 So welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal, always looking for interesting things to talk about and cover in Israel. And I came across an interesting blog called The Finest Dream via a social media group. And I have the two creators of that here today. They're called Fiona and Finn. And for those who haven't heard about fire, it's become financially independent and retire early. Did I get that right? Yes. Yes. Cool. So if you want to pin for us, see, thank you guys for for doing this for maybe telling people who haven't heard about fire, what exactly it is, and also the fact that you guys are doing it here in Israel. So let's start at the very basics. Can you guys explain what fire means? So fire is essentially its financial independence early, retire early, and it gives you the option to stop working whenever you want. But you need enough of that creating an extra pension for yourself to so you have the option is not to worry about a nine to five job or whether you're working from an employer or working for yourself, you have the option to choose to work or not to work. The point is to create enough passive income to live off. Yes. Like, you don't want to get to the age of 67 and say, Okay, I worked 40 years of my life. Now what you want to you want to be able to have when you still have a lot of energy, like when you're like 55. Okay, I want to go travel the world for a year, a year and a half. And I don't need to worry about a job. I have the money. I'm living off a living off a paycheck and I'm paying myself and going. It's essentially like if you're going on maternity leave, when people go on maternity leave, and they get paid from we talk to me like three months in advance, and then you're paying yourself a paycheck, your mortis want to pay yourself a income every month from your savings investments that you have, whether it's from the stock market or it's from real estate or any passive income that you could create. So fire isn't necessarily about, you know, sort of a get rich quick scream and end work as quickly as possible. While you're saying to me, it sounds like it's more about taking control and predictability over the point at which you don't have to work for for income anymore. Exactly. It's becoming work optional. It's becoming work optional. It's more about that. You can choose. I don't want to work anymore. I want to travel, maybe a full time part of all the vitality of my kids' school and beyond being in school in four hours a day, supporting the school without wearing an income because I have an income. A lot of people are not pursuing fire. They're pursuing FI, just the financial independence part. A lot of people continue to work in some capacity after reaching it. It depends on what age you're reaching. No, it depends on the person and what they want. Some people do it, some people don't. We're probably going to continue working in some capacity, but not full time. So I'm just interested. I mean, fire, from what I understand, there is a huge community on Redis and seems quite internet-centric generally. So how did you guys come across this? Because I understand you've been living in Israel for a while. So is this something that you heard about in the US and decided to start after making Aliyah or did you come across this concept and movement here in Israel? Well, we didn't meet when we met Aliyah. I grew up here in high school and everything. So I probably first really heard about it is from Rich Dad Poor Dad, the book by Robert Kanowski. But during COVID 2020, when the first lockdown happened, we were all locked down and I was on paid leave due to everyone else. I had a lot of free time and I was listening to Hope Timit with Aura Ariel and came across. She's a famous Israeli fire person. Like she retired at the age of 30 and she got inspired and whatever. Then during COVID, she got screwed. I'm going to Mexico for half a year. Her and her husband just sat in Mexico with their brand new baby for half a year and just lived off their income. So that was very inspiring. And then it took me like a year and a half to convince you. It did take another year and a half. You were talking about it all COVID. We have a COVID baby. And then I ended up going back to work, getting back to work. And then something happened at work that made me very frustrated. And I ended up leaving that job in my huff of leaving the job and finding a new one. There was this whole, if we did this and I wouldn't have to run towards a new one, I want to be able to make that decision. And then you found, Oh yeah. And then I found this couple, our rich journey, Christina and Amon, and they blog about this. Now they're huge, but back then they were a lot more modest because I think they had just reached fire at that point. So I watched a lot of their videos and I liked them because they were a couple. They were doing it together. They had two little girls and I thought, oh, maybe it is reachable. Maybe. Yeah. Do you guys feel, I mean, I think that a lot of people in Israel are just really bogged down in the kind of day-to-day financial survival here. Obviously we all know Israel is super expensive and life here financially is difficult. So did you guys not kind