About

My name is Kit and I realized my goal wasn’t to work a typical day job for 40+ years.  I realized this 9 years into my career, but luckily I hadn’t made too many egregious financial mistakes.  I have set some limits on my ability to achieve financial independence, the main one being location hence the name of the blog and the tagline, “No Geo-Arbitrage Required.”

What the heck is geo-arbitrage and why isn’t it required?  Wikipedia has a great article on arbitrage.  The geo portion refers to location.  The simple explanation is moving from a higher cost of living area to a lower cost of living area to make reaching financial independence easier.  For a lot of people this can be fantastic advice, but it’s not for me.

I grew up in California, lived pretty much my entire life here and have discovered very few areas outside of the state I would want to live.  As such I am starting my journey down the FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) path with the assumption I won’t be able to get to FIRE by simply moving.

As I said, I grew up in California, I went to college in California, and got my first career position in California.  I’m an engineer working for the federal government so I have a different perspective than others in the FIRE community on how to reach my goals and what tools are available to me.  I also have some advantages in that my wife and I are both working professionals with respectable salaries.

As I move towards financial independence I’ll share my thoughts and knowledge on a number of topics that will hopefully be useful to others seeking to get off the hamster wheel of lifestyle inflation.  Some of these are:

  • Federal government specific topics: FERS, TSP, USAJobs, TDY, etc. (For those not in government we use a lot of acronyms, these are basically retirement topics, hiring process and advancement, and work related travel)
  • Real estate (so far only primary residences)
  • Budgeting
  • Goal setting
  • My adventures in the outdoors: California and elsewhere
  • Other random topics

For those that wish to get in contact with me, I can be found on twitter, facebook, pinterest, or e-mail at kit[at]californiafire[dot]net.