isn’t always easy and getting a firm grip on your finances will require commitment and discipline. But what I hope to do, and what I hope you will do with me, is to show that it is possible to do without too much complication and without the expense of financial professionals taking their cut. With some good sense, a judicious use of all the free information out there and most importantly the ability to take a long-term view, financial freedom should be well within our grasp.