Welcome to FIRE Sweden!

I’m glad you found my blog. Welcome. I hope you’ll find my writing educational, interesting or at least somewhat entertaining. First things first:

Who am I?

I’m a 1990’s millennial, based in Stockholm, Sweden, currently exploring the path to FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). To observers, I think our life looks quite normal; I am married, have a 1-year old son and live in a house in the Stockholm suburbs. We have a car and we do normal millennial things like play video- & board games, read books, watch Netflix and run marathons (me, not the wife). We home-cook most meals and we enjoy the outdoors, be that playing in the snow in winter time or going to the beach in the summer.

Our current goal is to reach Financial Independence (FI) in the next 7-10 years (our early to mid 40s). I’ll be posting progress updates every now and then on the blog too.

Why a Swedish FIRE website?

I’ve been an avid follower of the FIRE movement for several years, but unfortunately a lot of the material that is widely accessible is US-based. For someone living in Sweden there are a lot of things that either don’t apply at all:

College hacking (university is free in Sweden)
401(k), 403(b), 457, IRA, HSA, 529 accounts, Roth Conversion Ladders, etc.
Various types of insurance that are basically mandatory in the US (or you might go bankrupt)

… Or at least that behave very differently due to things like pensions and tax laws (real estate investing is an example of this where apartments (“condos”) aren’t widely rentable in the same way in Sweden). Instead we have other things that we need to consider:

Traditional “depå” versus Investeringssparkonto (ISK) & Kapitalförsäkring (KF) and the various tax rules that apply to these types of investment accounts.
Tjänstepension, often accessible at 55 years of age, so our own savings often only need to bridge the gap between our early retirement age and the age at which we can tap our Tjänstepension.
Real Estate investing & Bostadsrättsföreningar (BRF)
Allmän pension, garantipension, the low cost of healthcare in old age
Friskvårdsbidrag while employed
Ränteavdrag (tax payers cover 30% of your mortgage, if you have one)
Travel Hacking isn’t as accessible in Sweden as in the US; limited options when it comes to rewards credit cards and much lower value of those rewards.

… And so on. As a result, I decided to start this website with the ambition of documenting and sharing the information I find that is particular to a FIRE life in Sweden. There are obviously many other topics that I haven’t mentioned in this post, but I intend to cover many of them in the future. Stay tuned 🙂

As I’m not quite retired yet I’ve decided to adopt a pseudonym for the purposes of this blog. Maybe once I’m closer to my FI number will I drop the pen name. But for now, you can call me FireMoose.

Why is the website in English if it’s a Swedish FIRE website?

The main reason is that I want the information that I put together to have the potential to help other people outside of Sweden as well (they might be considering moving to Sweden in the future, there might be some similarities with other EU countries, etc).

I’ll also add that while I’ll be writing mostly in English, I do speak Swedish and there will be a fair bit of Swenglish because I won’t be translating some Sweden specific things, like the ISK investing account mentioned above.

Why now?

As I write this I am preparing to go on extended parental leave (about 10 months) and I’ve been having these thoughts for quite some time. As such, I figured now would be a good time to start writing and sharing the thoughts and ideas that I’ve been wanting to share.

Who is this website for?

While the website is mostly a tool for me to gather my thoughts and put my ideas on paper (at first I was planning to just have a blog full of unpublished posts that I could review myself in the future), my ambition with the website has shifted and I now intend to curate a collection of content, from thoughts and ideas to the best books, podcasts, tools and websites I’ve found, that will be relevant to anyone who is either already based in Sweden, or is considering moving to Sweden; either post-FIRE or during the accumulation phase.

As such, some of the information on this site will be relevant and applicable to people anywhere, regardless of geographic situation, while some might be relevant only for someone inside the EU, the Nordics or sometimes only people based specifically in Sweden.

What is FIRE?

FIRE is the clever abbreviation of the words “Financial Independence, Retire Early” and is most often used to categorize a niche group of people who have been portrayed in the media as extreme tightwads, depriving themselves the joys of life in order to save their money to be able to retire much earlier than the traditional retirement age. This, of course, is not entirely true (although some people certainly do appear that way!). There are plenty of non-crazy people in the FIRE community and I hope to be able to shed some light on these people in the comings posts.

FIRE enthusiasts often refer to the “4% Rule” when asked how early retirement is even possible. There will be future posts diving into this a bit deeper too, but the short version is this:

According to the 4% rule, your current spending (the cost of your lifestyle) x 25 = your retirement number. If you spend 20 000 SEK per month, you’ll need around 6 million SEK to retire early. At 40 000 SEK per month, that number doubles to 12 million SEK. These figures are based on a scientific study known as the Trinity Study. However, that doesn’t account for things like tjänstepension which for many people is available from age 55 and can cover a significant portion of their monthly spending once they reach that age. Again, I’ll dive deeper into this in future blog posts.

Questions?

If you have questions or want to reach out, please feel free to do so on firesweden (at) pm (dot) me. I’d be happy to answer questions, take topic requests for future posts, etc.

(Please note I won’t be giving specific advice as I’m not a certified financial advisor or planner, but I’m always happy to share my thoughts and ideas!)

If you made it this far on my very first blog post, thank you! I look forward to sharing more FIRE-related stuff with you all.

Best regards,

FireMoose