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Introducing Firebird

Our story and the vision for our product

The Origin Story

Back in 2020, we were planning our FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) journey. Andreia started a Google Sheets file and asked Eric to record all of their bank accounts and other assets so they could calculate their net worth. Using the “4% rule”, they calculated their FIRE number and projected how long it would take them to get there.

Unsatisfied – and being the Quantitative Finance nerd he is – Eric created a Python script to run Monte Carlo simulations (a fancy word for a Statistics technique used in Quantitative Finance to generate randomized scenarios, as a way to quantify the probability of success of possible outcomes).

Eric and Andreia used those tools during their journey. And suddenly they realized other people were asking the same questions they were. And they had the tools to answer (some) of those questions!

Thus, Firebird was born!

Now, after achieving the financial security they craved, they are taking on the challenge of turning Firebird into a tool that can help other people also achieve financial freedom.

What is Firebird?

Firebird is a web-based subscription service that will allow users to access a very powerful retirement calculator and related planning and forecasting tools.

Firebird’s mission is to empower every person to achieve financial freedom. Our goal is to be part of people’s financial freedom and retirement journey by providing them with tools that will help with their financial decision-making by visualizing the possible outcomes.

“But there are other services like that!”, you might say. Yes, but what makes us unique is that we’re building a new class of retirement tools, following these principles:

• Flexibility – add information in a way that allows you to do your personal financial planning
• Simple Design – user-friendly and easy-to-use tools
• Insights – custom alerts based on your financial data and future plans
• Knowledge-based – We pride ourselves on being serious about providing reliable financial knowledge and tools that are thoughtfully built upon it.

The Firebird website will offer these unique features:

• Powerful Monte Carlo simulations to investigate a range of future outcomes
• Scenario comparisons; e.g., what is the effect of quitting my job now vs. sticking it out another year or two?
• Track your net worth over time to compare with your established plan
• Intuitive interactive graphs to display the results of your plan

We already have a Free Calculator, which does simple extrapolations. Read more about it in our other blog post.

We also plan to produce some educational content with the lessons we have learned along the way – both through lived experience and thorough research grounded in reputable books and peer-reviewed papers.

Why Firebird?

We chose the name Firebird mostly because it contains the word “Fire”, as in FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early). Also, Eric is a music geek and likes Stravinsky’s symphonic piece titled The Firebird. Finally, the folk tale of The Firebird involves both luck and a reward at the end of a difficult journey, which somehow feels relevant to the quest for financial freedom!

And, of course, we dropped the “The”. It’s cleaner that way.

In Conclusion

We’re excited to work on this project! The journey to financial freedom is quite personal to us and we are happy to help others striving for this same goal.

As mentioned before, we already have a free calculator available and we are working on an MVP for the Premium version with some of the more interesting features described in this blogpost.

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