I first met Caroline at one of the Financial Independence Meetups London that she organises with her husband. I stayed late, she and the other women I met there were so interesting.
Since then we remained in close contact and we regularly chat about everything from cashback on bank accounts to cocktail and food recipes, and from holidays to tracking our expenses. She is one of those people who knows something interesting about nearly all topics. She also deeply cares about her friends and the people in her life.
Her story is inspiring because, in a way, we can relate to her. And in this she proves that having a grip on your own personal finances and financial independence are achievable when you build good habits over the long term and understand what you want in life.
Spoiler alert: she also made some financial mistakes, just like the rest of us.
Enjoy the read!
Tell us about yourself – what do you do and how old are you? Where are you from and what was your upbringing? Were there any important life events when you were younger?
I turned 47 this year, so I think I’ve probably missed the boat on ‘early retirement’, even if that’s something I was aiming for. I think of myself as a bit of a nomad, although to be honest the last decade or two I’ve been quite settled. I’m from South Africa, but was definitely born with a travel gene. After finishing high school I worked as an au pair in France, came back home (reluctantly) to finish university, and then left for Italy (2 years), then China (14 years) and now the UK (7 years so far). I currently work as a freelance instructional designer and learning consultant, which mainly involves developing online training courses for companies. I do a bit of educational writing too (white papers, training case studies, etc.).
I grew up on a smallholding – my parents were both ‘city people’ but had a dream of owning a piece of land, and they got there through frugality and hard work. We were comfortable and never struggled for money, although the expression ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ was burned into me at an early age! My parents divorced when I was a teenager and I moved into town with my mom and sister, but all in all it was a pretty uneventful childhood.
When did you become interested in financial independence? Was there a watershed moment?
I first heard the expression ‘FIRE’ about 2 years ago. My husband and I had started trying to educate ourselves about money shortly after moving to the UK, but didn’t have a clue where to start. Being expats for most of our working lives, we’d never had to deal with tax returns, pensions, or tax-efficient investing before. In China we’d been earning good salaries and living very cheaply, and a friendly ‘financial advisor’ had persuaded us to invest a huge chunk of our assets in offshore bonds. As we started to get on top of our finances, we realised that 1. the funds weren’t performing at all, 2. we’d been paying eye-watering fees, 3. we couldn’t bring the money into the UK without incurring huge taxes, and 4. we’d pay a massive penalty to close the accounts early. Calculating how much money we’d lost was not a pleasant experience, especially realising that it was our own fault for not taking responsibility for our own finances.
From then on I started learning as much as I could about personal finance, to protect us from making similar mistakes in the future. At first I thought the solution was to find another financial advisor, but I soon realised that we were better off doing it ourselves. Andrew Hallam’s book ‘Millionaire Teacher’ made everything click for me. Hallam had also been a teacher in Asia, so I could identify with his story. He was interviewed on a number of FI podcasts, and I started listening to Afford Anything, Choose FI, the Mad Fientist, Meaningful Money…, and reading all the blogs and books I could find. I felt like I’d discovered the secret to the universe, but couldn’t talk to anyone about it! So it was a huge relief to discover the London FI community at the ‘Playing with Fire’ documentary in 2019, and finally be able to talk to real live people about money. And it inspired me to start the London FI Meetup group a few months later.
How was your relationship with money when you were younger?
I think delayed gratification comes naturally to me – I’ll take 2 marshmallows, thank you very much! My parents gave us a tiny amount of pocket money, so if we wanted anything ‘fun’, we had to save up for it ourselves or wait for Christmas or birthdays. I know I complained at the time, but now I’m grateful to them for the good habits I developed. I did the usual odd jobs in school and uni: waitress, tutor, kitchen porter… I paid for my first overseas trip when I was 18 by running boarding kennels during the school holidays. I was quite entrepreneurial too: my dad used to get free boxes of expired cereals and baby formula to use as animal feed, and when I discovered that many of the packages contained stickers and other freebies, I started selling them to my classmates. I was probably around 10 at the time – unfortunately a teacher spoke to my parents and put an end to my lucrative side hustle 🙂
How did you pick your career path?
I’m sure I never walked around as a child saying ‘I want to be a learning designer’! I completed a business degree because everyone said it was the best way to get a good job, but my real passion was languages and travel. After graduating, I set off on a gap ‘year’, telling myself I was just getting the travel bug out of my system – and I never looked back. I started with English teaching, then moved into online language learning, product development, course design, education technology, and eventually workplace learning, adding qualifications along the way. Looking back, I realise I’ve found almost all of my full-time jobs through personal connections, in fact only 1 job in 20+ years has come through a traditional application process. It’s not just about building a network, though – you have to give 150% whether you’re mopping floors or managing a global team, and then your reputation will speak for itself. Some of my best career moves happened through uncontrollable events, and I’ve learned to be flexible and not fear change. Ironically, I gave up classroom teaching and went into online learning as a result of the SARS epidemic back in 2003 – and I’ve stayed in technology ever since. And being made redundant (twice) brought better opportunities each time.
