“Let’s put your money to work so that once you can
afford to get 40 hours back each week to cherish life.”
We want you to have everything you need to build your investments (in the stock market) to the point where they generate enough passive income to pay your bills. And we’ll tell you exactly how to do it without ever running out of money. Now, you can transition from your 40+ hour work week to a more self-directed (working) life as work (for money) become optional.
This blog is about figuring out how to achieve this as quickly as possible (and showing you how we do it while raising kids).
This can be done by striving for semi-retirement, aka Semi-FI, or early retirement, aka F.I.R.E., or a combination of both. Start creating YOUR own plan today with these resources!
Want to know more about semi-retirement (which we are big fans of) or what Semi-FI actually is? Check out the FAQs.
This journey is quite a (painful) process of learning what your values and priorities in life are (let me tell you), what you want to do with your time and what you want your (work) life to look like – especially as a family.
For over 2 decades now, we dedicate our time for money at work. We earn good money and kind of pay for that with our time. But at a high cost: our precious life-time that is limited. The plan was to continue doing so until we officially retire at age 67 (or later) to then get freedom of choice over the short rest of our lifetime. That didn’t bothered us as we liked working a lot also knowing we earn a lot and can afford a lot. Until one day. Our baby girl was born.
For the first time in our life we wished to be able not buying things but time. We wished to own something that pays for at least a part of our bills without having to work for it so that we can work less and spend more time together as a family. That something actually exists and is called capital.
We agreed to simply become owners of capital through investing our money instead of consuming it so that we can build real wealth for our family. That capital should liberate our time by paying for our bills. We decided to dedicate another decade and a bit more of our lifetime for money at work. But this time we wanted to buy back our life-time not things.
Before we started to save and invest around 60 % of our income there was a “broke rich” couple. We happily consumed most of our corporate job income as a software architect and a communications referee living in Europe/Germany. We had no assets, not in the stock market, not in real estate and only little savings – despite our good income. The plan was to live this life until we officially retire at almost 70 years and getting kids, maybe buying a house in-between. Until one day…
Our WHY for FIRE was born: our baby girl rocked our world. We fell deeply in love with her. But we struggled with living a family life mostly apart from each other and it deeply affected us.
Back then, our personal finances limited us. We had no plan for our money or retirement account and depended completely on our earned income. Living off of a passive income once where work becomes optional seemed out of reach for us. We dreamed of having full control over our time and money. But without worrying about paying the bills or funding our retirement pension.
We discovered F.I.R.E. – Financial Independence Retire Early. 3 years later we had an ETF stock market portfolio worth over 80.000 and also paid-off 80.000 in debt on our mortgage. 2 years more later our portfolio grew to over 120.000 – without us having deposited a cent more. And we paid-off another 60.000+ in debt. Today, we are about to retire early with our kids in less than 15 years before the age of 50. And we are a normal middle-class family.
We realized that a meaningful family life is not about how much you have but how you live and what YOU value. And after we figured it out and transformed our life for the better, we realized that we want to help as many families as possible find the same peace that we had found. That’s when Time And Money Tree was born.
Want to contact us? We LOVE helping you!
Before we started to save and invest around 60 % of our income there was a “broke rich” couple. We happily consumed most of our corporate job income as a software architect and a communications referee living in Europe/Germany. We had no assets, not in the stock market, not in real estate and only little savings – despite our good income. The plan was to live this life until we officially retire at almost 70 years and getting kids, maybe buying a house in-between. Until one day…
Our WHY for FIRE was born: our baby girl rocked our world. We fell deeply in love with her. But we struggled with living a family life mostly apart from each other and it deeply affected us. We dreamed of raising our little girl by ourselves equally, not just in the late afternoons after daycare and the last meeting ends. Or while running errands with her on the weekends to get it all done for the week ahead. We just felt like constantly rushing through life.