of feel a sense of maybe trepidation whereby most people here thinking about just getting by, getting by, but you guys are actually kind of looking a couple of steps further ahead and looking at retiring. Does the kind of scale of that objective ever kind of scare you guys? Yes. Yes. And it actually, like one conversation that we have often is that not everybody, like we are very privileged that we're not making huge salaries, but we're privileged that we have a high enough salary and that we also have the financial know-how and organization and in-house bookkeeper to swing this and a lot of other people don't. So we have also been affected by inflation and by the cost of everything going up. We now spend a thousand more shekel at least per month than we used to one year ago. When we last year, we set goals for ourselves for X number of thousand to invest every month and in January and February, we're passing it by 1000-2000 and now we're barely scraping that number by and we're still hitting that target every single month. Over the last year's target. But we're not surpassing it and in the beginning of one year ago, we were easily surpassing it. We were surpassing it most of the time. So yeah, it is hard. One thing that I think that makes it easier in Israel and this is what I tell people all the time. I don't know about easier in Israel, but my comparison, even though I never worked in the United States, I never lived there as an adult, I compare everything to there because I'm in American groups and stuff and American employers, they don't know you anything. And in Israel, you have your pension, you have your care, if you have a care in each download, you have a care in each download, which the two of those together is 30% of your gross being invested every month. That's huge. So even if you're doing nothing, the Israeli pension scheme, especially if you have a care in each download on top of it and you never pull from either one of them is pretty good. So that is definitely part of our fight, part of our buy savings. He's the pension and care in each download. And then there's what we put on top of it. That also was very intimidating to me in the beginning until I realized we're already part of the way there because we have this state mandated savings that we've already been doing. Only the pension parts mandate, can you turn what is not or just fortunate that we have. So what you guys are doing is taking the kind of mandatory pension contributions in Israel and for anyone who hasn't heard about Karen, he's still mood. I'm actually not sure what the exact, I think the English translation might be a provident fund, but don't quote me on that free tax free, relatively short-term savings vehicle that one can undertake in Israel in addition to your pension contributions, which are now mandatory, whether you're a employee as you guys are talking about, or as an that's my, but you guys are actually going to go beyond that you're taking the the basic you're taking the recommended in Israel and you're doing even more investment. So what are those additional investments that you guys are making? We're doing because of, as because we're American citizens, anything Israel based, if it's not direct stock, direct stocks or direct bonds, anything that's like a fund is very problematic. So we need to invest into US domestic funds as mostly US ETFs, which we're mostly doing following the S&P or the total stock market. So most English speakers in Israel are probably familiar with Facebook groups like, you know, the Living Financially Smarter Group, which is a course has become very famous. So not everyone as they understand in that group has heard of FIRE. So within the FIRE community in Israel, are there like different Facebook groups, or how do you guys interact with other FIREers? FIRE does exist in Israel, but I'm not quite sure how big it is. There are a few notable FIRE people in Israel and we are in several Hebrew speaking FIRE groups and one English and one English speaking FIRE group for Israel. And that one has about 600 people in it. We're also in several Hebrew speaking FIRE groups, like one of them is more real estate based, one of them is more stock market based. And those have tens of thousands of people in them. There's also Hassel Lidit who tends to be more anonymous, although her name has come out on things. Like a lot of these groups exploded during the first lockdown. That's true probably around the whole world. It's all of a sudden you locked down for like a month or two. And all of a sudden you're seeing the stock market went down 30% and then it went up 16% two weeks, three weeks later. And then everyone's saying, wow, what is this? One perception that people have about living in any way financially responsibly is that it's going to be really, really kind of miserable and involve depriving yourself of fun in all respects. So you guys are doing an awful lot of investing and the high cost of living in Israel. So does that not kind of put a real strain on the discretionary expenditure you guys might otherwise have? So there's a difference. As I wrote, as we wrote in our blog, we used to be pretty low income. And then we had a child that we had to send to