8 FIRE Resources I Love – Books, Blogs and Podcasts

When we started blogging on CostaRicaFIRE, with the FIRE piece standing for Financial Independence, Retire Early, my earliest readers (predominately family and friends, of course) thought I was so clever to come up with that acronym.

I wish I had been that clever! FIRE is already a popular movement of its own with multiple blogs, Reddit groups, Meetups and other communities being built around it.

Discovering the FIRE movement

It makes sense that my inner circle wouldn’t know about FIRE. I do not come from a family of entrepreneurs, though my mom was an early side hustler in that she always had additional work outside her day job (she was an Avon lady in the 70’s!).

My early career was very traditional – banking, management consulting, cue the yawn. Scott came from IT, and while there are numerous FIRE bloggers who come from computer engineering backgrounds (Mr. Money Mustache probably being the most famous one), Scott is a very in-the-box thinker so probably would not have heard of FIRE if I hadn’t roped him into it a few years ago.

Once you look into the FIRE movement –the idea of designing your life around your interests, not the constraints of a day job – it can be very infectious. You could lose hours combing through posts, discussion threads, books, even events.

I derive a lot of value from reading different points of view, so I enjoy jumping across different writers, blogs, and other resources, as opposed to subscribing to any one particular FIRE philosophy. I’m a big believer that reading other people’s stories leads to good ideas and, most importantly, inspiration – i.e., if they can do it, so can I!

Reading success stories is one of my favorite ways to expand limiting beliefs. This September 2018 New York Times article profiles several of those success stories.

My Favorite FIRE Resources

But the amount of information out there can be overwhelming, so here are some of my favorite FIRE resources to help you get started:

Books

I read a lot of books each year, and with 40+ years of reading, I could do a whole post on just books. So I looked back at just the last couple of years to pick from the more recent crop of business, self-help books:

Wealth Can’t Wait by Paul Morris and Dave Osborn – This book isn’t about FIRE per se (I don’t even think it mentions FIRE specifically) but it’s definitely about being creative with your career, looking at a wide variety of alternatives, and the importance of selling skills – all key elements of a FIRE lifestyle. If you are just starting your FIRE journey, this is a good book to expand your ideas on career planning. While it’s clearly a book written by and for entrepreneurs, it contains a lot of good advice for traditional career professionals as well.

Fun Formula by Joel Comm – Joel Comm is a serial entrepreneur and an Internet marketing expert. Internet marketing is another foundational skill that many FIRE proponents use to achieve FIRE. So while this book is also not about FIRE specifically, it definitely provides strategies and examples that support the FIRE lifestyle. Essentially the book is about using fun as a key metric in making decisions. The book encourages experimentation, and Comm shares many personal stories of the many things he’s tried over his 50+ years.

Start a Successful Business by Colleen DeBaise – This book is essentially a compilation of articles from Inc Magazine, where DeBaise is an editor. I love Inc, and I love Colleen’s work, so if you’re looking for a well-researched, well-written how-to on starting or growing your business, this is a good book for the reference shelf.

Blogs

Financial Mentor – Hands-down my favorite finance site, and one of the few I subscribe to, Financial Mentor is run by Todd Tressider, a retired hedge fund manager turned life coach, who himself reached FIRE in his early 30’s and has been living FIRE for over 20 years. Financial Mentor has a great blog, books (if you want to go even deeper than the 1,000+ word posts), and a retirement calculator that is much more helpful than the ones you see on the brokerage sites.

Financial Samurai – Financial Samurai is run by Sam Dogan, a laid-off banker who started the blog as a way to promote his severance negotiation book. The posts are very accessible, even though Dogan includes numbers and charts in each one. This is a good blog to get strategies and tips, but also to get a peek into someone living out the FIRE lifestyle. Dogan reveals his portfolio allocation online, reveals his real estate purchase and sale decisions, and talks openly about his different businesses (he even drove for Uber to report on that possible side hustle). This is a thorough and fun read.

Retire By 40 – Another computer engineer turned FIRE blogger, Joe Udo’s blog was one of the first I read regularly when I discovered FIRE. This blog is more day-in-the-life than hardcore financial advice, but I found it very helpful to read the trial-and-error and mundane details of someone living FIRE while I was working my way up to it. In fact, I profiled him in my Forbes column back in 2015.

Podcasts

My Wife Quit Her Job – I’m not a big podcast listener, and in fact, I discovered My Wife Quit Her Job in blog format. But the podcast interviews of online entrepreneurs and online sales and marketing experts are excellent. Too many other interviews leave out the numbers and intimate details of a strategy – how much did that campaign cost? When you say that it worked, how many sales did you make? This podcast actually asks the questions that are interesting. There is a lot of content, so much that I delegated this resource to Scott, who can actually benefit from the technical details. But even for the lay person (I count myself in that group of non-technical business people), it’s a helpful resource for creating online product income – a powerful option for reaching FIRE.

Business Exponential with Nina Kaufman – Business Exponential focuses on how to build a business that exists outside of you – something you have to do if entrepreneurship is how you make money, but you want the FIRE life. Kaufman interviews different entrepreneurs who have built self-sufficient businesses, as well as experts on different areas of business-building, such as what metrics to track or how to create a subscription service. Full disclosure: Kaufman interviewed me to talk about hiring for your business.

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There are a lot of elements that go into achieving and maintaining a FIRE lifestyle, so these resources are just the tip of the iceberg. In future posts, I’ll share other favorite resources for travel, real estate, and other topics we cover at Costa Rica FIRE.

Do you have any favorite FIRE resources to suggest?