Back then, our personal finances limited us. We had no plan for our money or retirement account and depended completely on our earned income. Living off a passive income once where work becomes optional seemed out of reach for us. We dreamed of having full control over our time and money. But without worrying about paying the bills or funding our retirement pension.
We discovered the F.I.R.E. movement – Financial Independence Retire Early. We learned how to treat our money in a goal-oriented way so that we can achieve our goals.
We learned how to save more money to then invest our savings into assets and create a passive income stream form that. Ultimately, our big life goal is to build wealth and stay wealthy.
F.I.R.E. was the answer to us because it gives us the freedom of choice what to do with our time each day once we retire early. And for us that includes doing meaningful work.
F.I.R.E. was never about leaving work as soon as possible. In contrary, we love working and it‘s an important part of our life. But F.I.R.E. is about choosing when to work and when not. It‘s about empowering us to be present for our kids when they‘ll need us the most while still working. Or for our parents when they‘ll be too old. It‘s about having a flexibility in life and HAVING THE CHOICE (when to retire).
3 years later we had an ETF stock market portfolio of over 80.000 and paid-off another 80.000 in debt on our mortgage. 2 years more later our portfolio grew to over 120.000 – without us having deposited a cent more. And we paid-off another 60.000+ in debt. Today, we are about to retire early with our kids in less than 15 years before the age of 50. And we are a normal middle-class family.
We realized that a meaningful family life is not about how much you have but how you live and what YOU value. And after we figured it out and transformed our life for the better, we realized that we want to help as many families as possible find the same peace that we had found. “Time And Money Tree” was born.
We run our blog because we have been there (where you may be right now) and what we share is what we learned in our real family life. We give you all the resources and informations that we have used and learned on our journey, so that you can start or change and boost your journey to financial independence, retire early and afford buying back your life-time.
How our new F.I.R.E. family life looks like?
Well, there were many changes. But the biggest change was both of us have chosen to work part-time in our corporate jobs and started to work on our own business on the side. Also, both of us went on parental leave after our daughters were born. We are so grateful for our precious two little girls and feel blessed to now spend the afternoons with our kids. We highly appreciate this family time all together.
All of that was only possible because we learned how to need less money to support our lifestlye. Our new life also empowers us to recreate our daily routines how it’s best for us.
Anna is a morning person. Her body basically shuts down at 8 P.M. and she quickly falls asleep after putting the kids to bed. She loves to wake up early and get things done that are meaningful to her.
Marc is a night owl. He loves his evening sports and working on the computer – in peace and quite. In the morning he enjoys bringing the girls to daycare by bike and then hit off-road through the woods back home to take care of our self-sufficient garden.
But the changes during the first F.I.R.E. year were hard!
We had A LOT of discussions about how we want to save and invest around 60 % of our income as that was our goal. We talked about our housing situation, our car and grocery costs and many more. We had completely different opinions about how and if we want to cut costs. But we were ambitious about F.I.R.E. and found our way as a couple. How?
We planned and wrote out a budget for an endless amount of hours to then crush our budget. It was hard to change our money habits and really make progress so that we can stick to our budget. We made many financial mistakes and had many spending guilts. Why? The hardest part was to create lasting change in how we treat and spend money.
It took some time until we realized that every time we failed we were failing our family vision to once retire early with our kids. So we got serious and made saving and investing our priority number 1.
This is what we learned:
- How to create a family life we love on a budget we can afford.
- How to write a realistic budget that works for our family & F.I.R.E.
- How to find alternative ways to spend less that feel really good.
- How to start saving and investing around 60 % on autopilot.
- How to build a profitable stock market portfolio with Index Funds/ETFs.
- How to live off of our passive income (stock market portfolio withdrawals) for 30-40 years without running out of money.
- How to change a F.I.R.E. plan, paying taxes on withdrawals and cut down healthcare costs.
Making the first financial step, achieving your first money goal is really life changing and we want to help you get there and stay there!
Let’s take this first step together and check out our resources here.
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