daycare. And we were really, really strapped and we were eating, we were trying to find all sorts of different ways to eat legumes. And we were really struggling at that time. And we did feel like we were suffering. But now in our journey to to fi or to fire, first of all, this is a choice. And when it's a choice, instead of a necessity, it feels a lot different. We readopted some of the things that we used to do back then, and not others that we didn't like. Like we don't, we stopped, we stopped making rental workers. Like, no, it didn't work. Oh, yeah. In terms of enjoying life or whatever, we do have things that we like. For example, we love travel. We live for travel. That's something that's super important to us. Like, for example, our six and a half year old daughter has been to America four times. And she has been to Europe. And she's been all the way up to Naharia. She's been all the way down to Elat twice. She's been all over Israel. And our COVID baby has been to America twice. And he's been to Beijing. So it's about, it's not, you can't, you can't cut off all enjoyment because then you're never going to get to your goal. You have to say all the things that you enjoy, you have to find ways to do them anyway. And you have to cut back on all the things that you don't care about. And then you focus on the things that you do. So travel is part of our budget. And then when we do travel, we find ways to do it more cheaply. We'll travel on off season. We'll travel low cost airlines. We'll go to cheaper cities. Like right now we're planning on going to Europe and we're going to end up in Bulgaria or Romania. Our kids aren't, they don't care where they're going. So it's about, no, it's about the quality. I have to say, I have to say, I totally, totally support your alternative travel idea point that I made on this YouTube channel recently is about how dramatically the open skies agreement has really re-architected aviation here in Israel. And I think people are still thinking in terms of the kind of classic destinations that are not, and there's a lot of great destinations in Eastern Europe. They're actually on my travel list as well. You mentioned Bulgaria, a few more of them that they're basically, you know, if you can find the right ticket on Skyscanner or all the Israeli websites that exist, you can actually get some, get some really good bargains and it can really bring down the cost of traveling to less than Israel. Somehow we went to Budapest in 2018. So with our, our daughter at that point was the age of our son now. And we're trying to, we basically want to recreate that except that the costs have gone up an hour or another person. But yeah, we want to create, recreate that vacation. And also another thing, for example, we don't have a car. We got rid of our car four and a half years ago. But now we're incredibly fortunate that we have a city car. We have a car sharing car right outside our house. And yeah, it costs more than the bus and it costs more than walking. But it saves a huge amount of time. He takes the bus to work. I walk to work or I walk from home. So in every month or two, we use the city car. We have car seats that are easy to install and we'll go somewhere rather than slipping on the bus. So we do have access to the car. We do have access to the travel. We do go, we like to last summer we went to a water park and we just found really cheap tickets to a water park through our credit card. Like, but that is one of the things that we do also like the water park, it says at the front, you pay it. If you pay at the front, you're paying $139. But on the website says, if you order on the website before you come, you have already 20 shuck of discount. But if you look through your credit card, you could get even half price or even through Groupon or Guru. About us not giving ourselves our enjoyment or that is, we choose what's for us. We don't try to live according to what our friends are trying to tell us. We're doing this. Why aren't you doing that? Like, we're living our lives. We're also not trying to live them in the moment. Like, yes, it's important to live the moment. But yeah, but you also need to really realize you not only you only you can live on what people call the yellow moment that when you only live once, you need to worry about like in 20 years, like, but also you need to enjoy the journey. We need to join now. So you need to do a combination of both. I want to ask you guys, because we're obviously both living in Israel. I did a video about car for that we were talking about before we started recording. And that created a lot of excitement with people thinking that, you know, this new international grocery store is going to drastically change food costs in Israel. I'm just curious whether you guys have any sort of Israel specific hacks, whether it's shopping in a specific supermarket, avoiding waltz, which I find personally to be the biggest financial one of the biggest financial drains in my life. For those not in Israel, it's basically just a takeaway delivery service. So do you guys have any Israel specific hacks you can offer for other people here? No, the stores. Yeah, I mean, we have we have at least two posts on our blog about how to