Welcome to the launch of FI (pronounced “F-Eye”) Road Trip! What is FI Road Trip you’re wondering? Good question. I had two main topics for this blog that I was contemplating: personal finance and travel. I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to write about more so this is my attempt to combine both topics into the blog you see before you.
Intro
My name is BML and I’ll be your guide as we travel through this blog (real name, no. real initials, yes). My wife, two sons, and I currently live in southeastern Pennsylvania about 20 miles outside of Philadelphia. I say “currently” since this is the longest I’ve lived in one place since my childhood home that we moved from when I was 13. As for my wife this is the longest she has ever lived in one place. Ever. So while we’re happy here and we don’t want to move while our kids are growing up sometimes you just can’t ignore wanderlust.
In the past year I turned 40 so I feel like I have enough knowledge or life experiences (or simply opinions) to write a blog. I am someone who enjoys learning and hopefully this blog provides a way for me to share some of what I know with a larger audience while meeting others with similar interests along the way.
This Blog
My chosen topics are popular ones. Personal finance means money and it’s something that no one except these people have enough of (there are over 2,000 billionaires in the world?!). My wife and I both work full time and are raising two kids. We don’t want to work til we’re 80, but we also want to give our kids and ourselves the chance to experience the world while we’re all still young. So you’ll find that a number of my posts discuss ways to balance the quest for financial independence (FI) with the goal of intentional fun (IF).
That brings us to travel. I have always loved to travel.
Fun fact…each summer when I was growing up my parents would take me, my sister, and my maternal grandparents to some vacation destination in the Eastern US for a week. This was the mid-80s and my parents had a sedan (SUVs didn’t exist yet and we did not have a station wagon). I would sit in the back in the middle between my grandparents for 8-12 hours, hang a road map between the two front headrests so I could track our entire route, and hold a AAA TripTik in my hands flipping pages as the landscape went by. Never slept a wink as I was having too much fun to even think about taking a nap.
I grew up traveling with my family up and down the East Coast of the US, traveled my first times internationally during college, conducted my own Westward Expansion during and after college, and have continued traveling to new and exciting destinations to this day.
Many blogs out there focus on luxury and exotic travel. I’ll certainly have some posts that highlight some of the larger excursions I’ve taken. However, I also think there is value in writing about the day trip. About local attractions that aren’t publicized but are more fun than you would expect. About day trips that are fun for the whole family but don’t break the bank. Sprinkle in some tips for ways to optimize families traveling with kids and, voila, we have ourselves a blog.
Blog Design
Finally, you might notice that the blog right now is rather sparse when it comes to design. I’m in tech by trade and in my world we often talk about the minimum viable product (MVP). I could spend months playing around with the design, adding widgets, social links, etc. but this is a blog. A blog needs content. The rest is fluff. So I created a logo, a menu, a basic homepage, and this is where we begin. As the posts grow, the blog will evolve.
Thanks for coming. I hope you’ll stay a while.
