Hi fellow FIREstarter, glad to see you here!

For an introvert like me it would be a nice thing to simply put the magical word above into the command line again and let the machine tell who am I. But this time I step out of my comfort zone, take the wheel keyboard and answer the questions myself which probably drove you to this page.

Who Am I?

As many fellow bloggers I want to keep myself in incognito and following their conventions you can simply call me HCF. Otherwise I am a simple 30something millennial guy, husband of a wonderful woman and father of two awesome girls. We are living in the heart of Europe, in the controversial country which is called Serbia (at the moment).

In the 9to5 world I do writing for a living. If you are wondering how come you have never read anything from me the answer is because my precious scripts reside in strangely named files stored inside robust machines in the form of source code. Fortunately not in a cubicle, but working as a web application developer for more than six years so far.

Why I Started This Blog?

In the recent years I discovered this interesting corner of the internet where people are talking about this mythical thing called FIRE (or FI/ER). I dug deep into this area of the blogosphere since then, crunching through posts, books, podcasts and numbers. Meanwhile I went through a big mindset change, still I am just at the beginning of the mission to reach financial independence. From blogging I expect a handful of things:

• Connections with like minded people who are working towards improving their life (financially or otherwise)
• Understanding myself and my situation better through telling my story
• Keeping myself on track with my goals
• Helping others to learn from my failures and successes

What Kind Of Topics Will Be Covered?

As a fellow wise blogger said “everything is told so far about personal finance” so I will try not just preach about the importance of saving and will not write another article about the 4% rule. There are smarter and more qualified people to do that. What I can share is my experiences in the adult world, from the perspective of someone living in a not so rich country in the heart of Europe. Stories of my attempts to implement the teachings of the wise in this corner of the world with often very different rules, circumstances and events. Also I will share the best pieces of my heritage of knowledge of my ancestors. And of course there will be coder stuff too applied to real world (financial) problems.

Hope you will enjoy them and find something valuable for yourselves. If there will be only one person who get a good idea from this blog then I will know that it already worth it.

What Does HaltCatchFire Stand For?

While it seems pretty obvious in terms of the FIRE movement there is a deeper, nerdy meaning too. HCF is an assembly mnemonic, a command which was used for debugging in the ancient days of computing. When the machine entered to this state it started to read the memory over and over again until the engineers found the error they were looking for. The catch fire part is from the assumption that this fast operation can cause the material to heat up and actually catch fire.

The reason I picked this as my blogs name is a thought experiment. I tried to imagine what if we could put our brains into this state. Just halt everything we do normally. Start reading our memory over and over again searching for errors which keep us from functioning correctly, living our perfect version of life. When we find these bugs in our system we can correct them and reset the “machine” to start running a better program than before.