Most FIRE content is written from America. Different tax system, different healthcare, different everything. I’m doing this from Europe — and I think that changes the math more than people admit. This is my journey.

I’m writing this on a laptop I bought in August 2021 for €1200, an HP ENVY Laptop 13-ba1xxx. The top right corner of the screen is completely shattered. It happened on 28 December 2025 and is held together with a clearly visible strip of clear tape. The bottom casing is fully open — this already had happened in 2023 and I repaired it for €300. However, it happened again at the beginning of this year, the screws came loose and it opened again. I stopped bothering to close it back up months ago. A new, better one would cost me €400. A proper repair would run about €300 for the screen and €300 for the case.

Can I buy a new one? Yes. Can I spend €300 or even €1200? Yes, I can.

I haven’t done either. It still works perfectly.

Vast majority of people around me judge my frugal choices. However, I do not let others opinions influence my plan.

“If words control you, that means everyone else can control you” – Warren Buffet.

Due to a serious of unforseen circumstances that we call Life, five years ago, I restarted from zero, in one of the most expensive cities in Europe without any family support nor inherited money. I was alone with myself and my challenge. I had just a job, a plan, great discipline, and a willingness to structure my living situation in a way most people my age weren’t doing. I started with house hacking: I rented a room in a shared flat to share housing costs with someone else living alongside me, instead of carrying the full weight of one of the most brutal rental and property markets on the continent by myself. It worked so well that I decided to share with one more person 4 months later.

From there, I invested everything by making extra payments on the principal of my properties. Firstly, I invested in a rental property in another country than the one I live in, trying to get a positive cash flow on the rental income which increased over time thanks to my aggressive extra payments and then I invested in a residential property and I also started to make aggressive extra payments to the capital. Although now I sold my first residential property for another one, this was my plan. Counterintuitive, with a lot of calculated risks, tailored for the layoff ERA we live in. I did not feel safe enough to invest all in ETF. The ETF investment strategy takes decades to provide dividends and I wanted to generate revenues from the rental property and to lower the monthly installment of my residential property with extra payments leading to reduced debt.
All my initial strategy was focused on reducing debt by lowering my costs rather than maximizing the ROI via ETF investments.
Why? Because after COVID, we entered in a layoff ERA and I needed to lower my fixed costs as much as I could. This strategy also provided me with a sense of safety and security. It was clearly not built to maximize the ROI, but it was the safest choice and looking at what happened 2 years later, it was the best choice. Indeed, I was laid off.
In practice, it was the opposite of a gamble: it was me trying to convert an unaffordable city into something I could actually build equity in, one calculated step at a time.

Here’s the part nobody plans for: the rate environment I bought into wasn’t the rate environment of the past 2 decades. I bought my first flat in December 2022, with a mortgage interest rate of 4.69% for the variable part and 3.53% for the fixed part (we will deep dive into this mistake the next time), while till 9 month earlier it was at 1% for the past 2 decades. One more time, the past 2 decades. Let it sink.
Why this happened? Then the war Russia- Ukraine broke out in March 4 2022, and within months, mortgage rates that had felt stable for years spiked hard till 6% and beyond. It was a shock.

Three years later, I sold the furst flat and I urchased my second flat. I was lucky enough to ended up settling at 3.72% — better than the peak, nowhere near the historical lows.

Every month I was afraid to opene the bank website and discover the new interest rate of the variable part and systematically every month the mortgage installment was higher while my income was the same.

That single experience recalibrated how I think about risk more than any book or blog post ever did. Every piece of standard FIRE advice says the same thing: invest aggressively, let the market do the work, don’t let debt sit around costing you money if you can pay it off.

I understood the math. I still chose to attack my mortgage as aggressively as I could for years because of my financial safety.

I’ve started calling this Risk-Averse FIRE, if I have to put a name on it. Not fear as an excuse to do nothing. Fear as data — data that radically change when life happens as a layoff.

Next time, I want to get into what actually separates this from the FIRE variants you’ve probably already heard of — Lean, Fat, Coast, Barista — and where my own numbers still fall short of the version of this I’m aiming for. For now, this is just how it started: a plan, a shock, and a laptop I still haven’t fixed.

— Miss FIRE