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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My husband used to be get into the FIRE movement before we had kids... When I got pregnant, the only way to convince him to read parenting books with me was that I agreed to read a "mr. Money mustache" article.

(Btw, MMM is now divorced, owns a Tesla, and doesn't seem to abide by his own rules anymore).

We have two kids and do not abide by a FIRE mentality, and the kids can pursue activities, we go on vacation, etc. 
But all that reading shifted our thinking and we do a few things that are FIRE-ish:

We bought a house we could afford on one income (though we had two when we bought). In our case, that meant buying in a gentrifying neighborhood in DC to get a better deal.

Our house is a duplex (two apartments that are connected.) until our kids were about 5 and 8, we lived in one and rented out the other, which covered the mortgage. Now we use both and connected them. When the kids are in college, we will rent the other side again and be income-positive on the house, and soin after that our mortgage will be paid and we will have a pretty significant source of monthly income from the house.

We drive a Toyota that I bought for $9,000 in 2009. That thing is not going to die anytime soon.

We don't have any car commutes in our life -- we can all bike to work/school . This cuts down on costs tremendously and increases happiness.

Part of my husband's desire to FIRE was that he hated his job. So, he was daydreaming about early retirement. After our conversations about it, he switched to a mission-driven organization that he cares about and now he really likes his job.[/quote]

This sounds similar to our story. My DH started reading Mr. Money Mustache in 2014 when I was pregnant with our first DC. We followed a lot of MMM's advice, saving over half our gross income, for four years and then went down to a single income for a few years when we moved across the country to pursue a career change for DH. We are a lot more lax with our spending now, but still live below our means and those years of aggressive saving at a young age have given us a lot of security. I'm grateful for those "MMM" years even though we ultimately don't plan to FIRE anymore.[/quote]

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