When you start working, your paycheck is everything. It's how you pay bills, fund your life, and build your first savings.

But here's the shift most people never make: that savings portfolio should become your primary wealth engine, not your job.

Think of your investments as your real side gig. It starts small, but compounds relentlessly. Each dollar you invest becomes a worker that never sleeps, building wealth while you focus on other things.

The people who reach financial freedom aren't the ones with the highest salaries. They're the ones who flipped the script — who built their balance sheet until it outpaced their labor.

There's a moment when your assets create more new wealth in a year than your job ever could. That's when your job becomes the side hustle.

Real wealth comes from ownership, not just labor. Your balance sheet is your ownership stake in the future.

If you use bitcoin as your core savings vehicle, this transition can happen even more powerfully. Bitcoin's hard-capped supply makes it a uniquely strong foundational asset for a personal balance sheet.

https://firebtc.io/p/making-your-job-your-side-gig

Your personal finance journey works exactly like Super Mario Bros.

Early on, you're just collecting coins and trying not to get flattened. Bills and debt are like Goombas—easy to dodge if you don't make a wrong move. Inflation is Lakitu overhead, constantly adding pressure.

Eventually you find power-ups. 401(k) matches, index funds, expense reduction—they help, but they don't last forever. One surprise hit and you're back to small Mario.

The real problem is that the fiat game is rigged. Your savings melt in the background no matter how careful you are. Even if you dodge every enemy, you end up at Bowser's castle. Bowser isn't just inflation—he's the entire fiat system. The reason your savings melt, the rules change mid-level, your freedom is always in another castle.

Most people spend their lives collecting coins and chasing temporary power-ups, only to get burned at the castle gates.

But hidden in the level is a warp pipe. Bitcoin is that warp pipe. It doesn't just protect your savings—it takes you off the fiat map entirely. Your coins don't melt. Your freedom isn't pushed into another castle. You're in control of the game.

FIRE gives you the map to reach the castle and some power-ups along the way. Bitcoin gives you the warp pipe and the Star Power to make you invincible.

In the fiat game, the princess is always in another castle. With FIRE + bitcoin, you can finally save her.

https://firebtc.io/p/pipe-dreams

FIRE gave me a way out—not just from work, but from a career without direction. After 12 years in Corporate America, I felt like a cog in a big wheel, a number in someone else's spreadsheet. The commute was tiresome, the office environment was stale, and the lack of flexibility left a lot to be desired. I felt stuck.

The FIRE approach is straightforward: build a savings and investment portfolio large enough to sustain your desired lifestyle without having to work. It's possible to implement a simple plan to create lasting wealth that doesn't require a radical change in your career or taking extraordinary risk.

The FIRE movement is about taking a fresh perspective and being intentional in crafting that plan for yourself to accelerate the timeline of reaching financial independence, thereby freeing yourself from being dependent on a paycheck.

Three core building blocks make it happen:

**1. Intentional spending and understanding expenses**

Understanding your expenses, both now and what you expect them to be in the future, is the first element to tackle. House, cars, groceries, taxes, gym memberships, kids' activities, vacations—all of this should be understood at a line-item level.

Be ruthlessly intentional about which expenses are necessary and which are wasteful. If an expense is wasteful, eliminate it immediately. If it's necessary, find ways to minimize it.

**2. Pay yourself first - maximize your savings rate**

No matter what you earn, you can always save some of it. Whether it's 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, or more, that proportion of any money earned should be immediately moved to your savings portfolio. Automate this savings process and figure out how to live on the remaining amount.

Think of yourself as the CEO and CFO for your own personal finance company. Your primary objective is to maximize retained earnings. Any extra value saved today is payment to your future self ten-fold.

**3. Buy and hold good assets**

You can't just hold dollars (or other fiat currency), because doing so will make you poorer, not wealthier. The cost of goods and services you use every day continually gets more expensive over time due to a combination of monetary debasement and government intervention in the marketplace.

Housing, healthcare, education—categories we all must spend money on that continually get costlier. Because of this purchasing power erosion, you must store your wealth in something other than fiat currency.

Most FIRE practitioners choose the stock market and/or real estate. I choose bitcoin.

Buying good assets allows you to maintain, and even grow, your purchasing power over time. This savings portfolio will be used to sustain your retirement lifestyle, and it needs to grow large enough so that you won't run out of money when you are no longer working.

Earn, save, stack, repeat. When you understand your expenses, pay yourself first, and start stacking assets, you're well on your way to financial independence.

https://firebtc.io/p/fire-fundamentals

Bitcoin is down A LOT between the time I wrote this on Monday and the time it was posted today 😅

https://www.firebtc.io/p/when-conviction-gets-tested

Most FIRE practitioners default to VTI and call it a day. Stack index funds, wait 20 years, done.

But there's a problem with that approach. You're accepting whatever return the market gives you, which means accepting whatever timeline the market dictates.

I ran an 8-year backtest comparing VTI-only portfolios against portfolios with bitcoin allocations. $100/week split between VTI and BTC at different ratios: 0%, 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%.

The results are striking. A 100% BTC allocation grew the portfolio almost 7x larger than 100% VTI. Even a 25% BTC allocation more than doubled the portfolio size compared to VTI-only.

