We are Kurt and April Granroth. Some salient facts:
- Married since 1996
- Two kids
- Grew up in MI/MN but now live in AZ
- Both software engineers
- Both work for the same company and on the same team
- Absolutely no training in working with our hands
- DIY fanatics
- Want to retire “early”
- Want to be self-sustaining
- Try to learn something new every day
There are a lot of people that seem to be learning the benefits of DIY and FIRE (“financial independence; retire early) at a very young age… that’s not us. We spent the first decade plus of our marriage in a very typical consumerist fashion. We put only the minimum in our 401(k) and do no other investing. Proceeds from a tech IPO that we got in on all went towards a new car. Yep, new cars when we wanted them. Everything was new because we had the money and, gosh darn it, we deserved it!
It’s only been in the past five plus years that we’ve come to our senses. The advent of DIY and FIRE blogs and YouTube channels showed us a world that we didn’t know existed. Now that we know of it, we absolutely had to be a part.
Better late than never, we’ve committed ourselves to becoming as self-sufficient as possible. This means doing things DIY-style to an almost insane degree. The implies wrangling our finances such that we can shave at least a decade or more off of the traditional “need to work” career. We’re too old to “retire by 30” or even “retire by 40″… but “retire by 50” is well within our grasp.
This blog has been in the planning stage for some years now. We are learning as we go and it makes sense that we could show others that all of this can be done, and anybody can do it. You’ll see a lot of mistakes made in the various posts on this site. When you’re figuring it out as you go, mistakes are a frequent companion. We’ll show how mistakes aren’t the end of the world.
Hopefully the message you take away from this site is that “if those two could do all this, then so could I”. Yes you can!