save money grocery shopping. But you have to, what we do is we we know which supermarkets tend to have the best prices on certain things. And then we rotate among the stores and stock up at each store to last until we get there again. We do, we do a major shop once a month, like we don't go every week. We do like once a month. For example, one of the super self, for instance, their imported cheese is 29 shekala kilo. Then when Picoach today is like 44 shekala kilo, I'm not exactly showing the exact price. But like, there is no they're like, if you avoid the name brands, you're going to find good quality and even the same quality. Like someone shared a week ago, two weeks ago, that Shufa sauce tomato paste that they advertise on their name brand thing. It's our name brand is whatever. If you look in the back and where it's made, it's the same while it's in the same place of one of the main name brands that's made in Israel. It's the same thing. It's just we made it especially for you. Osirat does that. Osirat has their own packaging. Instead of having the normal one kilo packaging, they have a kilo and 1.4 kilos. They do the same thing. They just buy from the same product and throw the label on it. Everything in our house is no name brand, not as much as we can. Most of the things is no name brand. But like, like a lot of people will say is, Oh, I'm so used to buying awesome and awesome. We'll tell them and all that. I cannot think about that. It's than that. But like, we do buy name brands, but like, you also need to only when there isn't either they're either the name brands are on sale. Or there is no alternative such as Kaddish cheese. There is no name Kaddish cheese. There is no name. Actually, there is no name milk, but it costs the same. No, there is no more no name milk. Super shall stop buying. Stop producing it this week or last week. Okay. You guys mentioned on your blog that your end goal is to retire in your 50s. So it's out sort of disclosing too much about where you guys are in life. I understand you're somewhere in your 30s. You guys are working office jobs. So you guys have kind of about probably 10 20 years more to retire. So how did you guys decide upon 50 that that decade is being your sort of endpoint for when you want to stop having to work in order to have to work. So to get to the point where you do not need to work, the simple math is saying is you need 300 salaries of your expected expenses. Then then of that is let's say you expect to need 20,000 shekel a month to live on, you need 6 million shekel of a nest egg. And from that you're first to pull 4%. The that if you when you invest in this stock market, the stock market goes up more than 4%. It goes up between 7 to 10% on average. So that 4% should take in consideration of a normal inflation, not what we have today in most of the world of up to 3% inflation. So if you're putting 4% and your portfolio is getting 7%, your portfolio is never going down. It's always gaining. If you have inflation of 5% and the stock market is going down 10%, you have a problem. We chose Tripsy because that's where we can get to. That's where we can get to when we want. That's when we would hit our goal of the number saying of our end goal is saying is we reached our number we can retire. We project that we can reach that number by 50. We may actually reach it a little before 50. We probably will because when we said 50 is being conservative of the stock market not going up. And also, I tend to be friends with all the Sabas at work who are all talking about retirement. And I am terrified of each of them. And being in the workforce at 50, having to look for a job, let's say at 50, I would rather not be desperate to have that work out. I would like to choose. I would like to be able to choose by that point. Working back maybe just a little bit, you guys mentioned also in your blog that it was when you became parents that you kind of, that was when the, was that sort of when you guys decided that fire was what you wanted to do. What exactly is, is the connection between when you guys became parents? It started, we, that's when we first had to take charge of our, of our spending and of our finances. We were always low level investing. Like, I think you were before we met. We always were investing a few hundred shekels a month, even when we were, because we were, when we were newly married, we were each earning a little bit over a minimum wage. And that's fine when you're just two people. And we were going out to dinner and we were doing all sorts of stuff and we were totally fine. And then we came back from our honeymoon, spent about 20% more than we wanted. We spent a ridiculous amount on our honeymoon to South Africa recommended. And, but having two slightly over minimum wage incomes while it can serve two people fine. It's harder to serve three people and spending all the things that a baby needs and daycare. And suddenly it's really, really tight. So at that point, we started pulling all these strategies to save. We weren't increasing our, our investing at that point, but that's when we realized we have to be frugal. We have to pay attention to how much stuff costs we have to track our expenses. We have to track