Working in education (even on the commercial side) has never given me the highest salary, but has led to an extremely flexible and satisfying career. I’ve held management positions for much of my working life – that’s helped bump up my earnings – but I’m much happier doing and creating things myself. I’ve enjoyed having lots of ‘mini-careers’ and being able to continually try new things – I think Jacob Lund Fisker is right that it’s better to develop expertise in a broad range of skills, instead of specialising in smaller and smaller professional niches. Most of my contracts are on hold right now with COVID-19, and I’ve been taking the opportunity to learn matched betting. After that I might look into coding, day trading, or blogging, and see what sticks!
Did you or do you have any debt?
No, just our mortgage – although that’s pretty large right now as we bought an overseas rental property last year.
Are you in a relationship? Do you have any children or dependants?
My husband is from Denmark – we met on holiday in the Philippines while we were both living in China. Anders grew up in Portugal and then lived in the UK, Australia and Singapore so I guess we share that nomadic streak. We’ve been married for almost 14 years and don’t have children – just 2 furry feline dependants. Our finances have been completely merged since the early days and I can’t imagine doing things differently – although these days I think it’s quite common for couples to have separate finances. We make financial decisions together and discuss purchases over a certain value, but we’re each still free to spend as we wish. It probably helps that we’re both 100% committed to FI, though.
When did you become financially independent?
This is one of those questions that I find impossible to answer. I definitely don’t have a date in my head like ‘This is when we’ll reach FI’. I’d say we’ve probably reached Lean Fire in the last year – so we could cover our basic expenses if we lived frugally and moved somewhere cheaper in Europe – or even back to Asia or South America for a few years. It would be tricky with the furry dependents, though… With our families living on 3 different continents, though, we have a pretty hefty travel budget and so I think Fat Fire (or at least ‘semi-skimmed’!) is a more realistic target. Plus we’d want to be able to look after our families (and ourselves) if things go pear-shaped – and it’s a lot harder to make contingency plans when you’re older.
To me, financial independence is not about stopping work, it’s having the freedom to do the things I love, where and when I want to – being free of commuting and schedules and office politics. I’d been on the FI path for a while when I was made redundant last year, and I only had to think for a minute before deciding ‘Screw it, I don’t need to find another full-time job’. Since then, I feel completely free even though I’ve been working non-stop the whole time (up until COVID-19, at least). For now, Anders and I love what we do, and we love living in London, so we’re happy to keep working for a few more years to build a bigger FI buffer. And maybe start some flexible side hustles that will set us up for our next move, wherever that is.
What do you invest in? What made the needle move most in your journey to FI?
Property (house in London plus a holiday rental in Italy) makes up just over 50% of our net worth, and we’re still working on growing the rental into a reliable income stream. Excluding property, around 60% of our assets are in taxable investment accounts or cash, with around 20% each in ISAs and pensions – obviously a lot less than someone who’s lived in the UK or Europe most of their life. Most of our investments are quite vanilla: index investing with a 70% equity allocation overall. We stick to Vanguard Life Strategy and a few other ETFs (VTI, VWRL, and some bonds and REITs). We do hold a decent chunk in company stock through an ESPP scheme. It’s done extremely well for us, but we make sure it doesn’t become too big a part of our portfolio. I do a little bit of P2P investment (less than 1% of our net worth) – mostly in small business loans and environmental projects like Abundance and Assetz Capital.
In terms of moving the needle, some factors have had a big impact relatively quickly, while others have paid off over a much longer period. The offshore ‘investment’ took things in the wrong direction, but we’ve been lucky in other areas. And of course we both come from a very privileged starting point – unfortunately there is still tremendous inequality in FI that isn’t always recognised in the community.
- Anders’ company shares have definitely made the biggest impact to our net worth in recent years. He joined a fast-growing tech company about a year before their IPO, and they offered a generous ESPP scheme where employees could buy discounted shares through a payroll deduction These can be risky if you end up with all your eggs in one basket, but if the company is growing and the discount is good (and you sell shares on regular basis), then it’s hard to lose: for example we paid around $7 a share in the early years, and last year the stock got close to $100. Of course we were incredibly lucky with this, but it did also come down to Anders getting a job in the right industry (technology / SaaS) and company. It took him almost 6 months to find something after moving to the UK, but as I’d come over from China with a job, he could take his time and not jump at the first offer. Also, we were only able to participate fully in the scheme because we had a high savings rate and could take the maximum salary deduction.
- We’ve also done well with property. We bought in London in late 2013 just before prices really accelerated, and managed to find something in a good area that was undervalued and needed a lot of work. The search took us 3 or 4 months, and as usual I plunged into it like a research degree, plotting postcodes, transport links, crime rates and a dozen other variables into a spreadsheet – and in the end luck was on our side again. We lived with garden furniture and cardboard boxes for the first year and renovated cheaply over the next 6, and although London prices aren’t growing like they used to, we’ve still gained almost 60% in value. We took a similar approach when we bought property in Italy last year: lots of research into rental potential, price trends, infrastructure, etc. and a little bit of luck finding a place that was undervalued and needed a bit of work (but was in a fantastic location).
