Welcome to a new instalment of Strong Money Stories.
Where we hear from real members of the community, sharing how they’re implementing all the stuff we talk about.
Because while I enjoy writing, what I really want is to see strong financial outcomes – actions taken, wealth built, and freedom created.
Plus, the more varied examples we have of regular folks making financial independence happen, the less excuses people have for not joining us 😉
If you’d like to share your journey so far (anonymously or not), reach out via my contact page.
This month’s Strong Money story is from a family who has taken a fascinating approach to housing (and life in general), where they prioritise freedom, time with their kids and adventure, over the more traditional path to FI.
I’m Clive, and we’re a couple in our early 40s with 2 kids under five.
We came late to FIRE learning about it in our mid-30s, but made very big changes in our lives in order to achieve it.
We both had average professional salaries, with me being in Education and my wife working in Allied Health. I did a Bachelor of Music at University straight after school.
We discovered FIRE in 2014, but couldn’t really see how we could achieve it in Australia with the astronomical cost of accommodation. Our solution before we had kids was to build our own house!
That took 5 years of weekend work with no previous building experience. This was the foundational step in our FIRE journey as we only had a mortgage on the land purchase and paid upfront for the house build materials as we did it.
But then when kids were on the horizon, we thought deeper about what is important in our life and came up with a much more radical plan focused on providing fulfillment over owning physical objects. And it seems to be working so far.
The House Truck.
A house truck is a quite simply a house on a truck! But when we tried to get one manufactured in Australia, nobody was building what we wanted, so we had to build it ourselves.
It’s not a motorhome, although that’s what it states on the registration.
We wanted all the comforts of a modern house, in the form of something we could move around easily where ever we want to go. It must easily sustain a family of 4 in all kinds of environments and have ease of use at its core.
The biggest difference from a motorhome is that all appliances are normal domestic appliances. Think dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, fridge etc, all the same as you would find in a regular house.
You don’t find this in a normal motorhome or caravan because of the amount of energy required. So the next biggest difference therefore in a house truck is that we have a house sized solar and battery system.
There’s 4.3kw of solar and 15kwh of lithium ion battery storage. This enables us to run everything electric, and happily run the aircon 24/7 while in the middle of nowhere without a generator (the house truck we built is 4×4).
The amount of water will last a month and more can be filtered and sterilised from poor quality water sources. With ridiculously high speed Starlink, a house truck is effectively a fully functional house (or office) without the need for property ownership or renting.
(Before and after pictures…)
We are lean FIRE already, aiming to be Fat FIRE later. I pulled the FIRE trigger early to be an active parent with our kids.
The House Truck is an integral part of our FIRE plan as it enables us to be fully invested in the share market while also taking care of our accommodation needs.
The S&P 500 has historically outperformed property, and in the last 5 years has massively outperformed property. The House Truck enabled us to move all the capital amassed through owner-building our last house and move it into a generally higher performing asset class (shares), while still having a home to live in.
A much more fun home to live in, as you can see from our little YouTube travel channel where we to try to show viewers our experience of a FIRE’d life.
Because we’re choosing to lean FIRE, we’re living off a small portion of our portfolio returns. That makes it a possibility we can achieve fat fire AND home ownership again down the track, if that’s what we want in the future.
We don’t see it as a trap. If you can afford a house in Australia and still achieve FIRE in a reasonable time frame, then that’s great!
But that would be very challenging on an average income. What we DO see as a trap is not viewing housing as a form of consumption.
It’s so common to see people purchase as much property as they can borrow and then spend a lifetime stuck in full time work or a job they don’t enjoy in order to pay it off.
We’re not saying that people who do that are doing it without any consideration, although that does clearly happen too. Alternative narratives can be hard to find and many people don’t truly consider the opportunity cost of home ownership or renting.
The opportunity cost of having so much capital tied up in a home is life-changingly enormous. As we have discovered in the last 5 years when we sold our house.
Back in 2015, we owner-built our perfect, hand crafted dream home. When you owner-build a house, you generally have a lot more attachment to it because it’s grown out of your own personal blood, sweat, tears, through years of your life.
But even after this enormous 5 year slog, we still came to the conclusion that a house was slowing down our FIRE journey and our ability to achieve higher goals. We were doing it in the wrong order.
