FIRE-side chat: travelling and arriving

Imagine retiring early at 34… but not on the back of a decade at a US tech giant, selling a start-up, or even retiring from the Premier League, but after crossing the globe on a bicycle and then finding an edge in the early prediction markets. Few of us will follow a path like that of Pablo – a Spanish FIRE-ee who declared the game won in 2022 – but his unique story can inspire anyone headed towards FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early).

A place by the FIRE

Hello! How do you feel about taking stock of your financial life today?

Happy to do it. I spent years on the road being asked how I could possibly afford to keep going, so talking about my life is familiar ground. I’m a little nervous too, because I’ve told the story in pieces for years but never the money side of it in one sitting.

I read a few of the previous chats beforehand, so I know the level of honesty you’re after.

Money stopped being something I stress about a long time ago. I guess that’s the story I’m about to tell.

How old are you? What’s your relationship status?

I’m 39. Not married, but I have a girlfriend. We met after I’d already retired, and we’ve been together for four years.

Do you have any dependents?

A daughter, two-years old. She wasn’t in any of my FIRE calculations.

For most of my life I was sure kids weren’t for me. Then life changed. I met someone, and the idea came to look different.

One of the things I loved most in my travelling years was taking someone along for a stretch of the road and watching them light up at what was possible. Doing a version of that with my own kid sounded like it could be pretty special.

It is.

Knowing I could afford to do it comfortably – with all the support that makes it easier – honestly helped me decide.

Whereabouts do you live and what’s it like there?

Greater Lisbon. I love it. The city is full of people from everywhere, and when everyone is new, everyone wants to meet people. Making real connections has been the easiest of anywhere I’ve lived.

The weather is comfortable all year round, though I still escape to somewhere warmer for two or three months each winter, because I hate winter. And it’s an outdoor life. I can play sports outside nearly all year.

When do you consider you achieved Financial Independence and why?

A few months before I stopped working. It was always a number for me, and by January 2022 I had basically crossed it. I took a whole month off in Tenerife, decided I was done, and the last two months of trading were just padding the number for comfort.

Why that number? It was enough that my spending would sit safely under what the pot can produce forever, with room for the life I actually wanted, rather than the cheap one I’d previously been living on the road.

What about Retired Early?

I stopped trading in April 2022, moved to Lisbon, and I’ve been retired since, from 34.

I still build things. Lately it’s a website full of the calculators and guides I wish had existed when I was working towards my own number. I’m also reviving my old travel blog, and a few other random projects.

But all of that is for love, not income. Retired, for me, just means nobody decides my day except me.

Assets: owning the world

What is your current net worth?


Seven-figures. The exact number I keep to myself. I’d rather it never becomes the first thing the internet says about me!

What matters for the story is it’s enough that a crash never forces me to sell, and my spending sits comfortably under a withdrawal rate the pot can sustain more or less forever.

What are the main assets that make up your net worth and are there mortgages or other debts that offset it?

Almost everything is global equity index funds, all accumulating, spread across a few brokers.

On the Spanish platforms, MyInvestor and Selfbank, I hold Vanguard index funds. On Interactive Brokers and Trading 212 it’s ETFs, mostly Vanguard’s all-world fund, VWCE, plus the iShares world and emerging markets ones, SWDA and EMIM.

When I retired I was 94% equities and 6% cash. These days it’s more like 98 or 99% equities, and 1 or 2% cash depending on how recently I’ve sold.

No property yet, no pensions, no business, no crypto, and no debts.

The one thing on the way is a flat. I’ve paid the deposit on a place that’s being built.

What’s your home like?

I rent a four-bedroom apartment overlooking the river, in a new building, with a nice terrace. I took it when I first moved to Lisbon and had more space than I knew what to do with – yet somehow, now that we’re three in the apartment, I’m running out of it.

The deposit I mentioned is on a flat being built in the same area, slightly bigger than where I live now. It wasn’t really a financial decision. It was a ‘make it mine’ decision. I want to set up a home exactly the way I want it, and have a base that doesn’t depend on a landlord’s plans or what happens at the end of a rental contract.

Do you consider a home an asset, an investment, or something else?

I guess it depends where you sit. An asset, yes. An investment, possibly, and whether a good one or a bad one is another story. I’ve turned this question over enough that I ended up building a buy-versus-rent calculator.