- We don’t have any side businesses (yet), and our income has come entirely from earning good salaries over a long period of time, and working hard to boost them each year. Like many women in the workplace I struggle with negotiation, but over the years Anders has taught me to fight for raises and promotions, and change jobs if necessary. He used to coach me before annual appraisals, getting me to research the job market, list all my achievements and increased responsibilities over the past year, work out what it would cost the company to replace me… and then when I came up with a number I felt was reasonable, he’d push me to add on 10-20% so there was room to negotiate. I hated doing this (and still do), but there’s no doubt it works.
- Which brings me to the next – and most important – factor: finding the right life partner. Financial independence is so much more achievable if you’re both focused on the end goal, have similar attitudes to money, and if you balance each other’s strengths. Working in management and sales, Anders has always been the higher earner (although he’s had longer gaps between jobs), but I’m the compulsive researcher: making spreadsheets to track 10 years of spending, researching our options for broadband, insurance, holidays, property, investment platforms or bank accounts, chasing deals and cashback offers, and keeping on top of our finances. Being double income earners without children has also made a difference: I do believe that FI is achievable with kids, but I’m also sure it’s much harder, so I take my hat off to all the parents on the FI path.
- Being able to live frugally is another ‘slow and steady’ factor. And of course living in China allowed us to earn expat salaries but keep our costs very low. When I first arrived, I taught in a rural university and earned less than £200 a month (with free accommodation), and I still saved money for travel. After I moved to Shanghai and started earning an expat salary, I felt uncomfortable living an extravagant lifestyle – I ate street food, rode my bicycle or took the bus, and lived in a modest apartment. I hesitate to describe our current lifestyle as ‘frugal’, though, because I think Anders and I spend a lot more than your typical rice-and-beans FIRE-ee and have some expensive passions like sailing, skiing, and overseas travel. For us, it’s all about finding balance, and spending according to our values and passions.
Which resources do you use? Books, podcasts, newsletters, social media groups, etc.
We did a Meetup in February on FI resources and I tried to summarise my favourites. Tough call! I’ve worked my way through 40 books on FI topics in the last 2 years, covering investing, economics, productivity, entrepreneurship, psychology… I’ve found value in all of them (well, Dave Ramsey not so much) – for me, reading/listening to books is the number one investment you can make. For non-fiction I prefer to listen to audiobooks, especially when they’re narrated by the author. I used to listen to podcasts every day but I’ve gotten out of the habit now that I don’t commute. I have a Feedly board with my favourite blogs, but these days I tend to seek out topics that I want to learn about, instead of reading on a regular basis. I started matched betting in April, so now I’m following blogs on that topic.
I joined a number of UK and international Facebook groups on FI: while I think the community is incredibly valuable, in my experience people (myself included) don’t always play nice online, making comments that they would never say face to face – and written posts can easily be misinterpreted. Since I started the Meetup group last summer, we’ve been holding monthly events at the pub, getting over 100 attendees at some of them. And there’s always a great atmosphere and a chance to learn something new. While people still don’t necessarily see eye to eye about everything, at least they can have an honest, constructive conversation about it (the beer helps, too!). We’ve recently moved these events onto Zoom, and it’s going well so far. So I’d say that the FI community is probably my top resource these days.
What is your advice for someone who is still on the path to FI?
First of all, don’t think of it as a destination: you have to enjoy the journey itself. I think you’ll have better success if you understand yourself: your values, strengths, interests, passions – and then try to design a life you love around those things, rather than trying to slog away at something you hate, ‘just for the next 5 years’. I used to think that I needed a high paying job so that I could afford to travel – when all I really needed to do was find a way to work abroad. That sounds pretty obvious, but many of us don’t really sit down and think about WHY we want to reach FI, and how we want to spend our time.
Second, the best investment you can make is in yourself: your skills and knowledge. Take every opportunity you can to learn (many of these will be free): be open to new experiences, try things out, meet people, ask for advice… most people will be very flattered to give it to you. Very few things are as complicated as they seem, and if you take things step by step you can learn pretty much anything.
Do you have any other female friends who are FIRE?
I remember a close friend of mine (in her 40s) telling me years ago that she no longer needed to work – I was quite shocked at the time, and in hindsight, I wish I’d asked her how she’d done it. Other than her, I don’t know any other FI people – male or female – in my friends or family, since it’s not something anyone talks about. I’ve met some incredible FIRE ladies through the Meetup group, but they seem to be in the minority – or maybe the women are less inclined to say that they’ve reached FI? But I’m very encouraged that we have a very even gender balance at our events, and I predict we’ll be hearing more and more female FIRE stories in the years to come!
Meet Caroline
If you want to meet Caroline and her husband Anders, come to one of the Meetups they organise – you’ll meet a lively and interesting community of like-minded people.
Are you a FIRE woman? Would you like to be interviewed in their series? Or do you know someone who would fit in well here? Then drop me a line 😊
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