Achieve FIRE first and then a house when we can afford it (or want it). Back then, we could choose: A) to live in our house and work full time until we’re 60 or B) swap it for a FIRE portfolio and actually get time back to spend in a way that aligned with the things that we knew provided real meaning for us; family, friends and experiences.
I know people that go to work before their kids are awake and come home when they’re in bed. They do this because they ‘have to’ pay the bills. Is owning a house really worth cutting your connection to your kids down to 2 days a week?
We decided it wasn’t and that there must be another way – the way of the House Truck. Most people seem to view housing possibilities as either owning or renting. In reality, there are many other options.
But if you buy a home by borrowing a lot, then you are essentially trapped in the necessity of paying the mortgage. We look at buying a house the same way as buying a car – if you can’t afford to buy it outright, then you can’t afford it.
Yes, you can debt recycle to make the interest payments tax deductible, and this is good strategy in lowering the direct costs. But when the total repayments on an average mortgage is around double the original cost of the house, it’s not really a great outcome to slightly reduce that massive pile of money lost to interest payments by making it tax deductible.
As Peter Thornhill implies; it’s a better outcome of a bad situation. And there are so many more costs to home ownership than just the interest.
There are elements of lots of the great FIRE mentors in our strategy.
Mr Money Mustache taught us to focus on WHAT IS ACTUALLY IMPORTANT IN LIFE. This is a key lesson that is still sadly often overlooked.
It’s like the engineering approach of referring to first principles when approaching a problem. And more importantly – removing the fluff.
The human mind usually tries to overcomplicate. We know from Buddhism that physical objects themselves don’t bring a fulfilling life. Owning or renting a house does not bring meaning or happiness in and of itself.
We learned this the hard way when we owned a house. Whatever you own, actually owns you in some way. With something as big as a house it can consume most of your life’s output either directly or indirectly.
They don’t call them ‘lifestyle properties’ for no reason. Bloggers like Millennial Revolution reminded us that a FIRE portfolio is just as good (or much better) than a house. But mainly this idea was driven by a desire to simplify. Reducing complexity really does pay dividends in the form of a clearer mind and faster compounding.
Ultimately, the arrival of kids was a big motivator to put the plan into action. They are the ultimate beneficiaries of our efforts, both financial and non-financial.
People love the House Truck because it’s unique. The off-road nature of it inspires people. It draws a lot of attention.
We had to build it ourselves (again lol) because nobody else was making what we wanted.
Everything else we looked at before we built this felt like you were living in a cramped motorhome, not a house. I could probably go into business making these things for people, given the level of interest!
Travelling for us is about the same as living in our old house if you take out all the building / property costs. It’s hard to differentiate between building costs and ‘life upgrades’ when you’re an owner-builder though.
And we are really focusing on experiences with our kids, so you could definitely do what we’re doing a lot cheaper than we are – far cheaper than owning or renting if you were still in accumulation phase.
We live off our FIRE portfolio and don’t work remotely, but we’re open to work opportunities if something is interesting.
Getting time back. Our goals were to live our lives with our kids and lead by example. So being able to spend every day with them while navigating a path together through this spectacular country I think has been one of the best things.
It’s hard to choose only 1 good thing about being FIRE’d. The people we meet and the adventures we have. We have the best house in the country I reckon. It’s an added bonus to experience living in pristine places where you can’t build a house or stay in a resort.
We often miss things about traditional housing, but then we remember the maintenance, the inflexibility, the rushing, the list of jobs and of course, having to go to work.
We’ve lived in a bus before so we had a pretty good idea what we were in for. It takes effort to work out where to go or what to do next, but that’s also what keeps it interesting.
Full time travel is never ideal. There are challenges. Living in a tiny house with 2 kids under 5 has its challenges.
It’s interesting though. I’ve done 8 month stints of backpacking and van-life in the past, but this seems different. Having your actual house with you does make it different.
We sometimes do farm sits or house sits, but right now we’re on a trip around Australia. We do slow travel, so I’d say it’s completely different to what most people experience from a 2-week vacation.
I think it took me around 6 months to really slow down and leave some of those ‘vacation’ mindsets behind. I don’t think there is an ideal lifestyle, but this is pretty close for us at this moment. Unlimited time to do with what we choose while our portfolio compounds in the background.
We still like houses and dreaming up crazy spaces to live in, so we tuck them away for when we feel like we want to own property again. Which I’m sure we will at some point down the track.