What I don’t like is having a big chunk of a portfolio stuck in one property, in one city, in one country. That’s a concentrated bet on the politics and economics of a single place, and I don’t want that exposure.

The way I look at it, your home can sit in your net worth, but be realistic that you can’t draw a percentage from it. It pays you in rent you don’t pay, and it charges you back in taxes, insurance, and repairs.

Earning: running the numbers

What is – or was – your job?

There was never one job – there was a sequence of ways to fund freedom.

I started working at 18 and left my parents’ home at 19. That same year I had a few months of online poker, which taught me something that shaped everything after: odds are something you can study, and sometimes you can be on the right side of them.

By 23 I was managing a restaurant in Gijón, in the north of Spain, with the safe career path laid out in front of me. In January 2011 I quit and left with a backpack. That was the real career decision of my life.

Everything after that fed the same project, one way or another. I taught myself web design to run my travel blog, and that turned into building websites for people while I moved. I picked up a camera, and within a year I was selling photography to magazines and campaigns, and running workshops.

The blog won best travel blog in Spain in 2015, and the trip ended up in a good stack of magazines and newspapers.

Nice! Did that contribute financially to your achieving FIRE?

Directly, no – and not for lack of opportunity.

I never tried to make the blog earn. I wrote it for the fun of it, for the pleasure of sharing what I was learning and researching along the way. Every idea I had for monetising it died the same way – it felt like selling my soul. 

The way it did pay me was sideways. I taught myself web design to run it, and people who found it started asking me to build their websites. That became work I could do from anywhere. The photography and the press came through the same way.

So the blog brought some income during the road years indirectly, but the pot itself was built in the trading years.

Got it. Onwards!

Between backpacking and the bicycle trip I spent about a year and a half in Manchester, working as a waiter, saving up for a bicycle, a tent, and enough money to ride around the world without running out of it.

Then, from January 2014 to December 2018, I cycled from London to New York the long way round. That’s about 47,000 kilometres through 30 countries.

After the ride I went full-time into trading prediction markets, which means pricing probability better than the people setting the odds. That’s the chapter that produced ‘the number’.

A few years of it, and in April 2022 I stopped, moved to Lisbon, and retired.

What was your annual income?

It changed with every chapter. The restaurant paid a normal Spanish salary. In the UK I made a killing on tips working as a waiter. In the travelling years I lived on around €10 a day backpacking and €3 to €5 a day on the bicycle, and the photography, the websites and the odd stretch of work along the way covered more than the life cost.

During the trading years it grew month by month, year by year, to the point of making six-digits monthly, until it was enough to retire on.

None of it ever came as a salary.

What was your edge with trading? I’m guessing it’s that early prediction markets were not super rational – a bit like early online poker? 

Since you ask straight, I’ll answer straight, then explain why I stop where I stop.

The markets were sports markets, and the counterparty was the bookmakers. I built models that priced the probability of outcomes, compared my number with their number, and took a position only when the gap was on my side.

So your poker instinct is the right one. What poker taught me at 19 is that odds are something you can study, and this was that lesson with more spreadsheet. Anomalies rather than big-picture calls – the systematic kind you find, verify, and then execute over and over without getting creative.

What was your typical day like?

Gloriously unglamorous! Maintain the models, watch the prices, act when the numbers said so. Log everything, review. Tracking the game was the whole game.

My vagueness past this point is deliberate, and only half of it is privacy.

I had a real edge and I checked the maths constantly. I don’t want my story read as an invitation for a reader to try the same without either – because that version of the story ends with less money, not more…

How did your salary progress, and to what extent was FIRE part of your plans?


There was no career ladder, so there was no progression in the usual sense. The progression was in freedom. Each chapter bought more of it.

What I knew early – long before I’d heard the term FIRE – was that freedom was the most important thing in my life, and that I had a very open mind about unconventional ways of making money. Once the trading started working, financial independence stopped being a direction and became a number.

From then on the plan was simple: reach the number, stop, make the freedom permanent.

Did you learn anything on the way that you wished you’d known earlier?

If I could send one message back to 20-year-old me, it would be: go now.

The world was the real education, and it didn’t properly open up to me until I left at 23 and discovered that everything was possible. Everything since has been a natural progression of the way travelling taught me to look at life.

But honestly, I wouldn’t skip a single step. Every job I had I enjoyed until I didn’t, and then I moved on with my life. That’s served me better than any career advice I ever got.

