About Mamma Panda:
Hi there, this is Mama Panda! I am 39 years old and working in the IT industry like Papa Panda. I grew up in the little country side so I thought frugality came naturally to me. My parents would never let us waste food and my dad would save every penny just to buy more farm land back in the day. But when I had to move to the big city to study and work, I started getting what I called “bad influences”, as there was always better quality clothes, expensive cosmetic products, designer handbags, nicer cars, the list was never ending. However, I did manage to force myself to put away 50% of my pay into bonds and mutual funds every month. I also bought a property in the city which I later sold. (Will list down the profit in our first portfolio statistics.)
Then about a decade ago, I got a job offer and decided to move to Perth and eventually met Papa Panda and had Little Panda 6 years ago. Papa Panda had already purchased his 2 properties prior to meeting me. But when both properties were sub-divided, we jumped straight into expanding the potential as Papa Panda would have explained in his article. I must admit we did learn a lot from a couple of building experiences.
All along, we knew we were doing alright with our investments but we were never really tracking our expenses nor thinking about early retirement, until I stumbled upon Mr Money Mustache ‘s blog when I went back to working full time 3 years after having Little Panda. I became obsessed with all the FIRE blogs and I started tracking our expenses and projecting our passive income. (Ask Papa Panda, I am obsessed with my spreadsheets). Through this I saw light at the end of the rat race tunnel! We were tracking better than we thought and we could do even better if we started cutting down unnecessary expenses and speed up the progress of paying down the investment loans.
Have we set our FIRE goal yet? Yes and no. We are progressively seeing passive income generated from our rental properties and we are hoping to fully offset all our investment loans in 4 years time! Having said so, I had been trying to make up my mind if I should put a higher percentage of our money into ETF/LIC rather than just in the offset accounts as the shares market seems to be doing so much better than 4% interest rate saving. After all, 4% saving in offset account is a confined saving.
The FIRE Panda Family 