“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 to equip you with everything you need to grow your stock market investments until they generate enough passive income to cover part of your monthly expenses. At that point, you can shift away from your 40-hour work week and step into semi retirement — also known as Semi FIRE or Semi FI — a rising trend in the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) community, for good reason.
This blog is all about sharing practical ways, real-life tips that actually work, and helpful resources so you can reach semi retirement and partial financial independence as quickly as possible — while staying on track to achieve full FIRE. That way, you can start enjoying the perks of an early-retired lifestyle long before you officially reach FIRE.
We’ve created a set of free, easy-to-use Semi Retirement Calculators as well as several Financial Independence Calculators to help you plan your own Semi FIRE path — without the risk of running out of money during semi retirement and full early retirement. And we share exactly how we’re doing it ourselves while raising young kids.
Ready to map out your own path to semi retirement and financial independence? Start here.
Curious what semi retirement, Semi FIRE, or Semi FI really means? Dive into our FAQs and browse the blog collection all about semi retirement.
Our journey started back in 2020, when we first discovered the FIRE movement. At the time, we were a family of 3 living in Germany (Europe). Today, we’re soon-to-be a family of 5 — and just a few years away from reaching semi retirement, while working part-time and taking parental leaves.
For nearly two decades, Marc and I earned good money — trading our time for a relatively high income. The plan was simple: keep going until retirement at 67 (or later), and then finally enjoy the freedom to choose how we spend the short remainder of our lives. It didn’t feel like a bad deal. We loved our jobs and took pride in being able to afford the life we wanted. Until everything changed. Our first daughter was born in 2019 — just before the Corona pandemic began.
For the first time in our lives, we didn’t wish for more stuff — we wished for more time. Time to be together as a family. What we truly longed for was something that could help cover part of our bills without requiring us to trade hours for money. That “something” is real. It’s called capital — and it can open the door to semi retirement.
We made a decision: instead of spending our money, we’d invest it to become owners of capital — to build lasting wealth for our family. Capital that would eventually pay for our bills and give us back the most precious thing: time. We committed to one more decade of focused work — not to buy things, but to buy back our time and move closer to semi retirement.
Before we started to save and invest around 60 % of our income there was a “broke rich” couple. In our early 30s 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. Then …
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 while constantly rushing through life 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 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 FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) in our mid 30s. We learned how to treat our money in a goal-oriented way so that we can save more money to then invest our savings into assets and create a passive income stream form that.
Around 3-4 years later we had a stock market portfolio worth over 100.000 and also paid-off 100.000 in debt on our mortgage. After another 2 years our portfolio grew to over 140,000 and we paid-off another 60,000+ in debt. So in 5 years we paid-off 160,000+ in debt while building a stock market portfolio worth over 140,000.
Today, we’re about to semi retire with our kids around age 45-50 and retire early at around age 55. And we are a normal middle-class family. Our path to Semi FI takes a bit over 10 years and includes years of parental leaves during which we make no investments in the market. When we reach Semi FI, we could stop saving and investing (and afford to work part-time both), while still achieving FIRE about 5-10 years later. We couldn’t be happier with our choice.
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.
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 the resources we use ourselves and all the informations we learned on our journey, so that you can start or change and boost your journey to financial independence today. And one day afford buying back your life-time.
Want to contact us? We LOVE helping you
Our semi retirement journey gives us the freedom of choice what to do with our time each day once we semi retire. And for us that includes doing meaningful work.
Semi retirement was never about leaving our jobs as soon as possible. In contrary, we love working. It‘s an essential and important part of our life. But semi retirement is about choosing when to work and when not. What we want to work on. 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 fully retire).
What does work look like in our new semi-retired family life?
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 while being on a semi retirement journey. Also, both of us went on parental leave after our daughters were born. I even took a 2-years long parental leave. We are so grateful for our precious 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 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. How we want to work and earn more money. But we were ambitious about semi retirement 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 earning. 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 and a work schedule we want.
- How to write a realistic budget that works for our family & semi retirement
- 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 semi retirement plan, paying little 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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