If anything, the pursuit of freedom was the career, and everything else was logistics.

Do you have any sources of income besides your main job?

Not since I retired, no. Everything I’ve done in the last four years has been for the love of it: hosting investment meet-ups, talks, and roundtables in Lisbon, the website, the tools I build for it, and a book I’m writing about my whole journey.

Any of those could probably make money if I pushed, and maybe one day I will if I feel like it, but it would never be the point.

I stopped doing things purely for money a long time ago. If I don’t enjoy it, I don’t do it.

Saving: the 3.33% rule

What is your annual spending? How has it changed over time?

These days, somewhere between €90,000 and €100,000 a year.

It has never needed a belt-tightening – it’s under the 3.33% of the pot that I’m comfortable drawing for it to last more or less forever. So I spend freely within reason, splurge when I feel like it, and it hasn’t been a problem yet.

The change over time part I find funny. I once travelled for a month on zero euros, as a challenge. The backpack years cost about €300 a month, the bicycle years €100 to €150 a month.

Today I spend in a week what once lasted me years. I couldn’t honestly tell you my happiness has moved much either way.

Do you stick to a budget or otherwise structure your spending?

No budget. Ideally once a month I pull my bank statements into a money app so I know what’s going on. In reality I sometimes let it pile up for two or three months and then procrastinate a bit longer. I properly look at where it’s all going maybe once or twice a year.

That’s the whole system. It works because my spending never threatens to get out of control, so there’s nothing to control. I’m aware of the costs, not stressed by them.

Are you using the 4% rule or a similar strategy to manage drawdown and spending?

My version is a 3.33% rule, and staying under it. Drawing up to 3.33% of the pot – roughly one thirtieth – is the level where I’m satisfied the money lasts practically forever, whatever the markets do.

What’s the mechanics of running this?

They are simple. I keep a cash buffer, and when it starts to run low I sell – at least six months of spending in one go. This way I’m not constantly selling and shuffling money around, and there’s always cash sitting there for any sudden expense.

If the moment feels like a bad one to sell, I can wait; if the cash runs out before a better moment shows up, I sell anyway.

I like to buy peace of mind. The system has been stress-tested twice since I retired – in 2022 and in spring 2025 – when markets dropped hard. I sold nothing either time. The buffer worked, so bravery didn’t come into it.

What percentage of your gross income did you save over the years? 

I never measured it, and the honest answer makes a percentage a bit meaningless. On the road there was barely anything to save, yet I finished five years of cycling with more money than I’d left London with. That life cost so little that stretches of work along the way – a bit in Georgia, a bit in China – paid for more than the entire trip.

In the trading years this flipped: I was too busy making money to spend it, so I was saving nearly all of it, without trying.

There was never a savings plan in either chapter. One had no spending to speak of, and the other had no time to spend anything!

What’s the secret to saving more money?

Find out what a good life costs you. Not in theory, in euros (or pounds), but rather: for your own life.

In my twenties, I used every trick to spend less, and sometimes I overdid it, but the answer was worth it. My good life turned out to be shockingly cheap for years. Even now, with the flat coming and the steaks and the winters away, it’s a number that doesn’t scare me.

Once you know that number, saving stops feeling like sacrifice, because you can see what you’re actually buying with it: free years.

If we are thinking on how to save money to reach FIRE, then, for me, after you have looked at your expenses and cut what makes sense to cut, you should next focus that energy into finding ways of making more money – ideally something you can scale – instead of stressing and wasting energy on cutting a few euros or pounds per month.

Any hints about spending less?

The month I travelled on zero euros taught me more about spending than any book. I’m not suggesting anyone live like that, but once you’ve seen how little a day can cost, the fear goes out of spending less. A lot of expensive habits reveal themselves as habits rather than needs.

My practical hint is boring: know where the money goes. Pull the statements into an app or spreadsheet once a month and just look. The leaks are usually things you don’t even enjoy.

Do you have any passions or hobbies that eat up your income?

Plenty, and I don’t fight any of them. Padel is the current obsession, with the rackets and lessons that come with it. It’s actually the first sport I’ve paid to learn properly.

The others I just kept buying gear for: rock climbing, ultimate frisbee, and even historical European martial arts, which is as niche as it sounds!

There’s also the gym, and a longevity habit that adds up: blood tests, supplements, sauna. What’s the point of being financially independent if the body fails first?

