About

About

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What is this podcast about, in a few words?

Life-hacking Europe. Finding the best country to study, work, invest and retire in. Which means: how to reach Financial Independence in Europe.

How will we do this?

Interviewing people who have achieved FI in Europe: business consultants, bloggers, investors, business owners and employees.

Who are we?

The interviews are hosted by Alvar and Mathias. I, Araminta, am the blogger (I write professionally over at Mint Studios). We all live in different parts of Europe (Scotland, Germany and Spain, respectively), we all have different jobs and are of different age. But we are all passionate about separating what we do from what we earn. We all want to live the life we want and not depend on a job to achieve this. By interviewing as many people as possible we hope to help others find their path to financial freedom, focusing on Europe.

Wait, what is Financial Independence?

‘Financial independence is the freedom to choose whether or not you want to work and what sort of work you want to do’

Yes, because when you retire early, you suddenly have the freedom to actually do what you want. No more waking up at 7 to go to work. No more getting home at 9 pm exhausted from your boss screaming at you. No more ‘ugh I have to work tomorrow’. The grind ends, and what starts is the adventure of finding what you really want to do in life.

Every person’s path to FI is different. People use different strategies, ideas and methods. Here are some examples:

The high-paying job one: Save up 25 your annual expenses, retire and live off 4% of your saved up nest egg.

The online work one: Work part-time online. The flexibility means you get to work from where you want and at the time you want.

The entrepreneurship one: Build your business, sell it and retire.

All the paths are different, but they all have the same goal: to be able to have choices. To have the choice to work or not. To have the choice to work on what you want. To have the choice to work how, where and with who you want.

Sounds pretty amazing? Yes, it is. And that’s what we’ll be exploring on this podcast.

Why just Europe?

The FI community in the US is hUGE (Trump says so). It’s amazing and inspiring how many people work towards achieving FI and improving their lives (check out an entire directory of them a Rockstar Finance!)

There is also a big community in Europe, but they’re a little more hidden. Those who have reached FI are hard to find, and unlike the Americans, they don’t start a blog to share their wisdom to the world. We want to find those people, and extract the juicy FI info from them.

You see, FI in Europe is an interesting thing: the large variety of countries and cultures means there are tons of different strategies and opportunities to really optimise your life.  

What do I mean by this? I call it life-hacking, but normally it’s called geoarbitrage: finding the best countries to work in, to invest in, to study in, to live in and to retire in. And we have way more interesting opportunities to do this in Europe than in the US.

So we want to find people in Europe who have done this: someone who has studied in Italy, worked in Switzerland and retired in Portugal.  Someone who grew up and worked in Germany, invested in Bulgaria and set up a business in Estonia. Or someone who lives in Germany but works in Switzerland and is planning to retire in Spain.

Not only do you get to cut a lot of expenses, earn more money and make life more comfortably, but the culture diversity makes it so much more fun and interesting (you get to learn a language or two!). Studying, working and living in the same country is so 20th century. Welcome to 2018, where we prioritise our lives over ‘la patria’.

What YOU can do

We’re a very new podcast, so any ounce of support is very helpful and encouraging.

You can leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

If you want to be interviewed or have something interesting to tell us, email us at: financialindependenceeurope at gmail dot com