About

Welcome!

I started Fire Dog after pouring over dozens of personal finance sites in order to educate myself on how to take charge of my finances. During this process I started reading a lot about the FIRE movement. While there are hundreds of sites teaching how to achieve financial independence and early retirement, I was struggling to relate. Most of the early retirees I read about were millennials, extreme savers, PhD’s, real estate agents, entrepreneurs or high earners with dual income and no kids. I am none of the above.

My name is Jeff, I have been married for nearly 30 years, and have 3 kids in their 20’s. I make a comfortable living in IT and have supported a family of 5 on a single income.

We have lived an average middle class lifestyle. We don’t have an extravagant home or extravagant cars (we have never bought a new car). We never took expensive family vacations, or had fancy party’s. These were some of the sacrifices we chose in order to live on a single income. However, like most middle class families, we spent the first 25 years of our marriage living with a large amount of credit card debt, surviving paycheck to paycheck. We would manage to pay down the debt through consolidation loans or home refinancing, but since we didn’t change our bad spending habits, it always seemed to pile back up.

During the course of this blog, I will share with you how we got out of the revolving door of high interest debt, and our journey to financial independence.

Full disclaimer: I am not a licensed financial advisor or tax expert. I can share what I have learned and what actions I have taken to take back my financial life. Contact me to discuss your financial journey.

Fun fact: The Dalmatian logo for the site is my dog. I have owned Dalmatians for the past 30 years.