We have a babysitter for our daughter, which is some of the best money I’ve ever spent.

Travel is the big line – two or three months somewhere warm every winter, comfortably these days, a motorhome trip around Norway last year, and next winter we’re thinking South Africa or Southeast Asia.

And meat. I like good meat – sirloins, entrecôtes, the odd chuletón or tomahawk, and I enjoy reverse-searing big pieces at home. I look at what any of it costs and I have no reaction. It’s what the money is for.

Investing: a life more ordinary

What kind of investor are you?

Passive, boring, and glad about it! Global index funds and ETFs, all accumulating, low fees from day one, and I’ve never churned a thing.

The portfolio I set up is essentially the portfolio I hold. I’m 98 to 99% in equities, and I genuinely think 100% equities is the best play for an early retiree, as long as you don’t panic.

That caveat is behavioural, not mathematical. The numbers say a global portfolio recovers – the question is whether you’ll still be holding when it does. My answer to that is the cash buffer. I never want to be urgently selling shares in a crash to pay for groceries.

Honestly, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t panic either way, cash buffer or not. The buffer just means I never have to prove it and keeps my stress levels down.

What was your best investment?

Leaving Spain at 23 with a backpack. Everything I have compounded out of that one decision: the confidence, the open mind about how money can be made, the discovery of how little a life costs, and eventually the number itself.

Years later I managed to put what it taught me in one line: “Fear does not prevent death, it prevents life”.

Second best, keeping an open mind about unconventional ways to earn. That one definitely paid off.

Did you make any big mistakes on your investing journey?

A very British one, for those reading this. Between the backpacking and the bike trip I lived in Manchester for about a year and a half, working as a waiter, and I put most of my savings into an ISA. The cash kind. I wanted the money accessible and stress-free while I cycled around the world, so it sat there, safe and going nowhere, for five years in which I barely touched it.

Knowing what I know now, that was exactly the situation a stocks and shares ISA in a global index fund was invented for. A cheap mistake as mistakes go – but five years of compounding is five years of compounding!

The other mistake took longer to spot. Long after I started to make significant amounts of money, I kept optimising like it was still the €10 days. There are cheap flights from those years whose savings I couldn’t tell you now, but whose miserable hours I still remember perfectly. Being frugal served me for a decade – being unable to stop cost me real comfort when I could afford it. It took time to change my mindset and relax about spending money.

If I’m understanding correctly then, your strategy was saving hard to get some seed capital, living frugally, and then investing that capital for a few years – ultimately parlaying that via Prediction Markets into your final retirement pot?

The index funds never built the pot – they are how I am keeping it afterwards. The engine was the edge itself.

The starting capital was whatever survives five years on a bicycle, nothing significant. What the frugal years really bought me was runway. A life that cheap meant the markets never had to pay my rent before they were ready to, and I could give the method my full attention for as long as it took.

From there it compounded the boring way. The results grew month by month, year by year. I was too busy making money to spend much of it, so nearly all of it stayed in. As it piled up it moved into global index funds, and when I stopped in 2022, the funds took over.

So: edge first, index funds after. Saving hard was never the wealth plan. 

What has been your overall return, as best you can tell?

A confession: I had never looked until you prompted me to – I normally just look at the current net worth total in the app. The money app I pull my statements into tracks it automatically, so the number had been sitting there all along: around 75% overall.

I started buying in during Covid, so the smaller early purchases have appreciated enormously and the later ones much less. The ETF I bought most recently – which is the one I sell from first because selling it realises the smallest capital gain – is up around 60%.

I suppose the reason I never looked is that the number changes nothing. But there it is, measured for the first time, for this interview.

How much have you been able to fill your ISA and pension contributions? 

My complete ISA history is the cash one from your mistakes question, which I suspect makes me unique among your interviewees. If I’d found Monevator ten years earlier, that chapter would probably have gone differently.

Beyond that, nothing. Spain doesn’t really offer worthwhile wrappers, and I’ve never used pension products. Everything sits in plain taxable accounts with low fees.

Keeping it that simple has one advantage: it works the same wherever life takes you.

So tax incentives and shelters didn’t influence your strategy?

Hardly at all. I use accumulating funds, which is the sensible default for a European investor anyway, and when I sell I sell the lot with the smallest gain first to keep the tax bill reasonable. That’s the whole strategy.

