Interview of Sorts Fiery Millennial

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Interview of Sorts Fiery Millennial

It’s time for another fun-filled adventure in our Interview of Sorts series and today we have entrepreneur, investor, and the leading millennial in the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) space, Gwen from Fiery Millennials. These interviews are a great look at how others have succeeded in their financial lives and a way to learn and grow your knowledge with money. Let’s get started with this FIRE Interview Fiery Millennial.

Hey everyone! I’m Gwen. I am a 28 year old that’s been on the path to Financial Independence for about 8 years now. I got started with Mr. Money Mustache’s blog and went from there. I currently live in Washington, DC doing IT work for a government contractor.

We first met at the Berkshire Hathaway conference, where Warren Buffett has his annual conference and answers questions, mostly about money. Then again at Fincon a couple of times. Now what I can only describe as a series of unfortunate events, I missed seeing you in Chicago when you came to visit. Does this explain the traumatic events of how we know each other?

It does! Although I think I would describe it more as deliberately avoiding me on all my trips to Chicago, but that’s picky details. I think we’re probably the most amicable Cubs-Cardinals fans in history!

FIRE Interview Fiery Millennial

What’s great is you have a blog where you share your financial story. What’s not great is my spelling bee skills and how to spell the word “fiery”, which I only learned through misspelling it as “firey”. All of that to ask what’s Fiery Millennial all about?

From what I know you. You are a military veteran, IT jobbing, blogger, podcaster, and known to visit every financial independence meet up IN THE WORLD. Does this describe you? Did I miss anything cool that you want to share?

Actually, I’m not a podcaster anymore. I recently stepped down from co-hosting Fire Drill in an effort to simplify my life and enjoy it more. I decided to focus more on the ‘excel at W2’ path to FIRE over the ‘hustle every minute’ path. My cat is incredibly adorable. You can find me swimming, biking, quilting and playing games of all kinds.

Cat FIRE Interview Fiery Millennial

You talk about Financial Independence, Retire Early, and F*** You Money. I’m all for it, especially financial independence. What’s your plan to get there? Big goals? Action Plan? Feel free to share with me your SMART goals if you would like.

When I started out in the FIRE world, my plan was to save as much money as possible and retire by the age of 35. Now that I’m nearly a decade into pursuing FIRE, my views have changed. I no longer want to retire early. Instead, I want a balanced and happy life. I don’t mind working as long as I enjoy the work and have control over my schedule. Having a lot of FU money saved up has helped me figure that out and get closer to that optimal life.

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In your pursuit of Financial Independence, you took a big leap. You started a few side hustles to reach your income needs and cover your expenses. Paint me a picture of how this all happened. Any fun stories or lessons learned in all of this?

I saw all these people online talking about their side hustles and how much it had benefited them, so I decided I could do that too! I bought a rental property, started a blog, collaborated on a podcast and even moonlighted as a financial coach and freelance writer for a bit.

These side hustles took a lot more time and effort than they appear on the surface. I also realized I disliked the nitty gritty details of the hustles, the ones you HAVE to do in order to succeed.

To that end, I recently ended every single side hustle I started with the exception of the blog. The blog doesn’t exist to make me money and is more about interacting with the community so I’ve kept it.

I realized I value having time to myself to recover from my time at my full-time job. I have really enjoyed letting go of other’s expectations for my time and energy to focus on things that I want to do…. Things that make me happy or bring enjoyment to my life.

I read that you interviewed with a big deal social media company, Facebook. If even one of those words from that sentence is true you need to tell me everything. I’ll just be sitting here conjuring up my own dreams of what this would be like.

I can neither confirm nor deny any details.

I am a big fan of theming your year ahead. This year I chose The Year of Exploration. Tell me more about your 2019 themed year.

I elected to make 2019 The Year of Focus. Over the last few years, I feel like I drifted away from who I am as a person and I wanted to get back to being me. It’s fun to go back over my goals for the year and see how far I’ve come already!

While I’m familiar with you, please tell everyone where they can find you and if you have any projects or anything fun coming up that you want to share.

You can find me dropping wisdom bombs over at my blog, FieryMillennials.com (2 L’s and 2 N’s). I tend to spend a lot of time sharing fleeting thoughts or cat pictures on Twitter under my @fierymillennial handle.

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