About FI-Journey
Empowering Your Journey to Financial Independence
A Note of Thanks
Before our story—a real thank you to the FI/FIRE community online. We learned almost everything from people who shared freely: the blogs, the forums, the open-source calculators, the strangers posting their own numbers so the rest of us could learn. We didn't invent any of this. We just tried to put it in one place. This is our small way of giving a little back.
Our Mission
Our mission is twofold: to deliver tools that empower you to understand your financial journey, and to provide powerful simulators that help you plan it. We believe that with the right insights and a clear roadmap, anyone can navigate the path to financial independence with confidence.
Our Story
Honestly, FI-Journey didn't start as a business plan. It started with the two of us trying to figure out our own money. After earning her Master's in IT, Lauren took what was supposed to be a dream job as a data analyst in tech—and found a monotonous 9-to-5 where earning half a day off meant six long days of work. It just wasn't the life we'd pictured for ourselves.
That nagging feeling sent her looking for another way. A lot of late-night reading led her from debt-payoff strategies and minimalism to the idea that changed how we thought about everything: FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).
Around the same time, Brad was chasing the same goal from a different angle. It began as one big, messy spreadsheet—projecting our net worth, taxes, and cash flow year by year. That spreadsheet kept growing until it quietly turned into a little web app, just for us, to see where we were headed. The more we planned, the more we leaned on it.
The real lightbulb moment was watching Lauren hop between a dozen different websites just to run a few numbers—one site for a FIRE number, another for Coast FI, another for a Roth conversion ladder. None of them talked to each other, and none of them felt like they were built for regular people. So Brad started pulling it all into one place: the simulations, the calculators, the budgeting—everything we'd been juggling, finally under one roof. That became FI-Journey.
We also just didn't love how our financial data seemed to get bought, sold, and passed around by the services we used, in ways we never really understood. It bugged us. So privacy wasn't something we bolted on later—it was there from day one. Your numbers are encrypted so that even we can't read them, and your login is kept separate from your financial profile, so it isn't easy to tie an email back to the person behind it. Your data is yours. Full stop.
And because we do just about everything together—finances included—we wanted something many tools simply don't offer: a way for two people to each have their own login to the same shared profile. No passing one password back and forth, no separate spreadsheets that never quite match—just the two of us, planning side by side.
We're not a big company. We're two regular people who built the tool we wished existed, and we're quietly proud of it. If it makes your own journey to financial independence a little clearer—and a little less lonely—then it's done exactly what we hoped.
Our Team
Founder & Lead Developer
Brad is a Strategic Lead Software Engineer with over a decade of experience designing complex data models and the automation that runs on top of them. His career has centered on turning sprawling, messy datasets into reliable systems—data pipelines, statistical modeling, anomaly detection, and pragmatic AI and LLM-driven expert systems that eliminate manual toil. It's the exact skill set behind FI-Journey's deterministic simulation engine, Monte Carlo analysis, and AI advisor. With a deep personal interest in financial independence, he is dedicated to building the robust, secure engine that powers it.
Founder & Financial Strategist
After a disillusioning start in the tech industry, Lauren discovered the FIRE movement and became passionate about personal finance. With her background as a data analyst, she is dedicated to building tools that bring clarity and simplicity to complex financial planning.
Our Philosophy
- Accessibility: We believe everyone deserves access to high-quality financial planning resources.
- Education: We strive to not only provide calculators but also to educate our users. We want you to understand the "why" behind the numbers.
- Community: We are building FI-Journey with you. We are always open to feedback and suggestions from our user community.
- Privacy & Security: We understand that financial data is deeply personal—and we refuse to treat it as a product to be sold. We employ bank-level, field-level encryption so that even we can't read your numbers, and we deliberately decouple your login from your financial profile. Your data remains yours and yours alone.