About

Hi there, and welcome to FIRE for One!

I’m a *cough* 50-something *cough* single living on the south side of Brisbane (Australia). I don’t have children, but up until she passed away at the end of October 2019 I did have a fur-kid. I’ve been working for a state government department since mid-2006. My qualifications are in music and education but, although I work in an education & training related field, I’m not a teacher – my job is more IT based.

I’ve been tossing up the idea of blogging my FIRE journey, not least because, as someone who’s only come into contact with the concept quite recently and is really behind the eight ball in terms of available time, I’m not even sure that the RE part of FIRE is going to be achievable for me, although I do hope to be able to retire by 65 rather than have to continue working past that. That said, I think the FI part should be, and that’s where my focus is for the moment.

However, after reading this post at Australian Dividend Investor I thought, what the hey, it will serve a couple of purposes for me: a way of keeping a record of my thoughts and experiences around changing my financial future; and also a way of keeping myself accountable. And as a side bonus, I’m hoping it will help build my web development skills a bit – I’ve dabbled in the past, but not put much time into it. So you may see the site design change over time. 🙂

I’m passionate about singing (I’ve spent half my life singing in choirs), reading (speculative fiction mostly, but also some occasional chick-lit and non-fiction), and Australian politics, none of which are likely to feature on this blog (other than references to FIRE related reading).

As the blog name indicates, I’m interested in how the FIRE journey will pan out for a single person. So far most of the bloggers I’ve discovered are coupled or have a family, so I thought a single perspective might be interesting for others out there in similar circumstances.

My current aim is to review my net worth on a half-yearly basis while I do a lot of reading and learning from the blogs of others, and work on formulating achievable FI goals and a strategy to reach them. Other than that, my posts are most likely to be around the evolution of my thinking.