The Chronicles of our Quest! towards Financial Independence

Dear Awesome Person

Welcome to the first post of The Cent(ri) Frugal Force!

My wife and I are on a Quest towards Financial Independence and this blog is a place for us to chronicle that journey. Financial Independence is not the Holy Grail, but it is something for us to aim towards and keep us focussed. The quest itself is the fun part. Through it we are learning a wonderful new way to live and think about life.

So what is Financial Independence?
Firstly, it's not actually about money...

It's about freedom. 

Photo credit Oliver Berghold (Public Domain)

Freedom to choose what work you do. Freedom to work part-time, for free for an NGO or not at all. Freedom to work because you want to and not because you have to. Freedom to spend time with your children (we don't have any yet, but this is a big motivator for us).

So where does money come into it? It turns out that although money can't buy happiness it can buy some or all of the above freedoms. Here's the slightly mind-bending part. Money can be used to buy freedom by not spending it. If this doesn't make sense to you then I hope this concept becomes clearer through future posts.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Much of what I have learned about managing our family's personal finances is from Overseas Masters which I started following in the middle of 2013. I was already frugally minded before I began reading personal finance blogs on financial independence and early retirement, but these writers have served to validate and incubate my early thoughts as well as give rise to new ones.

Mr. Money Mustache, The Mad Fientist, jlcollinsnh and Early Retirement Extreme are great storehouses of information on living frugally, investing and the journey towards financial independence.

Financial Independence in South Africa

 Photo credit Lollie-Pop (CC-BY 2.0)

I also have read (and still read) some personal finance sites more relevant to our South African context. IOL Personal Finance, MoneyWeb and Maya on Money are some of these websites. The forums on My Broadband are also a really useful place to ask questions, answer questions or even to simply observe conversations that unfold in some of the threads.

The websites that I've just mentioned are useful, but for the most part they are far too tame. They generally tend to assume that the readers are aiming to retire at 65 by saving 10% of their incomes. Now this might be fine if you really love your job and you want to work until you're 65. But if you're like me and you're a little more ambitious (okay, a lot more ambitious) and you want the ability to be free decades before normal retirement age then these resources just aren't going to cut it. The Overseas Masters are really good and most of what they have to say is general and can be applied anywhere in the world, but some aspects of living in a specific place require specific tactics. So sharp as they are, the overseas masters don't quite cut it either.

This is where I hope this blog can fill a gap. I've done quite a lot of research on how things are in South Africa and this blog is an opportunity to share that research with a wider audience than my wife. I don't have all the answers so I'm hoping for lots of comments from and interesting discussions with readers.

Onwards, to Freedom!