Rules differ in every country and change all the time, so I never wanted a plan that only works because of one paragraph in one tax code. I optimise where it’s cheap to optimise, and I’ve never let tax decide anything important.

How often do you check or tweak your portfolio or other investments?

Far less than anyone assumes. I pull statements into the money app monthly, in theory, look properly at the spending once or twice a year, and the portfolio I leave alone.

I’ve never had to change the allocation. The only recurring activity is selling for cash flow, roughly twice a year. My most active investing behaviour is procrastinating over the statement import.

How do you account for the new flat in your FIRE projections? Will you pay out of cash and accept a lower portfolio return, or take a mortgage and treat it almost like you’re renting to yourself? 

The projections never lean on the flat. The pot that has to last is the liquid one. The flat will sit in the net worth column, not in the drawdown maths.

What changes when I move in is the shape of the spending – the rent line disappears, the owner costs arrive, and the total still has to sit under the 3.33%, with the flat fully absorbed.

On the how: I’m buying the flat off-plan, so I’m paying 30% while it’s built and the other 70% at delivery. The plan for that 70% is a mortgage, so pretty much your renting-to-yourself idea.

While mortgage rates sit below what I expect the portfolio to return, I’d rather owe the bank cheaply than pull a big chunk out of the market. I’ll make the final call when the building is finished and I see the rates on offer. 

How does your girlfriend fit into the financial picture?

We met after I had already retired, so she was never part of the plan or the number. It was calculated before she was in it, and it has room for the life we share now, but she contributes to our common expenses.

On the road: physically down but most certainly not out.

Wealth: a standing (desk) ovation

We know how you made your money, but how did you keep it? 

By making the keeping as unlike the making as possible. The money was made with an edge, actively, glued to screens. The moment it was made, its job changed: everything went into global index funds, the allocation was set once, and a cash buffer stands between the portfolio and my groceries.

No leverage. Nothing exotic. Nothing that needs me to be right ever again.

Which is more important, saving or investing, and why?

For me it was saving first, in the sense that learning to live happily on little is what made everything else possible. It kept me free for years with almost no money, and it meant my number never had to be huge. But the pot that keeps me retired is the investing’s work.

The thing I’d put above both is knowing what your life costs. The saving and the investing both exist in service of that number.

When did you think you would achieve financial freedom? Was it a goal with a timeline?

It was always a number, never a date. I knew roughly that it would take a few years.

The number itself moved once. My first target was smaller, priced for the road-cheap life I’d been living, and I revised it upwards when I realised I might want more from the next chapters of my life.

I’m glad I did. The life I have now, with the kid and the flat coming and the winters away, wouldn’t be possible with the first one. And in the end it came down to months, not years. I knew months in advance I was there, and the final stretch was just padding.

Did anything unexpected get in your way?

The markets never surprised me. My own body did. After five years of cycling I sat down at a desk and put on ten kilos without noticing, because I was still eating like a man crossing continents while burning the calories of a man in a chair.

I dealt with it the way I deal with everything: I changed the system.

Standing desk, a walking pad under it, and no more snacking as if I had 8,000 calories a day to replace. The weight came off and stayed off.

Are you still growing your pot? If you’re de-accumulating, how?

Both at once, which is the strange privilege of spending under the growth rate. I’m de-accumulating in the mechanical sense, selling roughly twice a year to live, and yet on paper the pot is bigger than the day I retired.

Inflation has been a bit crazy, to be fair, so the real picture is less impressive than the nominal one. But the division of labour is clear – the pot looks after itself, and I look after the spending rate.

It’s interesting to me that you could switch off that money-making machine when you hit your number. As an active investor I know I can’t! It’s addictive to ‘beat’ the system, no? Did you feel your edge was waning? Or was it charging too high a physical price to be glued to screens all day?

I think the difference between us is I never loved the machine, I loved what it was building.

There’s a pattern in my life. I go all in on something, get it where I wanted it, and then walk away without much ceremony. Poker bored me after a few months. The restaurant career I enjoyed until I didn’t. Trading was the first time finishing had an exact number attached.

And no, the edge wasn’t fading. The odds got sharper over the years, so each position yielded less, but my results were still climbing, because I kept finding new angles and kept raising the daily volume of positions. That was why the yield was going down over time – because I was widening the range of events I would be working with to maximise profits.

I stopped because the number arrived, because it had stopped being a challenge, and because I wanted my days to belong to something other than being in front of the screens.

