August 7, 2026

I’m halfway through FIRE — or, as I call it, Debt-First FIRE. I want to share my strategy and compare it to the other FIRE variants out there.

If you know even a bit about FIRE, you already know the usual map. Lean FIRE is for people who cut spending to the bone to hit a lower number faster. Live on €25,000 a year, and the math says you need roughly €625,000 invested, using the 25x rule most of this community runs on — a smaller target, reached correspondingly sooner.

Fat FIRE scales up both the target and the lifestyle. Spend €100,000 a year, and you need €2,500,000 to walk away.

Coast FIRE is what happens once you’ve already invested enough that compound growth alone finishes the job, so you stop adding money and let time do the work. Say you’re 37 with €150,000 already invested, and you never add another euro. At a 7% average return, that alone grows to roughly €1,000,000 by 65 — nothing more required from you except staying invested.

Barista FIRE covers most of your costs through your portfolio, with part-time work filling the rest. Spend €40,000 a year against an €800,000 portfolio, and a 4% withdrawal covers €32,000 of it on its own. The remaining €8,000 — about €700 a month — is small enough for a part-time job to close, without ever needing to work full-time again.

My numbers don’t fit cleanly into any of these, and that’s really the point of this post. My fixed costs — before travel, before anything extra, but including all personal expenses, insurance, and monthly and annual taxes — run around €3,025 a month. I’ll break that number down properly in another post, so you can judge my level of frugality for yourself; it’s nowhere near as extreme as it was when I started. My rental income covers €2,650 of it. That leaves a gap of about €375 a month, and that’s before spending a single euro on travel or anything unexpected. Last month alone, I replaced a broken toilet for €650 and paid for a washing machine repair callout at €112.

It’s the same shape as Barista FIRE’s gap — just smaller, and covered by a rental instead of part-time work. I close it, plus travel and repairs, out of my own salary. Everything left over goes aggressively toward the principal on my property. That’s about to change, and I’ll walk through why in the next post.

Here’s what none of the standard variants really account for: what happens when the cost of your own debt becomes the unpredictable part, not the market. Lean and Fat FIRE both calibrate spending against a stable assumption of what your money will do. Coast FIRE assumes the growth engine, once trusted, just keeps running. Barista FIRE assumes you can dial your own labor up or down like a lever. None of them are built around a rate shock reshaping how much risk you’re willing to carry — they’re about lifestyle and income levers, not a fixed cost that quietly stops behaving like a fixed cost at all.

All of these strategies work, eventually, after a decade or two of compounding. But what happens in the meantime? What happens if you’re laid off and six months of emergency savings isn’t enough, because finding a job takes longer than that? What happens when something genuinely unforeseen hits?

I had two of those. I was laid off in the first big wave of layoffs, and it took me nine months to find another job. Around the same time, half of my mortgage was on a variable rate, and the installment kept climbing every month, unpredictably. Together, those two things pushed me to rebuild my emergency fund to cover a full year instead of six months — more on that breakdown in another post.

Debt-First FIRE was how I dealt with that uncertainty, or more honestly, with the near-certainty that something else would go wrong before something went right. It let me build equity, create a positive cash flow, and bring my costs down. But starting next month, it’s time to go all in on investing instead.

My ETF holdings are genuinely small right now, around €5,000. Years of putting almost everything toward the mortgage instead of the market mean my liquid, diversified investments are a fraction of what a typical five-year FIRE journey would show. Set my portfolio next to someone who went all-in on index funds from day one, and mine looks thin by comparison. That’s the direct cost of choosing security first.

So starting in September 2026, I’m flipping the ratio. For years, it was almost entirely extra mortgage payments with a little investing on the side. Going forward, I’m targeting roughly 80% of my available money into ETFs and only 20% toward extra mortgage payments.

The old strategy wasn’t wrong, to me — it got me real, secured equity at a moment when I needed certainty more than upside. This is a pivot because the conditions that justified that caution have eased, and the math has finally cleared my own bar for risk.

I’m not writing this from early retirement, but from a solid financial position within my own Debt-First FIRE. I’m in my forties, I still have a real monthly gap my salary has to fill, my ETF portfolio is intentionally small, and I’m still, deliberately, in progress.

If I can be this far from finished and still call it progress, you can start now, wherever you actually are.