our expenses. We have to lower our spending. That kind of led us through to today. And now that we're actively trying to lower our expenses in order to invest more, we are going back to a lot of those strategies that we had originally done a little bit. The ones that we enjoy, the ones that we did not prevent ourselves from enjoying stuff that's like, okay, so we need to take an extra, go an extra 10 minutes of a ride, drive a bus ride to a supermarket instead of going across the street. So like, okay, so that's an extra 10 minutes. So if by that we're able to get a better deal and save a few extra hundred check in a month, so be it. But like, I think a big difference also was that we used to eat out all the time before these kids and we used to order in all the time. And then we stopped doing it. Damn, this was before what? What's an exit? Yeah, this was before that. And then we stopped doing that. And then we started doing that again. And then we had an ordering in budget of, I think 500 check all month, which is like pretty normal, I would say, but we pretty much eliminated that because we realized, oh, this money can be better used. And then we started figuring out how to imitate all the things that we were ordering and just make them at home. And another thing that we stopped doing was when our kids were in school on Friday, we would just go to go into town, walk into the mall or walk into Mac stock and like, you could walk into our Mac stock or equivalent and wanting to buy something for 20 check, you could come out with a 300 check a bill. And it's gone within a few hours or maybe not hours, like shortly. So just by saying it's not going out to the sake of going out, by stop doing that, you're also saving because once you actually step out of your house to a shopping area, it's very easy to be tempted to buy something. I called up all our providers and said, lower my rates, cancel my fees, cancel. Like, I don't want to be paying extra money for stuff that I know I could get for free by just changing to someone else. And then all of a sudden that's 300 check and more that I saved and we saved a month. Well, that kind of thing, something we had spoken about is I think you had mentioned, Daniel, running a tight ship like in our preparation for this. And I was saying something when you have a ship, you need to waterproof your ship and make sure you have no leaks. So that's what we have done with our spending is we call up our service providers every 11 months. Finn does that and makes sure that we get the best deals for everything. And we check our credit card bills and we make sure that there's no expenses that we don't have. Which we had one time. Because other people, they don't know where their money is going. And some people, they don't know where their money is going and they are literally, it's leaking. It's like leaking out of their ship. And then they get to the end of the month and they don't know where it went. So that's, we patched. We patched the leaks. I want to say as well, speaking to that point that I think I did something a few months ago, I called up a credit card issuer, which in Israel we tend to have as you guys know, Cal and Israel card, I believe. And by default, they will charge you something like 15 shackles a month just for the privilege of having a credit card on which you're paying interest on every single transaction. I called up the company and I heard that so many times it can be done. And I just said, can you guys waive the card? It's something that I never would have thought of to do, but it was actually a very kind of fluid conversation and it worked. So I'm sure having just, you know, explored this one point, there are lots and lots of different charges that people are paying. And you know, I just want to say, I don't think it's predatory or cheap at all to be looking for better offers. That's why there's free market competition. And in the case of a credit card company paying you to maintain the privilege of charging you, it's a ridiculous charge. And it can be waived if you ask, you don't even really need to ask politely, but that never hurts. No, we could also like, a lot of these places have a WhatsApp, you could just message them on WhatsApp. And 90% like that's how I get all like, every 11 months, every 11 months when I recontact them, I WhatsApp them. I don't wait online for them. I WhatsApp them, wait for them to respond to me because a very essentially it is someone who's responding to me instead of waiting online. I respond within the five minutes chatting with them on texting the fees cancer for another year. You were saying it's not predatory, it's predatory on their end. Yes. Because we've had service providers where we threaten them, we ask them to lower the price and they don't do it. And then we leave and we switch to someone else. And as soon as we leave, they call us offering a lower price. And I always say, if you had this lower price to offer, you should have offered it when I asked you to lower it. Now it's too late. I want to ask you guys again, returning to the Israel specific context. We talked about budgeting and knowing where your money goes. I know there are a bunch of budgeting apps out there. Are