If everything goes badly in our lives from here, we should still be able to buy some kind of accommodation with our super. But you must be comfortable with uncertainty. I know we will be living a fulfilling life no matter what happens.
We have met heaps of families travelling around Australia, but none on the FI side of things yet.
In fact, the community we have is much richer after embarking on this way of living. We didn’t meet as many people when we lived a regular life in a house.
We do meet people who are renting out their PPOR’s to travel, and that’s great. But that adds a lot of complexity and ultimately drag on wealth accumulation. We know this from our situation, because we can compare where we are now to where we would be if we had taken that option with fairly close accuracy.
It’s a way of turbo charging your path to FI. Especially if you can work remotely or something like that.
Our House Truck would make the perfect airconditioned office. You could run a multinational corporation from a remote waterfall in the Kimberley’s quite easily. Starlink is a game changer. Definitely give the lifestyle a try first to see if it’s what you think before you fully commit.
The biggest difference came from shifting our capital from our house to the share market.
The next biggest thing is keeping costs down while it compounds. We were able to slash the biggest expense in everyone’s budget – accommodation. Our solution also provides an adventurous lifestyle that we love!
If you want to make a big difference, tackle the biggest costs. I always find it strange that people stress about relatively little expenses like a dinner out here or a little luxury there, but don’t try and reduce the big costs. If you can do that, all those little expense categories usually pale into insignificance.
The last thing that made a difference was putting a big effort in. We couldn’t increase our income due to the structure of the awards (and we didn’t want to go into management), so I took a second job at night while we were building our house on the weekends to help pay for it.
This big effort in our thirties set the foundation of where we are today. It would have been much better to put that effort in during our twenties, but we didn’t know about FIRE then. Swapping the lazy capital in our house for 100% shares has made the biggest difference overall.
I think people should always go back to first principles and think about what is important to them for a meaningful life. Let those choices guide your financial decisions.
You can have all the money in the world and still be unhappy. If you know your WHY then you make much better financial decisions.
Focus on the big things and don’t stress the small stuff. It’s the big things that move the dial. Slash your biggest expenses.
Put all your capital in the highest returning asset class. Maximize your income. The first million is the hardest.
Almost everyone overestimates what can be achieved in 1 year and underestimates what can be achieved in 5 years. Focusing solely on finances is a common mistake because it doesn’t usually provide enough intrinsic motivation to keep on the path.
You can choose your own adventure in this world.
The irony is not lost on us that selling our house, quitting our jobs and going travelling will most likely result in us owning a house outright AND a FIRE portfolio in a similar timeframe than if we had stayed in our jobs and kept paying the old mortgage.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is get FIRE’d first, then everything else will unravel, given the right amount of time.
Well damn, that was totally different from just about every case study I’ve come across.
I really don’t have much to add – our readers have summarised their experience pretty well for me!
I always enjoy hearing different approaches to old problems. Obviously, this type of living situation won’t suit everyone, but it might be intriguing enough for some of you to look into options you might not have considered before.
If you’ve got a sizeable amount tied up in your home, and/or you’re looking to pivot to a more freedom-filled life, see if you can find a low cost way to slow travel having your home or investments pay your way.
You can find out more from our reader at the House Truck Life website, which they plan to update more regularly going forward.
Here are some resources you may find useful on your wealth building journey:
Mortgage broker: My personal broker of 10 years is More Than Mortgages. Highly rated and award winning, Deanna and her team been super helpful over the years and can assist with anything home loan related, including refinancing and debt recycling.
Sharesight: A great portfolio tracking tool for share investors, and free for up to 10 holdings. It tracks all dividends, franking credits and capital gains, which is incredibly helpful at tax time. Saves me a lot of time and headache!
My book: After 5 years and hundreds of articles and podcasts, I’ve distilled everything down into an easy to follow book. Designed as a complete roadmap to achieving financial independence and retiring early in Australia. Available in paperback, ebook, and audio.
Just so you know, if you choose to use these resources, this blog may receive a financial benefit at no extra cost to you. Thanks in advance if you do. And to be clear, I only ever recommend things I genuinely believe in.
This reader story is from a family who has taken a radical approach from the norm. They’ve prioritised freedom and adventure and time with their kids over home ownership, and are much wealthier and happier for it.
My thoughts on a behavioural trap I see in the FI community, how to recognise it and how to fix it. Far more common than you might think, and it can prevent you from enjoying the wonderful wealth you’re building.
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