You already have the ten kilos weight story. Behind it sits a simpler fact, which is that I had spent my whole adult life outdoors and free. Past the number, every extra month was earning money I had no use for and paying for it in the only currency I’ve ever cared about.

Do you have any further financial goals?

None. The game is over. The flat will get finished, my daughter will get a financial education, and the money just needs to keep quietly doing its thing.

What would you say to Monevator readers pursuing financial freedom?

Freedom is not waiting for you at the number. I was freer at 24, on €10 a day, than most people with a full pension. If your plan is misery now in exchange for freedom later, fix the plan. The years on the way are your life too.

My whole life has been a search for freedom. FIRE did not start it, and reaching my number did not end it – it just made the freedom permanent.

In the weeds: you can go your own way

When did you first start thinking seriously about money and investing?

About money, early. I was working at 18, out of my parents’ home at 19, and that same year I spent a few months making money at online poker, until it bored me. So I always knew money as something you could figure out.

About investing, embarrassingly late. Until the last years of the bicycle trip I genuinely felt like a genius parking my money in deposits and savings accounts at 3 to 5%.

Then somewhere on the road I started reading properly, met the idea of index funds, and quietly stopped feeling like a genius.

Did any particular individuals inspire you to become financially free? 

Honestly, no. What I was taught as a kid was the opposite of all this: get the safe job, build the good career, get a state paid pension, and rest at the end.

Nobody around me was modelling financial freedom. I just decided the default wasn’t for me and worked the rest out backwards along the way.

How do your parents feel about your journey? You mentioned a life was laid out for you, but you’ve taken a very different route. Was there any tension or conflict?

There was never a big scene. My parents are both teachers, and the script I grew up with was the one they lived themselves – solid job, long summers, the same rented house by the same beach every August. A happy childhood, and a strict one.

When I quit my job and started traveling in 2011, the reaction was worry rather than anger. They didn’t understand what I was doing, and for years the most generous reading available to them was that it was a phase. My furniture went into the family’s storage rooms, and I think they accepted before I did that I wasn’t coming back for it.

Today I think they’re amazed at what I’ve pulled off. They always knew I was capable. What they could never see was how any of it added up to a safe life, and safety was the one thing they wanted for me.

In the end I got exactly that, by a route they still can’t quite comprehend.

I guess they’re proud.

Can you recommend your favourite resources for anyone chasing the FIRE dream? 

Three, and each one was useful at a different step of the journey.

Mr Money Mustache, specifically the early explanation of index funds. It was the first time investing sounded simple enough to actually do, and it pointed my money in the right direction.

The FIRE subreddits. I love skimming around and absorbing random information that way, with hundreds of real cases and real mistakes. It suits how my brain likes to learn.

Finally, a calculator – the ‘Will your money last?’ visualiser at Engaging Data. I stared at that thing a lot while I was working towards my number, watching the odds pile up on my side. Very comforting at the time.

I ended up liking that genre of tool so much that half my own site is calculators now.

What is your attitude towards charity and inheritance?

Charity: I’m generous with causes that matter to me when something crosses my path, but I don’t run scheduled donations. I’d rather get my hands dirty on something that matters to me. It’s case by case, like most things in my life.

Inheritance: I’m not planning to play that card for a long time. But everything is arranged so that if something happens to me, it goes to my daughter, with enough for my girlfriend to raise her comfortably.

I’d rather not die yet, though.

What will your finances ideally look like towards the end of your life?

My whole philosophy is that the money has to last no matter how long I live. I’m optimistic about technology and medicine within our lifetimes, and if that optimism pays off, this pot might have decades more work to do than the spreadsheets assume.

So I keep the withdrawal rate at a level where the pot never meaningfully shrinks, and no, Die With Zero is not for me. I’m playing the game where the money outlasts every version of the future.

If I knew for certain I had, say, a year left, I’d loosen up. But I wouldn’t burn it down for fun.

My daughter should grow up with a good financial education, so that whatever she inherits one day, she knows exactly what to do with it.

That, more than the money, is the inheritance I care about.

My thanks to Pablo for sharing a very different perspective on life with this story. Thoughts and feedback are welcome, but please keep it constructive! This is a personal story, and I’ll delete anything I deem mean or uncivil. Also check out his website: The FIRE Exit. And read more of our FIRE-side chats.