About RIP

Hi dear reader!

Welcome to Retire In Progress, a blog about Personal Finance, Financial Independence, Early Retirement, and much more!

You’re very welcome 🙂

I’m Mr.RIP, an Italian software engineer living in Switzerland since 2012. You can find out more about who I am and what are my goals by visiting the About Me page.

This blog was born on June 2016.

The initial goal was to cover topics related to earning, spending, investing, housing, living, early retiring (and more) both in Switzerland and in Italy (and maybe rest of Europe). Yes, I know, there are plenty of blogs about similar topics on the internet, but here’s a list of few (almost) unique things I hope to bring to the table:

• Real-time ultra-detailed Net Worth and Cash-Flow tracking, down to the EUR/CHF/USD. I’m proud to say that I’m the most transparent blogger that I know of in terms of Net Worth, Income and Spending openness. if I swipe my credit card today, you’ll notice on my spreadsheets before tomorrow. Here’s the link to my Net Worth spreadsheet. My Net Worth tracking habit started in November 1991, cash-flow (income and expenses) tracking is more recent. Check out my series on how I track my finances with Spreadsheets if you want to get some inspiration for your own tracking system.
• Switzerland specific aspects of FIRE. Taxes, investments, banks, pensions and more, customized to Switzerland. Most of the concepts won’t stop at Swiss borders though. Expect to find value even if you’re investing from Mars 🙂
• My unique point of view about the financial, psychological, ethical, and philosophical aspects of FIRE, investing, frugality, curiosity and learning… and life in general. How to live a meaningful, happy, authentic, healthy, intentional life? I have no idea, let’s find it out together! Expect to see challenged almost everything you believed as true.
• My unique story, choices, experiences, troubles, doubts, anxieties, principles, values… Truth is: this blog is my journal into midlife crisis, career burnout, and lifelong learning. Approached from a rational, contrarian, analytical, first principle thinker point of view.
• My unique dark humor storytelling skills. Ok, I don’t claim to be exceptionally good at it, but according to your continuous feedback most of my aficionados keep showing up to read my 5-10k words-long blog posts where I tell stories with very long sentences and predictable cliffhangers, and make fun of myself and others while I talk with imaginary friends, fictional characters inspired to real friends, real characters who became fictional friends, and other schizophreniac issues not yet scientifically classified.

The blog name is Retire In Progress. Where does it come from? Well, the initial goal was to document my journey toward Financial Independence and, more importantly, Early Retirement.

For the first 4 years of its life, the blog’s headline showed a monthly updated progress bar that tells how close I am to my goal.

I’ve crossed the 100% FI lane on April 2020. Well, actually crossed for the first time on February 2020, with some bounces thanks to Covid-19 market roller-coaster.

The target is a lie though: I’m not really Financially Independent, and there’s no Early Retirement coming in the near future.

I’m trying to design my ideal life, which doesn’t exclude meaningful work and doesn’t rely on magic FIRE formulas, like the 4% Rule.

That doesn’t mean I’m walking away from my goals, it means I’m redefining them on the fly.

Retire in Progress is always Work in Progress.

I think you’ll find a lot of value 🙂

And mind that this is not the average blog you’ll find online:

• I don’t give a fuck about being a conventional “blogger”.
• I don’t give a fuck about “how to write successful posts”.
• I don’t publish posts with “SEO Friendly” titles and tags.
• I don’t give a shit about pleasing search engines or drive traffic to a “landing page”.
• I don’t care about “building a huge mailing list”, showing you pop-ups to “register”.
• I don’t serve you ads.
• I don’t recommend you anything I don’t truly believe is an amazing product that I use and love.

Please, take a look at the Transparency page for more info about my blogging ethic.

I can hear you loud and clear, skeptic reader: why start a blog? What do you want to achieve with this blog? Good question indeed! Here follows a list of reasons why I decided to start blogging:

• Learn about ANY topic. I’ve been reading A LOT in last 10 years about a multitude of topics. Writing, and sharing publicly my thought process is my best way to learn. Both while researching and clearing my mind for a post (kind of rubber duck debugging), and while interacting with readers via comments or private messages.
• Network with like minded people. I’ve met virtually or physically more than a hundred of new friends. I don’t say “friend” to be nice to you. Seriously, at least a couple of dozens of my readers are now my friends, and we meet and talk regularly. And that’s amazing. Writing is the most powerful networking tool. Don’t be shy of reaching me out! I’m not that famous (yet), I still have bandwidth to meet a lot of new friends 🙂
• Commitment toward my goals. The Internet won’t forget. I’m here to commit myself to my goal of living an intentional and authentic life, trying to navigate at the best of my possibilities the huge Uncertainty that surrounds our lives.
• Accountability: the Internet won’t forgive either! I’m here to get smashed if I cheat on my values. Public shame is scary! During last 4 years you have no idea how much this has helped me. Knowing I would have to share “bad things I did” on my blog saved me from them many times. Keeping the target on sight, and having hundreds of people following you thru the journey made me reach my goals with ease (so far). I guess I owe you a couple of thousands Euros at least 🙂
• Community: this is not the first blog about investing, personal finance or FIRE. I was lurking the FIRE community for several years, reading other blogs, subreddits, forums… I felt the urge to contribute more actively.
• Sharing: my story, my strategy toward FI, my philosophy of life, my challenges. I was a huge fan of the sharing economy, but it failed me. Let’s make internet a sharing platform again!
• Help others learning from my mistakes. I’m trying to be the person I needed when I was 20 years old.
• Creating: I fell in love with coding at age 9 because writing software was creative. It was an outlet where to express myself. It’s not anymore. Writing commercial code sucks. Creativity muscle atrophied over time. Writing on this blog revamped my passion for creating. My brain’s imagination and ability to produce content increased 10x since I started this blog.
• Writing: I discovered I’ve a passion for writing itself. Writing sharpen your thinking, and makes you unstoppable. Writing is tough, they say. I find it natural. Of course, since English is not my first language, I need constant practice and extra effort to not embarrass myself. But it has the positive side effect of forcing myself to write more, everyday, and trigger the positive feedback loop of growing my passion for writing! Writing (and reading) is a thing I want to do a lot when retired, if I’ll ever “retire”.
• Yeah, ok, making some money as well: In February 2021 I sat down with myself (I like to hang out with cool people) and tried to look at my blogging endeavor from above. I realized that this thing is my real job. I love it, it’s also a passion and a source of happiness, but I’m taking it way more seriously than I’ve taken my real job at least since beginning of 2019. Writing on RIP is what defines me now, I’ve devoted countless hours to this project. And we’re not FI in Switzerland yet. I do want to take the leap and work only on my passion project, but it should prove to be an economically sustainable choice. I will try to monetize my effort, according to my ethical standards.

Dear reader, I hope you’ll find my blog useful and entertaining! If you have anything to tell me I’m more than happy to listen to you. 🙂

Have a great day

Mr.RIP

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Where to go from here?

Want to know more about my personal Work and life Story? Check it out!

Want to know more about FIRE? Visit the FIRE Dialogue page

Wanna full immersion in my blog? Take a look at the Binge Reading page 🙂