The multiplier effect: every 1% increase in BTC allocation added 9.61% to total returns. That's not a small difference. That's the difference between retiring at 45 vs 55.

The tradeoff? Volatility. Bitcoin dropped 84%, 72%, 55%, and 77% during four major drawdowns in that period. But here's what matters: if you're consistently stacking sats through those drawdowns, you're buying more when it's cheap.

Early in your FIRE journey, volatility is a feature, not a bug. Your goal is to stack as much as you can as fast as you can. Deep drawdowns just accelerate that process.

VTI is a solid choice for saving. Bitcoin is a better one. The question isn't whether to allocate—it's how much you're comfortable with.

https://firebtc.io/p/supercharge-your-fire-journey

It only gets access to what you let it. Of course, that could be easier said than done….

And we thought the bitcoin rabbit hole was deep!

Financial independence without sovereignty is just math on a spreadsheet. You can hit 25x your annual expenses and still need permission to access your own wealth. That's not independence.

I joined Shawn Yeager on The Trust Revolution to talk about what happens when individuals stop asking permission to control their own money. We covered the infinite reserve illusion, why Bitcoin is more tangible than your bank balance, and how self-custody flips the power dynamic with financial advisors.

The FIRE community has the discipline to build wealth. But if you can't actually access it without gatekeepers, intermediaries, and "processing times," you're still dependent. Bitcoin closes that loop. No custodians. No counterparty risk. Just direct ownership of what you've built.

The conversation went places most FIRE discussions avoid. We talked about how the modern banking system doesn't run on fractional reserves anymore—the reserves are infinite because they'll just print them. We talked about tangibility—your bank balance is just a spot on an amorphous ledger you don't control, while Bitcoin keys are actual ownership. And we talked about sovereignty starting at home, scaling through example.

Watch the full conversation.

https://firebtc.io/p/icymi-bitcoin-is-critical-to-the

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Most personal finance gurus tell you to eliminate all debt. Pay off your mortgage. Live debt-free.

But they're ignoring how money actually works in a credit-based system.

Dollars are created from new debt and destroyed when debt is extinguished. This creates continuous expansion in the money supply, which means debasement of both existing debt and existing money.

The people who refinanced their mortgages at 3% in 2020 didn't just save on interest. They locked in a liability that became progressively cheaper to repay as inflation ran at 9%. Meanwhile, they freed up capital to invest in assets appreciating faster than their borrowing cost.

This is "speculative attack" — a concept Pierre Rochard wrote about in 2014. Borrow in a weak currency to buy a stronger asset. When inflation runs higher than your interest rate, your debt gets easier to pay off while your assets appreciate.

Consider two scenarios for buying a $500k house in 2020:

Scenario 1: Pay cash. You own a $640k house today.

Scenario 2: Put 20% down, take a 3% mortgage, invest the $400k you didn't spend. You own a $640k house PLUS whatever those investments returned.

I call this "Aikido finance" — using the momentum of the fiat system instead of fighting against it.

Yes, debt carries risk. You need stable income to cover payments. But if you have the discipline to pursue FIRE, you already have the discipline to manage strategic debt.

The fiat system runs on credit expansion and debasement. Like it or not, those with access to credit and an understanding of how to use it have a distinct advantage. You can ignore that reality or you can use it to reach financial independence faster.

https://firebtc.io/p/speculative-attack

Most people understand compound interest intellectually but don't feel it. The first year, your investment grows by $10. You feel a ripple. After ten years, a wave. After thirty years, a tsunami.

FIRE isn't about striking it rich with one big win. It's about letting compound returns do the heavy lifting. Your $100 becomes $110, then $121, then $133. The gains build on themselves. The longer you let it ride, the faster it grows.

Time is your advantage. Starting early means you need to save less. Waiting means you fight friction. A 25-year-old saving $500/month beats a 35-year-old saving $1,000/month if the returns are equal.

Compounding works in reverse too. Credit card debt at 20% interest compounds against you. Outstanding balances become dangerous fast. The same force that builds wealth can crush you if you're on the wrong side of it.

Einstein called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it. He who doesn't pays it. That's the difference between working until 65 and retiring at 40. Between hoping your money lasts and knowing it will.

https://firebtc.substack.com/p/the-power-of-compounding

FIRE people track their expenses to the penny. They stress over loyalty points and mortgage basis points. Bitcoiners obsess over MVRV ratios and exchange balances.

Both groups think more measurement equals more control.

But there's a trap here: mistaking information for insight and activity for progress.

I run my numbers every morning over coffee. Takes 10 minutes. I track where cash flows, what my portfolio is worth, what my trailing 12-month expenses look like. That's it.

The Pareto Principle applies: a small number of inputs drive most results. The rest is noise.

What gets measured gets managed. But most people manage the wrong things.

Track what matters. Simplify the rest. Trust your process.

Bitcoin gives you radical transparency—you can verify the monetary policy, audit the ledger, hold your own keys. But that transparency is for validating the system, not for predicting price movements.

Use measurement to clarify your path, not to shield yourself from uncertainty.

Direction over perfection.

https://firebtc.substack.com/p/run-the-numbers

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Help my buddy Hal out!
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