there any you guys recommend or that are Israel specific or do you just use general tools to keep track of your expenses? We use for ourselves, we use Google Sheets, but a very popular one that came popular during the lockdowns was Rise Up. Let me just ask you one more question for someone looking to get going on this fire journey, especially someone based in Israel. What would you advise someone, perhaps like me, who was running a very leaky ship with money going into Walt and Amazon and generally was bad at financial management? This seems like a very, very big goal at fire, but what would you say to someone like in this situation, probably hundreds of thousands of people in Israel like this in Israel who are just looking for some encouragement to get going with this? I went to breakfast with a friend on Friday, and every time we hang out, she asks me about fire and she keeps saying how we're so inspirational and she wants to do it too. And I said by virtue of the fact that you even want to do this and are looking even to start, you're way ahead of so many other people. And the fact that you know that you have a leaky ship is so much better than other people who don't know or don't care. So for someone who wants to start, and this is what I tell her all the time, you're already ahead of the game, you already have your pension, if you have a care needs don't move, you already have your care needs don't move. The next thing to do is just to know how much money you're earning and how much money you're spending and know where all of your money goes. And then from there, like, yeah, budget, like if you're, if you're making 18,000 shekel and you're spending 20, you need to make sure you're under the 18 because essentially your ship, your company of your own household, you need to make sure you always have extra money at the end of the month so that your fridge broke tomorrow, you need to replace it, you're not going to be broke or whatever going overdraft cover it. Basically know, like before you people, people get like so intimidated with all the things that they have to do. And what I keep telling them is that like first know where you're at. That's a step into itself. And that's the most important thing you have to know how much money is coming in, how much money is going out, and to where before you change anything, people get so intimidated that they have to change things that they don't even start. Like I also, we also have friends that say, oh, we finally have enough, we can start investing. And there isn't a time to start investing, even if you have 100 shekels that you can invest like start because with the compound interest, you can start anytime it'll go. So Fiona and Finn, you guys started a blog called the finest dream, which is a play on the Zionist dream for financial matters. Tell me just a little bit about the blog and where people can find out more about your authorship on your fire journey. Our blog is at www.finestdream.com. Finest is like Zionist with an F. We're on Facebook and we're on Twitter. We blog about our journey to fire. It's, we do have some personal updates. A lot of stuff is just how tos. We wanted, our blog is both to be accountable for ourselves. And like for example, we posted on the blog that we are planning a vacation to Europe for the fall for under 8,000 shekels. So now we have to have a vacation to your 10000 shekels. You're working hard on that. I'm working hard on that. But it's one, to keep us accountable. And two, to be a resource for people, not everyone who reads our blog is seeking to achieve fire. There are a lot of things there. I would say most of the things there are just about how to save money. Those are actually, or know how to get the money back. Yeah, those are the post that divided tax return. The ones that are about investing. I feel like people, people read those less, they have, they're not as popular, but all of the ones of this is how you can with one phone call, you can save money and you can save money here and save money there and get money back. Those are the popular ones. And that reaches everyone. Like that touches everyone. That's something that can help anyone whether they're, whether they're aiming for a fire or not. Cool. So Fiona and Finn, thank you guys so much for doing this YouTube interview. I hope for other folks out there who are looking to do fire that this will be of interest. And of course, there is finestream.com. You guys can follow their journey. And there's also living, I have to say a shout out to, I believe it's called living frugally in Israel. Do I have the group name right? It's run by someone outside my called Adara and she is big into tips for frugal Israel. So these are Facebook groups that people should definitely check out if you're on this journey to cut down on your expenditure and really find other people who are doing it. Cause I think a big part of budgeting is not feeling ashamed about it and knowing there are other people out there who have similar objectives and just sharing tips and tricks. So thank you guys so much for coming on this little YouTube channel and good luck with the blog. And thanks for sharing your wisdom with people. Thank you. Thank you so much, Daniel.